Re: The Pages of Punch

the scripts are too faint - how annoying - removes 70% of the fun!

Re: The Pages of Punch

Gumbud



Sorry you couldn’t read it all. Here is my transcription of the entire cartoon.

Top row – first pic

Marry? Why not providing everything is OK?

Top row – second pic

Of course she would have to be very piquant -

Top row - third pic

and lively –

Top row – fourth pic

and have intelligence –

Second row – first pic

though not too much of it. Naturally.

Second row – second pic

She’d have to be thoroughly capable -

Second row – third pic

and domesticated –

Second row – fourth pic

in more ways than one.

Third row – first pic

She’d need to be sporting -

Third row – second pic

and reposeful.

Third row – third pic

Then she he’d have to do me credit on special occasions –

Third row – fourth pic

have a useful income of her own and be generous with it -

Fourth row – first pic

and when I want a change know how to pack properly

Fourth row – second pic

and unpack it on my return.

Fourth row – third pic

Children? Yes, she’d have to provide a few to look after my comfort when the years begin to tell.

Re: The Pages of Punch

charming I'm sure!!

Re: The Pages of Punch

1935: A Precarious Profession

The actor, who is an old hand at this, knows that the manager is putting an optimistic gloss on a dire audience reaction. He simply wants to know how much he is going to get paid and when the play is going to close.

Re: The Pages of Punch

1935: Media Derived ‘Information’

Charles Laughton won the Oscar as Best Actor in 1933 for his starring role in the Private Life of Henry VIII. It was still being talked about in 1940 when I heard about Laughton in the role of Henry eating a chicken with his hands and throwing the bones on the floor.

To the schoolboy it is Laughton who is real, not Henry VIII. This kind of misunderstanding is now much more common than in 1935. Apparently there are still many people who think that the sinking of the Titanic is just fiction.

Re: The Pages of Punch

1935: Removing the Vicar

In 1935 even mere vicars tended to be rather grand as this cartoon illustrates. This goes for their wives too. The joke here is that the obsequious tradesman doesn’t want to be insulting but that is exactly what he is doing.

Re: The Pages of Punch

1935: Nostalgia for the Great War?

The drill procedure being executed by the municipal road sweeper (using his broom instead of a rifle) is the General Salute, which is only made in the presence of an officer of that exalted rank. This seems to suggest that this had once been the status of that benevolent looking elderly gent complete with umbrella, bowler hat and spats.

One way of looking at this cartoon is to say that is nonsense. A general would sit in comfort at a chateau well behind the lines. The road sweeper would have been in the infantry risking his life on a daily basis standing up to his waist in freezing contaminated water whilst manning his section of the trenches. Any suggestion of comradeship might appeal to the upper class readers of Punch but bore no relationship to reality during that conflict.

Another way of seeing it is rather different. The disparity of risk and conditions is of course true. Even so the war had ended some 17 years previously. For both the two men in the drawing there could now be a somewhat rose-tinted memory of a time when there had been a common purpose across all ranks. The former general, no doubt now a company director accepts the salute with some recognition of what the sweeper had previously had to endure.

Personally I prefer the second interpretation.

Re: The Pages of Punch

1935: It’s Not Only the Map that’s No Good

They don’t seem to be on the best of terms. He is obviously lost. She isn’t trying to help with the map reading. Indeed she isn’t showing any interest in his forlorn attempt to make sense of where they are.

Far from admitting his incompetence he blames first the map and then her for not ‘asking someone’.

It would be rash to anticipate an early reconciliation.

Re: The Pages of Punch

1935: Hiking with George Belcher

The amply proportioned hiker would be well advised to heed the farmer’s veiled warning.

In 1935 the vast Victorian network of branch lines was still reaching into every part of the countryside. It was destined to remain more or less intact until the mid 1960s when the Beeching Axe fell after which such a conversation could not have taken place.

Re: The Pages of Punch

1935: Ship’s Crew Summoned as Witnesses

No doubt the case concerned Divorce rather than Probate or even Admiralty. Some hanky panky has been taking place on a pleasure cruise (surprise, surprise) and the stewards have had to tell the court what they saw. Not having been fed on a diet of courtroom TV dramas the speaker in the cartoon is quite unfamiliar with the art of cross-examination.

This particular barrister does not look the pleasure cruise type so he is unlikely to find himself as an ‘accidental’ victim of having scalding hot tea poured onto his lap.