Sir Richard (‘Dick’) Whittington and That Cat!

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The panto Dick Whittington and his Cat (both socially distanced and non-socially distanced) is currently playing at the Watford Palace Theatre (and no doubt at countless other venues, Dick + Cat being a Christmas theatrical standard in British and Commonwealth pantomimes,  plays, puppet shows and other manner of family entertainments for centuries). The tale of young Dick recounted to generation after generation  since the early 1600s is familiar to all🅰...penniless young boy from the West Country🅱 comes to London desperately seeking work but finds life as a lowly kitchen scullion unbearable. He decides to hightail it back home but on the way, going up Highgate Hill, Dick hears the ringing of the Bow Bells which seem to be telling him to “Turn again Whittington” and that he will be “Thrice Lord Mayor”. Encouraged, Dick returns to London, acquires a feline companion which becomes the key to the boy’s fortune. The cat turns out to be a champion mouser, killing all of the rats in a Barbary Coast kingdom. Dick cashes in big time when the grateful ruler forks out a ginormous “transfer fee” to secure the services of the ace rat-catching grimalkin.   

That’s the folklore surrounding Dick and his cat. But unlike the even more legendary Robin Hood, Dick Whittington was an actual person. Sir Richard Whittington (ca.1354-1423), the historical personage, was Lord Mayor of London four times (1397, 1398, 1406, 1419), but that’s where the similarities with the folkloric character ends. Richard hailing from an affluent Gloucestershire family was no acquaintance with the harsh realities of poverty.  

Creditor to the royal family and exchequer        From 1379 in London Whittington was supplying velvets and damasks to the English nobility and royalty. By 1395 he was a master mercer, employing five apprentices. Public records illustrate his ongoing connexion to the House of Lancaster as a supplier of expensive silks, cloth and textiles to the royal court. Whittington had a close personal and business relationship with Richard II who bought two cloths of gold from him for £11 (1389), as well as fabrics for his personal wardrobe to the tune of almost £3,500 (1392-94). Whittington was crucial in the final years of Richard’s reign as the only financier still prepared to lend him money (‘Whittington, Sir Richard, (d.1423)’, The History of Parliament, www.thehistoryofparliamentonline.org). Being close to King Richard didn’t stop Whittington from doing business with his nemesis and successor Henry IV🅲 (‘The Story of Dick Whittington. Sir Richard Whittington and his Cat’: London’s Most Famous Lord Mayor’, Richard Jones, www.london-walking-tours.co.uk). Both Henry IV and Henry V continued the royal trend of borrowing heavily from Whittington.

The influential merchant-cum-politician was also elected an MP in 1416 and served as a member on King Henry IV’s Council. His other titles included mayor of the Staple of Westminster and collector of the wool custom.

Catless Sir Richard                                                    Nor does the association of the cat with Dick Whittington in the folklore have parallels with the 14th–15th-century London lord mayor. There is no recorded evidence of the actual lord mayor ever having owned a cat. One oft-quoted theory advanced to explain the cat’s inclusion in the story relates to the coal trade, which was significant to the London merchant’s wealth acquisition. ‘Cats’ were slang for colliers and the name for a ship transporting coal was a ‘cat’, although the link can’t be definitely substantiated (Jones).

Richard Whittington’s will: No mention of a cat beneficiary.                                                                  Sir Richard died a widower and childless, leaving a substantial estate to a host of charities including various almshouses and a bequest providing for the  “yong wemen that hadde done a-mysse in trust of good mendement” at St. Thomas’s hospital, Southwark (‘History of Parliament’).

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🅰 eg, Samuel Pepys’ diary entry in 1668: “To Southwark Fair, very dirty, and there saw the puppet show of Whittington, which was pretty to see”

🅱 in some versions, Lancashire

🅲 as usury was deemed illegal in Medieval England, it has been speculated that Whittington’s money-lending to the Lancaster royals was not necessarily pecuniary, but was more about currying favour with the king (Jones), such as Richard II’s influence in his candidacy for lord mayor in 1397

 

Moby-Dick and the Peculiar Pecuniary System of 19th Century Whaling

536 𝔀𝓸𝓻𝓭𝓼 🐳

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ONE of many memorable paragraphs of Herman Melville’s allegorical American classic work of fiction, Moby-Dick, is when the narrator/ character Ismael speculates on what remuneration he might receive for signing on to the voyage of the Pequod: 

❝ I was already aware that in the whaling business they pay no wages; but all hands, including the captain, receive certain shares of the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship’s company...I made no doubt that from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay—that is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage...what they call a rather long lay, yet it was better than nothing ❞.

As Elmo P Hofman elaborated in a 1926 essay, “the whaleman was not paid by day, week or month, nor was he allowed a certain sum of every barrel of oil or for every pound of bone captured”...his earnings came from a “specified fractional share” (a lay) of the net profits of the trip (cited in ‘How Profit Sharing Sent Captain Ahab in Search of Moby Dick, Joseph Thorndike, Forbes, 15-Dec-2015, www.forbes.com). Rather than bring wage-earners the crew including the skipper were sort of joint shareholders in the commercial venture. 

The experiences of real-life whaling boats of the era of Melville’s novel offers insights into the synchronic system of divvying up the profits – if we look at the profits of the 1843 whaling voyage of the Abigail of New Bedford⚀, it reveals a 70/30 split of the dividends, 70% to the owners and partners and 30% sub-divided between the captain and crew (Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, Karen Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan (1997)). This was pretty typical for the period of what has been described as “an oddly denominated profit-sharing scheme” (‘The Whaleman’s Lay’, Ahab Beckons, 04-Feb-2018, www.ahab-beckons.blogspot.com). A captain might score a lay of ⅛ th whereas a ‘green’ hand might only net a ¹⁄₃₅₀ th lay or worse, so the novice sea-hand Ismael was perhaps over-optimistic about his likely share.

So, like the unknowables or “known unknowns” of the stock exchange, a crew member of a whaling vessel engaging in this pelagic industrial arena, even if he knows what lay he had scored, still won’t have any idea of how much he’ll earn for his months and months of hard ship work. Everything hinged on the voyage’s profitability.

Then on top of this there were deductions from a crew member’s lay when he did finally get the money...anything an ordinary whaleman purchased from the ship’s store during the voyage—tobacco, boots, clothes, etc—was subtracted from his lay. The same if he was given an advance to send to his family. A crew member, especially one with a very long lay, could easily end up in debt to the ship’s owners at voyage’s end (‘Life Aboard’, New Bedford Whaling Museum, www.whalingmuseum.org).

New Bedford Museum

𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 𝄪 

⚀ 50 mi south of Boston, from the early 1820s on it supplanted Nantucket as America’s foremost whaling port 

Pall Mall, a 17th Century Pallamaglio Alley

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Pall Mall, SW1, is a Monopoly board-famous street in the City of Westminster, connecting Trafalgar Square with the St James’s area of the city. These days it’s a prime commercial hub of London, home to investment banks, big-end-of-town financiers, “Big Petroleum”,  etc. Back in the 19th century it was the place for “Gentlemen’s clubs”– and they had staying power, the Reform Club, the Athenaeum Club, the Travellers Club and the Royal Automobile Club are all still there. 

 

Pall Mall, SW1 ⇪

Credit: Oxyman / A4 Pall Mall 

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A4_Pall_Mall_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1011774.jpg

Long before the Gents’ clubs Pall Mall was a sporting ground for aristocratic gentlemen, more correctly it was called an ‘alley’ for the playing of pall mall⟦A⟧, made popular by Charles II who played pall-mall in the St James’s alley in the 1660s, hence the street’s name. Pall mall had other associations for the ‘Restored’  King Charles, his mistress the actress Nell Gwyn resided at № 79 Pall Mall. 

The game itself first reached British shores earlier however, probably imported from France via Scotland...reportedly Mary, Queen of Scots played pall mall in East Lothian in 1566. It’s uncertain if the game originated in France— where it was called paille-maille —or in Italy—where it was called pallamaglio (literally “ball mallet”). The equipment comprises a heavy wooden mallet (similar to a croquet mallet but with a curved head) and a boxwood ball possibly some six inches in circumference. The idea of the game is to strike the “round bowle” with the mallet and propel it through a ring suspended in the air (also described variously as an “iron hoop” or “a high arch of iron”) located at the end of an alley (which is variable in length)⟦B⟧. Pall mall was thus sort of like “croquet with elevation”, in fact pallamaglio seems to have been a precursor of croquet⟦C⟧ . The  winner apparently is the player who ’aces’ the target in the fewest number of attempts, cf, golf (’Pall-mall’, Topend Sports, www.topendsports.com; To Coin a Phrase: A Dictionary of Origins, Edwin Radford (edited and revised by Alan Smith), 1974).

The lawn game of royals became as extinct as the dodo long before the modern era, however in 2009 there was a nostalgic albeit momentary revival of pall mall held “in the shadow of Buckingham Palace” as part of the promotion of the “Story of London” festival (‘Pall Mall – The story of an iconic London address’, Kate Dean, 116 Pall Mall, 04-Mar-2019, www.116pallmall.com).

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Footnote: Polysemic extension The adverb “pell mell”—meaning to rush headlong in a disorderly or reckless and hurried fashion—derives from the “indiscriminate vigour” of the sport’s players (Radford)

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 ⟦A⟧ the mall was a field for playing, by extension the term came to be used for any long, open grassy area where people walked or played (‘Pall mall balls and mallets’, http://mall history.org)

⟦B⟧ the alley is commonly depicted as a lawn court, although the premier diarist of Charles II’s reign Samuel Pepys described the ‘Pellmell” (as he called it) surface as comprising “hard sand...dressed with powdered cockle shells”

⟦C⟧ contemporary drawings and paintings of pall mall showing two distinct types of target for players—the raised ring appended to a post and an inverted u-shaped iron hoop which is much closer to modern croquet—suggest there were two versions of the game

Unconsummated Hitchcock: “The Short Night”, the Auteur’s Last Hurray That Never Was!

 𝟝𝟜𝟝 𝕨𝕠𝕣𝕕𝕤

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Rotund, sardonic Anglo-American auteur Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre comprised over 50 feature films but he was no stranger to unfinished or unrealised film projects. Starting with what was meant to be his directorial debut in Number 13 (AKA Mrs. Peabody) in 1922, for the next 57 years Hitch was at the helm for upward of twenty aborted films. Hardly any of the score of unmade movie projects ever got beyond the pre-production stage[1̲̅].

There were various reasons why the films never got made...difficulties in location (Walt Disney wouldn’t let Hitchcock film The Blind Man at Disneyland supposedly because of his disapproval of Psycho); Hitch’s dissatisfaction with scripts[2]; Hitchcock’s Titanic project was waylaid by a string of obstacles including objections from the British shipping industry; some projects were vetoed by producers and studio heads; Hitchcock couldn’t get the female lead he wanted for No Bail for the Judge (Audrey Hepburn)[3]. Hitch’s great success with The 39 Steps prompted him to try to direct film adaptions of other John Buchan novels featuring spy Richard Hannay, eg, Greenmantle, however he couldn’t afford the rights to the book. He even wanted to direct Shakespeare, his enthusiasm to do a modernised version of Hamlet (with Hitchcock favourite Cary Grant cast as the “Melancholy Dane”) was ultimately blunted by the threat of a lawsuit from a writer who had already penned a modern-day version of Shakespeare’s great tragedy (‘Every Unmade Alfred Hitchcock Movie Explained’, Jordan Williams, Screen Rant, 12-Jun-2021, www.screenrant.com).

The final project pursued by Hitchcock was The Short Night, which was to be Hitchcock’s red-hot crack at making a “realistic Bond movie”. Originally conceived in the late 1960s (after two uninspiring earlier Hitchcock Cold War espionage features Torn Curtain and Topaz were coolly received), the director scouted locations in Finland. Hitch wanted the “real deal”, Sean Connery, to play the Bondesque double agent protagonist, the director must have been keen on the film...while the project was still parked in pre-production, without anything about the movie being nailed down, Hitch had a poster designed for the movie (‘Alfred Hitchcock’s unrealized projects’, Wikipedia). Alas, scripts were again a problem, Hitch churned through a bunch of writers and a number of different treatments in the search for the ‘right’ script, but an even bigger problem was Hitch himself! Now 80, Hitchcock‘s health was failing badly, he was unfocused and listless on the set[4], he simply was no longer up to it. Towards the end of 1979 Hitchcock quietly retired from the business and The Short Night project was shelved. 

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[1̲̅] Hitchcock managed to shoot only a few scenes of Mrs. Peabody before a lack of budget brought the production to a close 

[2] the prickly and demanding Hitchcock had fractious relationships with his scriptwriters, he even fell out with his favourites like Ernest Lehman, contributing to Hitchcock ditching The Wreck of the Mary Deare and starting work on the classic North by Northwest

[3] Hitchcock’s uber-creepy obsessiveness with many of his leading ladies (Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, Ingrid Bergman et al) has been well documented, eg, Spellbound by Beauty, Donald Spoto (2008)

[4] ”moving in and out of senility” in the view of the last screenwriter parachuted into the project, David Freeman