Mythchaser

[oldbloke]

This month's FT Mythchaser column is about the purported use of wooden fakes of raspberry pips in dodgy jam.
A quick Google will find it rumoured to have happened in Victorian times, or during WW1, or during and after WW2.
Best hit seems to be a ref to Sylvia Pankhurst setting up a jam factory to make the real stuff employing the women who'd been making the wooden pips, in WW1. But of course as soon as you Google her name you just get load sof politics. She mentioned it in a book she wrote in '31, apparently. None of this is proof it was ever actually true.
Anybody know?

Comments

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Pips? I allus calls 'em seeds.

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

Sounds like 100% tosh. Like the Scots stories of Highland landlords bollocking midges for profit. Nobody *makes* raspberry seeds, they're too small.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

So... was Sylvia Pankhurst lying (presumably for some political end), or taken in by a myth????

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

Without a citation from SP I guess I'm agnostic on the point. I can believe she found employment for unemployed jam-makers - in fact I may have a proper reference to that somewhere in The Literature I've been carrying about like a tortoise its shell - but not for the seed-makers, which is not credible at any level. The huge agricultural depression which took place after the Great War and was at its deepest by 1924 (and is largely unmentioned in histories more concerned with urban industrial decline) displaced a large number of lower-level agricultural labourers and the next level up of factory workers. This affected Scotland more than England but was also significant even in places like Kent and Essex, which had traditionally built its economy on the fruit industry (along with cattle and coastal trade).

Lecture endeth here.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

This ought to be the book. I can't go into our Uni library though, my ex still works there.

Author Pankhurst, E. Sylvia (Estelle Sylvia), 1882-1960 Other titles by Author(s)
Title The suffragette movement : an intimate account of persons and ideals / by E. Sylvia Pankhurst
Publisher London ; New York [etc.] : Longmans, Green and co., 1931
Control Number p3327730
Subject Women--Suffrage--Great Britain
Women--History--Suffrage
Physical description xii, 631 p

[blackberry44.livejournal.com]

I thought L was some sort of descendant of the Pankhursts? Or maybe I got it wrong. Does she know?

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

No, she's related to one of the (feamle) bodyguards of one of the Pankhursts.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

bollocking midges for profit

What?

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

I didn't like to ask.

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

[indrawn breath]aye,[exhale]aye.

It's a fairly old Highalnd and Island legpull; that in the 1950s certain landlords were so mean they were selling midge bollocks to the scientific community for research purposes. Told to me as solemn truth in Uist in 1984.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

I had a flat-mate in Manchester, a PhD biologist, whose research consisted of spattering fruit-fly bollocks with gamma rays. While they were still attached to the flys, mind.