Rumour Advice (Australia, WWII)

SPEAK NO RUMOUR

HEAR NO RUMOUR

BELIEVE NO RUMOUR

Cavalcade (Australia), June 1941, back cover

 

 

Horse Learns to Stop at Bootlegger's -- Finger Bowl Faux Pas -- The Mailed Jeep

The following account is in the tradition of stories about unsuspecting people who end up owning horses that have learned to stop at drinking establishments or brothels.

Sheilah Roberts Lukins, Bottoms Up: A History of Alcohol in Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s, NL: Breakwater Books, 2020), 121, 238n15.

It is said that by the late 1940s and early 1950s, nearly every house on or near Princess Street [in St. John’s] bootlegged liquor.

The local police soon found a clever way to catch some of the local bootleggers. They simply watched the horses. These clever delivery animals knew their routes well and knew exactly where to stop with their wagons. One of the soft-drink companies had a delivery wagon with a driver who was less than hard-working. In the middle of his deliveries, he would regularly scoot down to Princess Street to visit a bootlegger. Here he would stop the horse and pick up his drink. The fellow soon lost his job for various reasons, and the company hired a new driver. They never bothered to train new drivers because the horses knew the routes so well. So when this new driver steered the horse and wagon in the direction of New Gower Street one day, the horse went about its business “training in” the new driver by turning onto Princess Street, where it stopped at a house. The driver looked around confused, but soon realized what had been going on. It was said that the horses showed the police the location of every bootlegger in town. This helped the police apprehend many of them. [n.: Patrons of Fiddler’s Pub in discussion with the author, July 2017.]

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Stories about naïve diners’ experiences with finger bowls typically involve the water therein being sipped or drunk. In Woody Allen’s memoir, however, the situation is reversed: he mistakes a bowl of clam broth for a finger bowl, and washes his fingers in it. (On the finger bowl faux pas, see Véronique Campion-Vincent & Jean-Bruno Renard, 100% Rumeurs (2014), 344-56.)

Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2020), 34.

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“Dear Dad.” M*A*S*H, season 1, episode 12, 17 Dec. 1972. Corporal Radar O’Reilly mails a jeep home piece by piece, telling Colonel Blake the packages are toys for orphans. Dr. Pierce (voice over): “Radar is not the first guy to do this, of course. It’s an old army bit. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of George Washington’s soldiers hadn’t mailed home a horse one piece at a time.” (There’s an unintentional double negative there, I think.)

C. H. Moore, “On the Level,” Crime and Punishment #12, March 1949. “A soldier in Germany stole an army Jeep and had mailed half of it to his home in the U.S. before he was caught!”

 

 

Prince Philip Anecdotes: Cutlery Advice & Escaping a Boring Slide Show

The first anecdote involving Prince Philip is well-known in Canada. I’ve seen versions where the incident was supposed to have occurred “in a lumber camp in the wilds of northern Ontario” and on “a Royal Visit to Saskatchewan.” The second one is new to me.

https://www.timescolonist.com/letters-april-13-tales-about-a-prince-why-building-bicycle-lanes-makes-sense-1.24306543

Times Colonist [Victoria, BC], 13 April 2021

Letters

A Yukon highlight for the Duke of Edinburgh

I am saddened to learn of the passing of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

May I recount one of the stories of his 1954 visit to “the wilds of colonial Canada.” He is reputed to love to tell this anecdote to visiting Canadian dignitaries over a cocktail.

Philip was scheduled to visit the Yukon during his 1954 visit. At the time, the Royal Canadian Air Force had a small station in Whitehorse. The commanding officer thought he had best put on a mess dinner in honour of the duke’s visit.

The officer’s mess did not have sufficient serving staff, so they recruited several waitresses from the local cafes to work the dinner.

The staff were trained in all the proper etiquette; serve from the right, pick up from the left, only speak when spoken to and then always address him as “Your Highness.”

All went well at the dinner. The wine was poured, toasts were made, dinner served. Having finished his meal, Prince Philip set his knife and fork at the proper 4 o’clock position on the plate.

The waitress bent in from the left to pick up the plate and exclaimed:

“Hold on to your fork Dukie, there’s pie coming!”

Bob Kanngiesser

Port Alberni

Prince Philip knew what had to be done

My parents were good friends with Gar and Lorna Dixon, who ran Government House for many years.

They met all the royals. Here is a quick story about Prince Philip:

“They” were staying at Government House.

After dinner there was a slide show about something that went on perhaps a bit too long.

After a few too many slides, Commander Gar decided to sneak out for a breather. He realized he might be seen, so he crawled on his hands and knees in the darkness and nearly knocked heads with the Duke, doing the same thing.

Rick Stevens

Victoria

Did Timothy Leary Advocate Dosing Reservoirs with LSD?

Ido Hartogsohn, American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020), 162-3.

In May 1962, Leary and other collaborators from the group published an article titled “The Politics of the Nervous System” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Contrary to suggestions elsewhere [n.: Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, 86], Leary did not propose dosing American water reservoirs with LSD in order to prepare the population for a possible attack by the USSR. However, …he did imply that since the Soviets might indeed try to use LSD to contaminate the water supply and create mass panic in the American population, the logical solution would be for citizens to become knowledgeable and experience with psychedelics[.]

Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, rev. ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1992), 86.

Timothy Leary, George Litwin, Michael Hollingshead, Gunter Weil, Richard Alpert, “The Politics of the Nervous System,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 1962, vol. 18, issue 5, p. 27.