Major & Midsummer, Ba Gum!
The truth about John Major, Midsummer and minced oaths
June 19
On this date in 1997, John Major stepped down as Conservative Party leader after Labour’s landslide election victory in May, 1997.
Major seemed a safe, happily dull choice for party leader and then prime minister after the Thatcher alarums, a hark back to such as Stanley Baldwin (slogan: Safety First). His Spitting Image puppet, all grey and pea-loving, captured this, but not the many remarkable aspects of this outwardly unremarkable man.
He was, to start, the son of a trapeze artist, which prompted the pleasing if inaccurate joke that he was the only man to run away from the circus to be a banker (by this time his father had left the circus and stage to manufacture garden ornaments, including, irrresistibly, gnomes).
His father’s name was Tom Ball, then Tom Major-Ball, after his music hall double act, Drum & Major, with his eventual wife, Kitty. John was his son with his second wife, Gwen. In theory then, the prime minister’s name should really have been John Ball. By another attractive coincidence that is also the name of one of the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt and subject of William Morris’s famous poem, ‘A Dream of John Ball’, the radical priest who demanded ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? (I could also mention Jack Straw, another peasant leader and namesake of the subsequent former Labour home secretary, and the further detail that Tony Blair’s grandfather, Charlie Parsons, stage name Jimmy Lynton, was a music hall escapologist, but I don’t want to stretch credibility too far.)
Major’s premiership was not a conspicuous success, his flagship policy of a campaign to restore family values of the Baldwin kind fatally undermined by the extremely non- familial activities of any number of his MPs (including, earlier, it turned out, surprisingly, himself).
The better-qualified will deliver properly weighty judgements; I will merely add what this dedicated collector of unconsidered trifles has gathered in over the years.
While it is true that he is the first prime minister to have been turned down for a job as a bus conductor, the claim that this was because he failed the maths test has been contested (apparently he was too tall, which seems curious).
He was given the pet name ‘Rover’ by a girl friend.
He was the first prime minister to save the life of his heat-affected pet goldfish by rubbing in sun cream.
To make an important announcement, he changed from his grey suit into another grey suit.
During his tenure, he would always add the Downing Street postcode when signing visitors’ books.
You will remember his famous traffic Cones Hotline (qv), which the unkind claim to be his greatest achievement.
He also had a remarkable elder step-brother, Terry Major-Ball, an artless man of innocent charm who enjoyed the attention of mischievous hacks but never once revealed anything damaging or even disobliging about his brother. This is in marked contrast to many another sibling of leaders around the world: the non-pareil would be Billy Carter, the fiercely god-fearing Jimmy’s disreputable redneck brother, who at one time ran a bar with the sign outside ‘Topless girls drink free’.
June 21
Ah, yes, Midsummer, the Summer solstice, the turn of the year, from the most ancient eras the time to give the henceforth waning sun a bit of a boost with bonfires, which not so long ago burnt all over Europe, from Scandinavia to the Sicily, Iberia to the Urals and further abroad. Attempts to Christianise them by making the midsummer solstice the Feast of St John the Baptist were less successful than Christmas and Easter.
They persist, particularly in Scandinavia, but some features have been lost, including rolling a fiery giant straw wheel, and some fertility activities for which an excuse could always be found. And, of course, wherever archaeologists and anthropologists gather, it a truth of almost Austenish universal acknowledgement that the mention of human sacrifice cannot be long delayed. Both in the fires and the fiery wheel, apparently. (And you do not want to know want to know what the Romans did to puppies or Native Americans did to tortoises).
Much of this I get from Sir James Frazer’s remarkable compendium of folklore and religion, ‘The Golden Bough’, which had achieved no fewer than 15 volumes by 1915.
Sir James, who was not without native pawkiness, also digresses to another remarkable lost aspect of British life:
‘Perhaps the last relic of such superstitions which lingered about our English kings was the notion that they could heal scrofula (lymph gland disease) by their touch. The disease was accordingly known as the King’s Evil. Queen Elizabeth often exercised this miraculous gift of healing.
‘On Midsummer Day 1633, Charles the First cured a hundred patients at one swoop in the chapel royal at Holyrood. But it was under his son Charles the Second that the practice seems to have attained its highest vogue. It is said that in the course of his reign Charles the Second touched near a hundred thousand persons for scrofula. The press to get near him was sometimes terrific. On one occasion six or seven of those who came to be healed were trampled to death.
‘The cool-headed William the Third contemptuously refused to lend himself to the hocuspocus; and when his palace was besieged by the usual unsavoury crowd, he ordered them to be turned away with a dole. On the only occasion when he was importuned into laying his hand on a patient, he said to him, “God give you better health and more sense.”
‘However, the practice was continued, as might have been expected, by the dull bigot James the Second and his dull daughter Queen Anne.’
One of those touched by Queen Anne was the infant Samuel Johnson. Her successors, the protestant Hanoverians, would have nothing to do with this curious custom, said to have been inherited from Edward the Confessor, but it was continued by the exiled Stuarts right up until the death in 1807 of Henry, Cardinal York, last of the line.
Related to this was the healing power of royal blood: stained items of the executed King Charles I were being handled well into the nineteenth century; probably the last was the shirt said to have been worn by the king on the scaffold, handed down the family of Lord Ashburnham, his Groom of the Bedchamber. Unfortunately, around 1860, a housekeeper came across it and because it was so stained had it washed.
Another incident not long after the king’s execution is related by the distinguished historian, CV Wedgwood: ‘Visitors who had gone to see the caged lions at the Tower were astonished at the rage with which the oldest lion roared and bared his teeth at one of their number. The gentleman - not a Royalist - confessed he had bought for curiosity a piece of rag stained with the royal blood. He offered this to the venerable King of Beasts, who was instantly appeased, fondled the sacred relic with reverent paws and soon after peacefully passed away’.
June 20
Plain-speaking is not always a reassuring description; I tend to detect the implication of a threat in it, as with the Yorkshire ‘I speak as I find’, and the Welsh ‘We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside’.
But this is a particularly, how shall we say, robust, age, and only a lover of subtle orotundity and colourful language (of a good kind) would regret the loss of the polite contortions of the past. The minced oath, for example.
It descends from the Hebraic tradition of avoiding the name of the deity, and from the disapproval of righteous Puritans in the seventeenth century and their social successors, cloaking potential blasphemies in closely related verbiage. Although, regrettably or not, no longer remotely necessary, some of them are truly relishable and redolent of a charming lost innocence.
Here are a few; I’m sure most of you still use them, but if not, do try to give the poor old things an occasional outing:
Bloody: there’s a school of thought that this satisfyingly plosive word is ‘by Our Lady’ disguised, but it in fact a reference to the blood of Christ. Ruddy is an example of a minced minced oath. Bedad: by God Bejabers: by Jesus Cheese’s Crust: Jesus Christ Cheese and Rice: Jesus Christ Cor Lumme: God love me Crikey: Christ King Cripes: Christ Doggone: God damn Gadzooks: God’s hooks (the nails of the Cross) Golly gee: God and Jesus Go to Putney on a pig: go to hell Gor Blimey: God blind me Gum, ee ba: by God Heck: hell Jeepers Creepers: Jesus Christ Judas Priest: Jesus Chist Lawk's a mercy: Lord have mercy Lor luvaduck: Lord, but luvaduck is of uncertain origin; it probably comes from the other strain of disguised swearing that hides reference to private body parts and activities Oh my godfathers: Oh my God Strewth: God’s truth Zounds: God’s wounds
Next, bigod!
I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this. Marvellous