Jolly Comrades

In the 1920s The Little Man was commisioned to make a series of films for the Pathe company. These were to be shown alongside the company's newsreels in British cinemas. The films varied in quality and covered an electic range of subjects in an inconsistent style. Only six films were made and Pathe did not renew The Little Man's initial contract. Nevertheless, the first film, documenting the lives of the entertainers and showmen who entertained the pickets during the general strike of 1926, is still considered a classic. Fresh from the National Film Archive, it is with pleasure and pride that we present this newly-digitised film to you today. We hope you enjoy The Jolly Comrades.

Uncanny Prophecy of the Day

Whatever, then, the State Socialists may claim or disclaim, their system, if adopted, is doomed to end in a State religion, to the expense of which all must contribute and at the altar of which all must kneel; a State school of medicine, by whose practitioners the sick must invariably be treated; a State system of hygiene, prescribing what all must and must not eat, drink, wear, and do; a State code of morals, which will not content itself with punishing crime, but will prohibit what the majority decide to be vice; a State system of instruction, which will do away with all private schools, academies, and colleges; a State nursery, in which all children must be brought up in common at the public expense; and, finally, a State family, with an attempt at stirpiculture, or scientific breeding, in which no man and woman will be allowed to have children if the State prohibits them and no man and woman can refuse to have children if the State orders them. Thus will Authority achieve its acme and Monopoly be carried to its highest power.

    - Benjamin R. Tucker, State Socialism and Anarchism: How far they agree, and wherein they differ, 1886.

Children of the Ghetto: Henryk Ross

A party in the Łódź Ghetto, Photography by Henryk Ross

Long after the Second World War had finished, Henryk Ross returned to his native Poland and dug up the photographic negatives he had buried for safekeeping.

Many had suffered water-damage since they were concealed, but they had survived well enough for Ross to revisit the life he had led between 1940 and 1944. As he examined his work, he would have seen happy images of children’s parties; comedy shots, such as the one that depicts a policeman with a watering can hovering over his head; and a delightful photo of a pretty young woman posing by some saplings.


At first glance, you would mistake these as the snapshots of a very talented photographer. But look closer and you see a recurrent and unexpected detail: the yellow star worn on every breast.

Were it not for that, it would be hard to believe that these happy, well-fed people were interned at Łódź, in the Holocaust’s second-largest ghetto. Overseen by the controversial Chaim Rumkowski, whose name is now inextricably linked with the notorious “Give me Your Children” speech, the ghetto was effectively a sweatshop for the German war effort, as well as a holding centre for Jews being deported to the death camps at Auschwitz and Chełmno.

So why are these photographs so radically different to the now-familiar Holocaust images of starving and brutalised men, women and children? And how did Ross manage to get hold of the camera and film under such conditions?

The answer to both of these questions lies in the fact that Nazis allowed the Jews to administer and police the ghetto themselves. Subsequently a Łódź “elite” evolved: a minority who held coveted jobs and lived comparatively privileged lives. Henryk Ross was employed by the ghetto’s Department of Statistics to capture images of ghetto inhabitants producing goods for the Nazis.

Ross performed his duties correctly, but was also in demand by members of the elite families, whose children he photographed at play and at parties. However, he also risked his life by taking clandestine shots of the ghetto’s horrors: hungry people searching for food; Jews being herded into cattle trucks on their way to the death camps; individual deportations; a corpse hanging from a noose; people trying to escape Nazi round-ups of the old, sick and very young.

It was dangerous and horrifying work, but Ross later recalled the strength of his motivation:

“I was anticipating the total destruction of Polish Jewry. I wanted to leave a historical record of our martyrdom.”

He succeeded. Some of the photographs Ross later unearthed were used as evidence at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961. However, although Ross himself did not die until 1991, the more ‘homely’ pictures of life amongst the Łódź elite were not publicly displayed until 2005.

It is not hard to see why. The images of a well-fed, seemingly content class of people amongst the ghetto’s inhabitants force us to ask some very difficult questions about human nature. How, against a backdrop of hunger, forced labour, deportation and murder can we interpret photographs of plump children playing at policemen and arresting their friends?

As one survivor remarked when seeing the photographs for the first time, “Hunger does not bring out noble feelings”. Nor is it easy to pass judgement when, looking into the eyes of those Ross photographed, one remembers that almost every single person was dead by 1945: of the 204,000 Jews who passed through the ghetto, just 10,000 survived.

---

Ross himself.

The Great White Beard

Primo Levi (1919-1987)

"I wanted very much to learn to draw: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world... It's an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is." From Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman by Physicist (and general hero) Richard P. Feynman.

Richard Feynman was one of the great scientists of the twentieth century, most famous to the physicist for his Feynman Diagram method of modelling subatomic systems (Quantum Electro-Dynamics, it got him his Nobel), and to the layman for his legendary autobiography Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman. As a layman, it's one of the most personally inspirational books I've ever read, with his anecdotes about lockpicking, his personal experiences on the Manhattan project, and his first-principles approach to any social or scientific problem. Whether he was solving the problem of liquid helium, theatrically determining the cause of the Challenger explosion, or drumming in the Rio Carnival, his style was unchangingly playful. However, despite being the archetype of a major physicist, he was a minor (although exhibited) artist, and a relatively minor (although hugely entertaining) writer. His book is rousing and humane, but never quite captures the passionate vision of reality that so obviously hangs behind his world-view — that's left for his lectures, his description of Entropy's role in time's arrow is magnificent.

Primo Levi was a minor scientist — a self-effacing Italian professional chemist who's post-graduate experiences revolved around analysis in manufacturing and industry. But he was the archetype of a major writer. His place in history is guaranteed by his first books If This Is a Man and The Truce, documenting with consummate empathy and humanity his year-long experience when interned in Auschwitz. It is a topic I will gloss over here, for it is not this aspect of his work that makes him one of my favourite writers. Beyond Auschwitz Levi managed to build himself a role as the poet laureate of analytical chemists, and in this respect he is unique. The poetry in his writing on the mechanical and technical raises and emphasises a vision of the world Feynman describes above striving (and failing) to render in pencil.

---

"I still enjoyed seeing it grow, day by day, and it was like seeing a baby grow: I mean a baby that isn't yet born, when it's still inside its mama. Of course this was a funny baby because it weighed about sixty tons, just the framework, but it didn't grow all anyhow, like a weed; it grew up neat and precise, like it was in the drawings, so when we fitted the ladders... and they were fairly complicated, they fit right off without any cutting or welding, and this is a real satisfaction, like when they made the Frejus tunnel, and it took thirteen years, but then the Italian hole and the French hole met, without any error, not even twenty centimetres" From The Wrench, by Primo Levi.

Levi's work usually took the form of a series of short, discrete stories that say more when taken together than they manage to do on their own. His skills as a poet of the technical are best seen in four of his works: The Wrench, Other People's Trades (sadly out of print), The Sixth Day and Other Tales and most of all The Periodic Table. The Periodic Table is a unique professional memoir, quite unlike anything else I've ever read. In it he describes his life's experience by a series of chapters named and viewed through the the properties of specific chemical elements. The first is titled Argon, through who's ubiquitous but inert properties he describes his people, the Jewish Diaspora. The last is titled Carbon, and is a poetic story of the existence and cycle of a carbon atom. Between these is an utterly humane work on the nature of living, making it clear that for Levi his professional discipline and empiricism carried him on from the camps, binding him to the unyielding nature of matter. Each chapter is intriguing of itself, I am particularly fond of Chromium — about a varnish factory that no longer understands its own recipe — and Gold — about his total abject failure as an armed partisan against Mussolini's regime. Taken together The Periodic Table is one of the strangest autobiographies of the 20th century.

The Wrench is notable as a collection of short stories, following the form described above, used to bring out the blood and satisfaction in the work of an engineer. The lead character is a rigger, engaged in numerous construction projects, and each story relates to steel, tools, and machine oil. There is an aesthetic here that a man should be viewed through his relationship with the physical, making an odd book but one well worth reading. The Sixth Day and Other Tales is equally strange, because it follows all the rules and forms of Science Fiction (a story about the day when water's viscosity spontaneously changed is particularly typical of SF written in the 50's and 60's) but was intended for an entirely different audience, and I suspect conceived mostly in ignorance of the form as it was being developed at the time. Levi would certainly have had success amongst the pulps, but his work is most closely comparable to another hero of mine, Polish SF writer (and major critic of the American version of the form), Stanislaw Lem. They share an ornery but playful intellectualism more pronounced than that present amongst the Americans. Levi's only novel, If Not Now, When?, returns to the topic of resistance in the Second World War, this time set amongst the Jewish population of The Ukraine. It's a good novel, and it holds well with his other holocaust books, but it does not reach the heights of his autobiographical books on the topic.

---

I am a fan, it's that straightforward. Levi is, and remains, one of my all time favourite writers. His work is not for everyone, there is no action in anything he ever wrote, but his books are intelligent, rich, and very, very human. He is the only writer I know that makes me wish I could read his work in the original language. He died in 1987 of a fall from the third story balcony, one of those Italian internal spiral staircases, in his home in Turin; whether this was suicide is still debated (unfortunately united with his material this makes him something of a Kurt Cobain figure to those who wish to view him that way). Anything he wrote is worthy of attention, and while If This Is A Man is a book of significant importance, such a weighty topic should not blot out the gravity of his less historic works.

---

Patron saint (Jewish) of analytical chemists.

Art From The Ghetto

Bruno Schulz's self portrait, in characteristic scratchy and evocative style.

This publication has been building up something of a theme when it comes to celebrating the death of artists of note, not intentionally - it's a pretty morbid obsession - but I'm finding it impossible now to resist the "on this day" obituaries. A disturbing indicator for my sanity.

This Monday coming , for example, is the 65th anniversary of the death of Polish writer, artist and literary stylist Bruno Schulz. Schulz is an uncategorisable writer, widely recognised after his death for his imagery rich books that aren't really stories in the normal form. Schulz, an assimilated Jew, became trapped in the Nazi-occupation of Poland, and was murdered in the course of an argument between two Gestapo officers in 1942. A book review and biography will be forthcoming next week.

In Schulz's honour, and just because we can, we thought we'd attempt a brief season on works of art and science that emerged from the camps of the Second World War. For the most bleak events of the twentieth century there is a very strong body of human creativity that emerged from under their shadow, and it deserves celebrating (also, it's November and I'm feeling morbid). So, from Monday onwards we'll be posting on the topic.

To start off with a lede: Schulz's highest profile book Street Of Crocodiles served as inspiration for a stop-motion opus by American twins The Brothers Quay. This exceptionally dark adaptation, with its reliance on imagery and music rather than any real narrative is a bit overwhelming, and rated by Terry Gilliam as one of his favourite animations of all time (you can see similarity to his animated work). Anyone familiar with the music videos of the band Tool will recognise its influence immediately. So, I post it here in two parts.

Street Of Crocodiles by The Brothers Quay (1986), click for Part 2

---

Bruno Schulz (1892-1942)

“I am an anal impressionist”

“He also found time to father three children. They joined the act, performing charming little dances to their father’s accompaniment. A tasteful, delicate performance that, today, would give a child psychologist nightmares.”

Were they not so transient, a man's farts could be used to identify him with the accuracy of fingerprinting. From the light odour of his morning thunder, to a heavy bacterial bean-fart or a beery evening blow-off, his flatus asserts unerasable personality. In a blind smell test, a farter's blindfolded wife could pick him out of a crowd of thousands. And then, in all probability, she would berate him for being so disgusting. Needlessly. Whilst most fellows enjoy dropping a sulphur bomb, notably if they happen to be exiting crowded lifts, underground trains or any other compartment that will seal in other people with both the smell and the blame, there is a sadly undeniable taboo attached to farting. Some trace this back to Roman times, citing Flavius Josephus's account in The Wars of the Jews of the soldier who raised his clothes and farted at the Feast of Unleavened Bread: the profanity enraged the Jews so much that it caused a riot in which thousands were killed. Others plump for the tale of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who was supposedly so mortified after letting rip in Queen Elizabeth I's presence that he vanished into self-imposed exile for seven years.

Such shame in farting has not always been de rigeur. Indeed, some fine men have not only relished the chance to assert their personalities through farting, but have raised the function to an art form. St Augustine was an early witness of such individuals, recording in the City of God that there were those:

...who can at will, and without any odour, produce such a variety of sounds from their anus that they seem to be singing in that part.

Fine party tricks from those children of God, but Augustine does not tell us whether they exploited their flatulence for cash. If they didn't, they missed a trick: by the 13th century one Roland le Pettour held the manor of Hemingstone, Suffolk, from the King - in return for a very unusual rent:

Seriantia que quondam fuit Rollandi le Pettour in Hemingeston in comitatu Suff’, pro qua debuit facere die Natali Domini singulis annis coram domino rege unum saltum et sifflettum et unum bumbulum, que alienata fuit per particulas subscriptas.

The following (lands), which formerly were held of Roland the Farter in Hemingston in the county of Suffolk, for which he was obliged to perform every year on the birthday of our Lord before his master the king, one jump, one whistle, and one fart, were alienated in accordance with these specific requirements

(Liber Feodorum)

All these men, though, pale into insignificance when compared to the master, Joseph Pujol, the farting Frenchman from Marseilles. Known as Le Pétomane (aha, now le Pettour's name makes sense too), Pujol would fart at will before the late 19th century audiences at the Moulin Rouge. He could fart the Marseillaise. He could imitate the sound of cannon fire. He could play the flute by farting through a rubber tube. He imitated the farts of little girls, mothers-in-law and masons (dry - no cement). He gave impresssions of a dressmaker ripping two yards of calico. He could smoke with his back passage. And for all of this, he was paid handsomely and widely adored.


How so?

The answer lies partly in good luck, and partly in Pujol's willingness to use those talents nature had given him. As a soldier he would entertain his fellows by sucking in seawater through his anus, and then firing it out again in a powerful stream. Thereafter, he experimented with air rather than water, delighting his contemporaries with his increasing repertoire of sounds and leading him to adopt the nickname Le Pétomane, or “The Fartiste”.

His big break came in 1892 when he walked into the office belonging to the Director of the Moulin Rouge, announcing: “I am Le Pétomane, and I want an engagement in your establishment”. When asked by the Director for an explanation, he replied:

“You see, sir, my anus is of such elasticity that I can open and shut it at will. . . . I can absorb any quantity of liquid I may be given. . .[and] I can expel an almost infinite quantity of odorless gas.”

After a short demonstration, Pujol was hired and performed that very same night. His success was so great that several tighly-corseted women fainted from laughing so hard.

Indeed, Le Pétomane made farting so respectable that he not only developed his act to incorporate his children (they danced), but he also performed in front of the future King Edward VII and the King of the Belgians.

Little Men: it is time to follow in the wake of Le Pétomane and to fart with pride. And if your wife protests, show her this instructional film. When she has finished laughing you can look forward to a happily flatulent future life.

---

Unruly Contraptions in Bloomsbury

All Behind You, Winston (1940, Evening Standard)- David Low's classic cartoon, note the Labour politicians Atlee, Bevan and Morrison in the front row to demonstrate national unity.

Bloomsbury in central London has an intellectual history few neighbourhoods in the world can match. From shrine's to The Mahatma to stuffed philosophers it's an abidingly Enlightenment influenced square kilometre. At it's southern end is Little Russell Street, situated a minute's walk from The British Museum and the location of both a Nicholas Hawskmoor church (St George's Church — a particularly eerie chapel, Roman style architecture and unicorn and lion statues climbing the tower are disturbingly pagan, typical of the mysterious Hawksmoor) and that most English of places: The Cartoon Museum.

The satirical cartoon is one of the defining artform's of Britain's colonial era, from Hogarth in the 18th century onwards, and this small charitably owned museum attempts to do justice to the history of the art. The present temporary exhibit (5th of July to 7th of October) cover's the life of William Heath Robinson, Britain's great absurdist cartoonist, who's life's work revolves around elaborate and convoluted contraptions. So abiding is his influence on the public consciousness that his name has become an adjective to describe rickety and overcomplicated machinery.

The reconnoitring mortar (1916)

His work is characterised by a masterful attention to detail, each cartoon requires minutes of thought to interpret fully, and an abidingly English cast of ladies, top hatted gentlemen and amusingly sweet Huns (he typically played The Enemy as being incompetent rather than evil in both his WWI and WWII cartoons). At £4 entrance this is a affordable and satisfying museum to spend 2 hours in, with a permanent exhibit of comics and graphic novels above the exhibit on political satire. One comes out realising what a large contribution this art form has made to the idea of Englishness, each of the big names works in a land of stiff upper lips, cynicism and grand gestures and Heath Robinson in particularly is continually raising the class divisions of this country, but without socialist flag-waving. The collection runs all the way to the present, meaning one must consider the placement of the modern (and I must admit, I hate his work in strip cartoons) Maggie-basher Steve Bell alongside W.H.R and co, yet it makes it clear that the political cartoon is still a major force.

Personally I was most intrigued by what regular cartooning does to an artist's style (in this case W.H.R but you could say the same of Gary Larson, who draws heavily from him) ... Initially we see serious artistic and visual variation as he demonstrates his penmanship chops, but the requirements for weekly cartoons, and stylistic consistency, means that his work becomes both increasingly detailed, and increasingly stylised throughout his career... The newspapers are not interested in innovation, but intelligence, humour and theme. Thus his later work increasingly takes place in a "Heath Robinson World" which works under the rules, traditions and vision established over hundreds of previous single frame images. This alternate reality is fantastically detailed, and Heath Robinson is a remarkably optimistic visionary, there is rarely malign intent in his work — and often absurd degrees of compassion.

Little Man, What Now? endorses this product — well worth a break for when strolling amongst the granite edifices and Rosetta Stones of England's plunder museum.

Testing Golf Drivers (1934)

---

Gundiguts Grose

Whilst the "most dangerous tool in the hands of any girl is a book", any self-respecting schoolboy reacts with horror or bewilderment when confronted with a "big papery thing" with words printed on it. This reluctance to sully their eyes with the written word has long irritated politicians, who have tried to remedy the problem with eccentric or patronising suggestions such as filling shelves with spy novels and other "masculine" stories, forgetting that even Melvyn Burgess's attempts to shock are pretty dull compared to the attraction of firing up Grand Theft Auto on the Playstation and getting down to some serious murdering, raping and blow jobbery.

Worse still is the idea that, if you provide young boys with positive role models they will, somehow, be filled with an insatiable desire to read. Frankly, most boys don't give a mongoose dropping what Monty Panesar is reading: they want to know how he handles his balls.

The problem is, of course, that politicians shy away from promoting the books and role models that really would appeal to young boys. There is no boy (or man) in the country who has not spent many happy hours looking for rude words in the dictionary, nor one who was disappointed at how few he could find. Likewise, instead of castigating young fellows for being overindulged, foul mouthed, obese slobs who fritter away their cash, we need to put forward as role models older men of this kind who also happen to have a love for the fundamentals of all great literature: fine words, lewd deeds and dark humour.

That's why Little Man, What Now is campaigning for every secondary school pupil in the country to be given a copy of Captain Francis Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a compendium of buckish slang, university wit and pickpocket eloquence. No boy would ever find reading dull if he owned a book which, when opened several times at random, would provide him with invaluable words and phrases like these:

BITCH BOOBY. A country wench. Military term.
BUTTOCKING SHOP. A brothel.
HASH. To flash the hash; to vomit. Cant.
INDORSER. A sodomite. To indorse with a cudgel; to drub or beat a man over the back with a stick, to lay cane upon Abel.
STRIP ME NAKED. Gin.
WHIRLYGIGS. Testicles.
WINDMILLS IN THE HEAD. Foolish projects.

Indeed, after the boys had fallen about arsy varsey with laughter, they would surely wonder what genius had produced such a dictionary and, indeed, how they could aspire to be more like him.

Luckily Francis Grose's habits and mode of living are easy to emulate. A heavy drinker, his method of book-keeping when Paymaster of the Surrey Militia was to keep "two books of accounts,viz. his right and left pockets". He was also extremely fond of rich foods and, due in part to this and his overindulgence in port, was extremely fat (he enjoyed the apt fact he was called Grose). But best of all, he researched his dictionary by spending evenings in the slums, drinking dens and dockyards of London whist in the company of his improbably-named assistant, Tom Cocking.

A character to aspire to and one that, even today, could inspire fat, pleasure-seeking, spendthrift young wastrels to develop a love of language and reading. Put Grose in every school: our boys have been cork-brained and pudding-headed for too long.

---