Amongst the many books I have accumulated over the years, I came across a grubby little Sheffield Street Directory. I believe that it was printed in 1935 even though that significant piece of information is not announced on the cover.
The small book lists every street in this illustrious northern city, indicating which zone and postal district it was in back in 1935. Alongside those pages, there are advertisements for a range of products and services including "Drama and Elocution" with Bessie Barwell at her house on Machon Bank and "Corsets, Abdominal Belts and Elastic Hosiery" from Ellis, Son and Paramore.
There are also adverts for estate agents, breweries and even high grade coal from the nearby town of Bolsover: "Not an Ordinary Coal but a Super Coal". However, there were two particular adverts that made me chuckle and were rather surprising too - adverts for mysterious schemes that were guaranteed to make you taller!
Standing at exactly six feet from the ground below me, my height has never been anything that has ever bothered me. I am happy with my height. Nonetheless, I realise that there are some visitors out there in Blog World who are small in stature and may fantasise about being taller. It is a shame that we are no longer in 1935 because the adverting could have led those vertically challenged visitors to increased loftiness and the unbridled happiness that automatically arrives with greater height.
Why not be TALLER? Why don't we see such adverts any more?
I know George Orwell wrote: “Sheffield ... could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World … it contains fewer decent buildings than the average East Anglian village … And the stench! …”, but it's going a bit too far calling it "grubby little Sheffield". They should put you on the rack for that. Then you'd be taller.
ReplyDeletePosh Orwell only spent three days in Sheffield in 1936, his research focused almost exclusively on the industrial Don Valley. There was another Sheffield that he never saw or never bothered to enquire about. If he had walked up The Porter Valley to Ringinglow and looked back upon the city, I am sure that he would have written something far different.
DeleteMy goodness. If you were only 19 years old again, you could use this method to be 6'5" in only 6 weeks!! What a deal!!! Surprising that the ladies could become taller AND develop a graceful, willowy figure. On the other hand, the men could be taller and develop their mental powers! Shazam!!
ReplyDeleteGraceful, willowy women must have been all the rage back in 1935. I wouldn't have wanted to 6'5" as it is much further to fall. Thanks for calling by again you willowy gal!
DeleteOh thank you YP. I have written to Mr Ross and eagerly await my course application details. I have always wanted to be taller than my measly 5ft 3in so this will be a boon.
ReplyDeleteHave you tried platform shoes or perhaps stilts?
DeleteI would like to be 3 inches taller! What do I need to do? :) I would also like to increase my mental powers.
ReplyDeleteTo be three inches taller adopt a beehive hairstyle. Mental powers can be increased by spending an hour each day reading a dictionary and by eating fresh seaweed.
DeleteAs nurses, if we needed equipment we would go to Ellis Son & Paramore, in my day they were based opposite the Hallamshire hospital
ReplyDeleteNurse Pudding has just confirmed this MaC.
DeleteStreet Directory. Discovered in a cardboard box in Yorky's attic.
ReplyDeleteTattered, outdated, an indispensable guide to Sheffield circa 1935.
Neighbourhoods, lanes, town halls, shops, factories, garages, libraries.
Walking in Glasgow I try to see my city through the eyes of outsiders, like all those Chinese girls who live here and go walking in threes, holding hands nervously.
Thanks to YouTube, I can visit Kingston Ontario, Dijon, Aix, the Hague, Montreal, Melbourne, Morpeth, and Sliven (Bulgaria) where a friend who now lives in Glasgow grew up.
A video on the green spaces of Wolverhampton is worth watching.
And another on the steep streets of San Francisco where Hitchcock filmed *Vertigo*.
Iris Murdoch's first novel *Under the Net* (1954) is like a street guide to the parks, pubs, bedsits of post-war London, particularly Chelsea.
My interest in the fiction of Sillitoe, Stanley Middleton, Stan Barstow and Braine lies in their infallible sense of place, the streets and people they remembered.
*Shelagh Delaney's Salford (Ken Russell BBC Four* (YouTube) says it all.
Amos Oz, born in Jerusalem, heard about *real cities* from his Polish-Ukraine mother. Cities with a river and bridges and church spires, unlike Jerusalem.
*BBC One HD Amos Oz The Conscience of Israel (2005)*. YouTube.
Thinking about the writer's mother (she committed suicide in Jerusalem where she felt an alien) led me to walk along the river Clyde, seeing my city as European.
I am sure you look at Sheffield (1935-2021) like that.
Our grandfathers would never have imagined that we can drink beer and wine in our pavement cafes. We are all flaneurs and boulevardiers now.
Haggerty
As per usual, interesting reflections John. I have never been to Wolverhampton which is, I am sure, an uninteresting announcement.
Delete*And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.* T.S. Eliot
DeleteMonica Furlong did a book about the numinous, The End of Our Exploring.
I have never been in Wolverhampton and the old buildings looks like Baedeker heaven. Strange, when an unknown city looks like a second home.
I thought of Hamlet as if for the first time, watching Harold Bloom (YouTube) talk about the play. Bloom was as speculative as a quantum physicist.
*There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.*
Haggerty
I have always liked that quote from "Hamlet" though I doubt that happiness is genuinely a cigar called Hamlet.
DeleteThere is a reason why we don't see adverts like this anymore! I wonder what Percival Carne's offerings are on how to become a Venus?
ReplyDeleteI thought I was quite a tall female until my daughters hooted with laughter at the idea. I've shrunk by about three inches over the years.
Platform shoes and a beehive hairstyle should find you laughing back at your unkind daughters.
DeleteWe may think that's amusing- how gullible people used to be!
ReplyDeleteAnd yet as we speak people are taking livestock deworming medication to treat covid. And many of those are the same people who believe that Donald Trump actually won the last election.
You make a good point Mary. By the way, I was thinking more about the ridiculousness of the advertisers' claims than the gullibility of their target clients.
DeleteIs Wynyard road in it
ReplyDeleteYes it is. It's the final street in the W section just after Wyming Brook which is between Lodge Moor and Redmires.
DeleteI love these old books and the adverts especially. I have some Victorian ones that are even bolder in their claims!
ReplyDeleteThank you for the complimentary comment on my blog - I will be back writing soon I hope; very sadly, my wife's mum is at end of life and caring duties have simply consumed virtually all our spare time.
Oh yeah. Sorry to hear about that Martin. I have been there and got the T shirt as they say.
Delete"Why don't we see such adverts any more?"
ReplyDeleteLawsuits!
You mean the claims are untrue?
DeleteI recently saw a man in a video clip hanging upside down by his ankles but I didn't watch further. I reckon that is what he was doing, attempting to increase his height.
ReplyDeleteI don't have the defect of being short and I'll leave it for others to judge if my proportions are defective.
Rumour says you have a 32 inch waist.
DeleteWell remembered I think.
DeleteWe are all smiling at the copy in the ad WHY NOT BE TALLER?
ReplyDelete*There is no longer any need to be short and overlooked.*
How cruel to deceive people (I nearly said raise their hopes) and rob them too !
I am over six feet and never gave it a thought, but many people hate being small.
Malcolm Ross, Height Specialist, Scarborough, was a charlatan.
He is like a dodgy character in a Mike Leigh movie.
Haggerty
Over six feet tall? Good for retrieving items placed on high shelves... you may be good for other things too but I don't know what Lofty!
DeleteWell, I would like to be a little taller but I'm not obsessed about it.
ReplyDeleteIf you don't mind me saying Red, it is rather too late in life to respond to those advertisements.
DeleteI like Mary Moon's point. The charlatans AND the gullible have always been - and probably always will be - among us. The only variation is whether they will lose their money or lose their lives.
ReplyDeleteP. S. Who're you callin' short, buddy?!!
ReplyDeleteSome of the best things come in small packages.
DeleteP. P. S. That's an example of what my six-foot-tall husband always referred to as "SPS" - Short Person Syndrome :)
ReplyDeleteI believe that Adolf Hitler suffered from that.
DeleteThis made me laugh! Had we been alive back then, we may have been taken in by these fantastic claims too. Who knows, maybe somewhere festering in some attic, are the very booklets advertised. These days they'll be put on "Flog It" and sold for a ludicrous sum!
ReplyDeleteLong ago, during the Inquisition, the Spanish had the solution for short people - as mentioned by Tasker - they used the rack!
Had no one heard of genes back then?
I think that genes were invented by Levi Strauss in the nineteenth century.
DeleteAt five foot would have been happy to be taller, but there are always compensations like when you fall over it is a shorter way to hit the floor. I have never been to Sheffield, only know it for its cutlery but Wolverhampton, home of my birth is probably its twin.
ReplyDeletePopulation of Wolverhampton - 263,000. Population of Sheffield - 585,000. If they are twins, one is more than twice as big as the other! Do you wear a Wolves shirt on the mean streets of Todmorden? BTW Todmorden population - 15,001.
DeleteOh, now I see what inspired your subsequent post! Yeah, these ARE bewildering. I have a feeling the advice probably amounted to, "buy shoes with higher heels." Love the cover of that street guide. What a cool thing to have.
ReplyDelete