The Queer Feet: a short story by G K Chesterton

“The Queer Feet” is the third story in the first book of Father Brown stories by G K Chesterton (1874-1936), entitled “The Innocence of Father Brown” (published in 1911). It revolves around a clever piece of deduction by Chesterton’s priest/detective, but it depends on a highly contrived situation and a statement about human behaviour that, if it applied in 1911, certainly does not do so today.

The situation is the annual dinner of an exclusive men’s club called The Twelve True Fishermen. Their dinner is at the equally exclusive, not to say bizarre, Vernon Hotel in London’s Belgravia. The restaurant only has one table, at which 24 people can sit, but if there only 12 diners, as on this occasion, they can sit in a row and have a view of the hotel garden. The restaurant employs fifteen waiters, who therefore outnumber the guests.

Another fact that is essential to the story is that The Twelve True Fishermen are most interested in the fish course of their dinner, and for this purpose they supply their own cutlery of ornate silver knives and forks, shaped like fish, each with a large pearl in the handle.

On the day of the dinner a crisis occurs when one of the fifteen waiters suffers a severe stroke and is taken to a room upstairs. As the waiter is a Catholic he asks for a priest to hear his last confession, which is why Father Brown is on the premises. The waiter has asked Father Brown to write out a long document, the nature of which is not fully explained by Chesterton. The hotel manager agrees that Father Brown can do this work in a room that is next to a passageway that leads from the waiters’ quarters to the terrace where the guests are mingling and is next to the dining table. This room has no direct access to the passageway but is linked to the hotel’s cloakroom.

While he is working in this room, Father Brown is aware of the sound of footsteps in the passageway. He deduces that they are all made by the same feet, because of the slight creak of one of the shoes, but they keep switching from a fast walking pace, almost on tiptoe, to a steady heavy pace. This keeps on happening until there is a complete pause, followed eventually by a running pace made by the same feet.

Father Brown then goes through into the cloakroom, just in time for a man to come up and ask for his coat from the person he assumes to be the cloakroom attendant. Father Brown then demands that the man hand over the knives and forks that he has stolen. 

The story is then told from the perspective of the diners and waiters. Two courses of the dinner take place, followed by the fish course, after which a waiter collects the plates and the cutlery. A second waiter then arrives and is horrified to discover that the table has already been cleared. It then becomes apparent that the special knives and forks, with their pearls, are nowhere to be found. Father Brown then appears with the stolen items and explains how he was able to reclaim them.

The story revolves around the footsteps heard in the passageway. Father Brown has deduced that the rapid walk is typical of that of a waiter on duty as he dashes about taking orders and serving dishes, however the solid walk matches that of an aristocratic gentleman. Clearly this is one man pretending to be two.

The guests and the waiters are dressed almost identically, so it would not be difficult for a guest to assume that a strange face belonged to a waiter and for a waiter to assume that he was a guest. The only difficult moment for the thief would have been when the waiters lined up before the meal and might have been discovered, by his fellow waiters, to be out of place. However, he was able to avoid this problem by standing just round a corner.

It is a clever idea, but does it really stand up to examination? As with most of Chesterton’s stories there are weak points that are not properly explained.

For one thing, the reader is not told how Father Brown knows about the special cutlery. He has been called into the hotel to deal with an emergency, is sequestered in a locked room, and has no reason to know anything about the arrangements on hand for the dinner. However, he is able to demand that the thief hands over the silverware.

Another difficulty is that the thief does know about the silverware and how the dinner is organised. This is an exclusive club which guards its secrets, but there is no clue given as to why the thief would have known about the dinner, the special cutlery, or the vacancy caused by a waiter’s sudden illness.

It also seems odd that, with a complement of fifteen waiters, only one would clear the table of all twelve plates and 24 pieces of cutlery. Surely, with more waiters than diners, the most efficient procedure would have been for each diner to have their own waiter who would deal with them exclusively? However, the plot of the story would have fallen apart if this had happened.

If there is a passageway along which waiters and guests might be expected to walk, why does only one waiter/guest do so? There is no indication that Father Brown picks out the distinctive steps from among many others, but that they are the only ones to be heard. This is surely highly unlikely, as is the idea that any guest would feel the need to visit the waiters in their quarters, which is assumed here. 

As mentioned above, this story is just too contrived to be really successful. There are too many features that seem improbable and put in place just to make the plot work. The story also fails to work for the modern reader who would find it extraordinary that waiters walk in a distinctively different way from diners. Perhaps they did more than a century ago, but today?

© John Welford

The Invisible Man: a short story by G K Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English critic, poet and novelist who was well known as one of the most colourful and provocative writers of his day. He was seen by many as a latter-day Samuel Johnson, not only for his common sense and incisive wit, but also for his physically large appearance.

“The Invisible Man” was the fifth story written by G K Chesterton about his priest/detective Father Brown. It appeared in his original collection of Father Brown stories, entitled “The Innocence of Father Brown”, in 1911.

The Story

The setting of the story is Camden Town, a district of north London. A young man, John Turnbull Angus, walks into a café and proposes marriage to the waitress, Laura Hope, who appears to be the only member of staff on the premises. One assumes that the two are not complete strangers to each other, but this is not made clear. She turns him down but, because he refuses to take no for an answer, she tells him the story of her complicated love-life.

She had been living at her father’s pub, The Red Fish, which was somewhere out of town, when she had been the subject of marriage proposals from two suitors, neither of whom she found attractive. One was a very short man, almost a dwarf, named Isidore Smythe. The other, tall and thin but with a terrible squint, was James Welkin. Laura did not want to marry either of them, but neither did she want to hurt their feelings, so she came up with the plan of announcing that she could not marry anyone who had not made his way in the world. The two men promptly set off to seek their fortunes as if, in Laura’s words, “they were in some silly fairy-tale”.

A year has passed, and Laura is now running the café but in real fear that she has been tracked down by James Welkin, the suitor with the squint. She keeps hearing his voice when there is no-one to be seen. She has received letters from Isidore Smythe, who is a now successful businessman, but as she reads the letters she can hear Welkin’s distinctive laugh.

Angus hears a noise in the street and walks through into the confectioner’s shop that adjoins the café to find a man who can only be Isidore Smythe. He points out that a strip of paper has been pasted on the shop window bearing the message “If you marry Smythe he will die”. Smythe also mentions that he has had threatening letters left at his flat, but nobody has seen anyone who could have brought them. Angus offers to help Smythe, and Laura, by putting the matter into the hands of a private detective that he knows and who lives nearby. He is Flambeau, a reformed former French master criminal who is a character that appears in many of the Father Brown stories.

Angus escorts Smythe back to his flat, which is on the top floor of Himalaya Mansions. On the way he notices billboard advertisements for the product that has made Smythe his fortune, namely large clockwork dolls that perform household duties under the general name of “Smythe’s Silent Service”.

When they reach Smythe’s flat, Angus notices that the place is full of these machines that perform their functions at the touch of button. He also sees a scrap of paper on the floor with a message that reads: “If you have been to see her today, I shall kill you”.

Angus heads off to fetch Flambeau, but before he leaves he instructs four people, a cleaner, a commissionaire, a policeman and a chestnut seller, to keep a close eye on the premises and report back to him if anyone enters the building while he is away.

Angus finds Flambeau, who is being visited by Father Brown. As the three of them walk back to Himalaya Mansions it starts to snow. On arrival, Angus hears from all four “guards” that nobody has entered the building in his absence, but Father Brown is not so sure, because he can see footprints in the snow that tell a different story.

When  they reach Smythe’s flat they find a bloodstain on the floor but no Smythe. Back on ground level, Father Brown asks the policeman to investigate something on his behalf, and when he returns he says that Smythe’s body has been found in the nearby canal. Father Brown then regrets that he forgot to ask if a light brown sack has also been found.

The solution of the mystery revolves around the fact that, according to Chesterton and Father Brown, people tend to observe only what they expect to regard as being out of the ordinary. Nobody saw anyone enter Himalaya Mansions, although they would all have seen the postman do so but dismissed this occurrence because it was unremarkable. A postman does not count as a person in such a context.

As a postman, James Welkin was able to deliver all the letters and messages to Laura and Isidore Smythe, and to take away the latter’s small body in his postman’s sack. Laura could hear Welkin’s voice but not see Welkin himself, because the voice was remarkable but a postman doing his rounds was not. The murderer was invisible because he was all too visible, being as much a part of the background scenery as the trees and the houses. Even the sight of a postman leaving the building with a sack that was fuller than when he entered was apparently not sufficiently out of the ordinary to attract attention.

Does it work?

It’s a reasonable thought on which to hang a story, but does it really stand up to scrutiny? One thing to bear in mind is that this story was written in Edwardian England when the class system held sway and everyone with any money employed servants to perform menial tasks for them. Chesterton hints at this very strongly with his description of Smythe’s mechanical servants who line the walls until called into service to perform a specific task. There is a telling line here in that they are described as “only automatic machines and nobody would have looked at them twice”. This would have been how many middle-class people regarded their human servants.

However, even if the reader is willing to accept that a middle-class person could regard a postman as an invisible public servant, does this really work in the scenario of the story? The people who are asked to keep a lookout are not middle-class but working-class, and of the same social status as a postman. Would a cleaner or chestnut seller really allow a postman to be invisible in the same way that a much wealthier householder would? The commissionaire actual states that he would ask any man, “duke or dustman”, what his business was on entering the building, but would he really have made a distinction between a dustman and a postman in this regard, even to the extent that the latter  was “invisible” to him?

It is on this point of class distinction that the story rests in terms of its acceptability to the reader. It is probably true to say that it would have been read differently by its original readers in class-ridden England than by members of today’s much more classless society.

© John Welford

A Tradition of 1804: a short story by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is known as the author of a series of lengthy novels, which are not always an easy read. However, he also wrote a considerable number of short stories which modern readers might find more approachable. Here is an account of a particularly brief short story.

A very short story

“A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” was one of the stories published by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) under the title “Wessex Tales”. Although most of the stories had appeared in a collection dated 1888, the final set of seven tales was published in 1912. Of these, “A Tradition of
Eighteen Hundred and Four”, at seven pages long, is easily the shortest. Hardy wrote the date “Christmas 1882” at the end of the story, which was when it first appeared in print (under a slightly different title, with “Legend” for “Tradition”) in an American Christmas annual. 

A summary of the story

The narrator of the story, following an introductory couple of paragraphs in the author’s voice, is “old Solomon Selby”, who retells an experience from when he was a child. After the story has been told, Hardy tells the reader that Solomon has been dead for ten years, so the time gap of about 70 years from then back to the events of the story makes perfect sense.

Solomon says that his father had been a shepherd all his life and lived “out by the Cove”. This can be understood to be Lulworth Cove, on the Dorset coast about midway between Weymouth and Swanage. It is a small, almost circular cove with a narrow entrance that is today a noted feature of the “Jurassic Coast”. As a child, Solomon had lived in a remote shepherd’s cottage, and the years he remembers best were 1803-5, because he was then of an age “when a child’s eyes and ears take in and note down everything about him” and also because those years were at the heart of the Napoleonic Wars between Great Britain and France.

People in England, and especially along the south coast, were particularly worried about the threat of invasion from France. They knew that Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered most of the continent of Western Europe, was intent on defeating Britain. Solomon relates that his father, when droving a flock of ewes to Sussex, had been able to see the French coast and caught sight of the sun glinting on the accoutrements of the vast army that Napoleon had assembled on the beaches and which he was preparing for the invasion. It was believed that some 160,000 men and 15,000 horses would make the crossing on a fleet of 2,000 flat-bottomed boats, which were being built as part of the preparations.

Solomon introduces his uncle Job, a sergeant at foot, who reckoned that the invasion would take place on a calm night, using oars rather than sails. Napoleon’s problem was where he should land his troops, and, according to uncle Job, there was a lot of speculation about where this was likely to be. Most people agreed that the shortest crossing, towards Dover, was the least likely, given that that part of the coast would be the most heavily guarded, but there were plenty of other possibilities. Napoleon’s knowledge of potential landing places and troop concentrations was known to be slight, so people were wary about French spies coming ashore to “case the joint”.

The story then focuses on a night early in the year when the sheep flock needed to be tended right round the clock because the ewes were lambing. Young Solomon was called upon to help his father at such times, standing in for him when the latter needed to rest. On the night in question uncle Job had paid a visit to the house and, when it was Solomon’s turn to go out to the sheep-fold on the hill above the Cove, offered to accompany him. They settled down to rest in some straw with uncle Job telling the boy stories about his past adventures until Solomon fell asleep.

When he woke up, uncle Job had himself fallen asleep and Solomon became aware that there were two men, in military uniform, standing about twenty yards away. He watched by the light of the Moon as they looked at a roll of paper, pointed at various features, and spoke in a language which Solomon could not understand. 

He woke uncle Job and pointed the men out to him, having suspected that they were two French generals come to spy out the lie of the land. However, when uncle Job saw them he soon realised that one of the men was Napoleon Bonaparte himself, which was soon obvious to Solomon when the light from the Frenchmens’ lantern fell on the famous face that the boy had seen so often in pictures.

Uncle Job cursed that he did not have his flintlock pistol with him, and so Napoleon and his companion were able to slip back to their boat and escape, watched by Solomon and his uncle, to a larger boat waiting outside the Cove. Solomon ends his story by simply stating that, having reported the incident, uncle Job heard no more about it, and also saying that the expected invasion never took place. However, he remained convinced that Lulworth Cove was where the French army would have landed had it ever done so.

Could it have happened?

Hardy concludes with a paragraph that states, as mentioned earlier, that Solomon has been dead for ten years, and that his account was not generally believed “due to the incredulity of the age”. 

In his preface to the 1919 edition of “Wessex Tales” Hardy added a note to the effect that this story was purely fictional and that he had always thought it highly improbable, but that he had since been told that the tradition was a real one and that some people believed that Napoleon had actually visited the English coast on a spying mission. It is possible that this legend was not well known in Dorset, where it is hard to imagine that Hardy would not have been aware of it, because Hardy had originally set his story in Sussex and only moved it to Dorset between the different editions of the “Tales”. On the face of it, Sussex, with its long stretches of deserted low-lying coast, seems a more likely location for such an event, and the idea of Napoleon Bonaparte considering the prospect of sending 2,000 boats into Lulworth Cove, which is relatively small, seems little short of bizarre!

As a story, “A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four” is not particularly memorable. It contains only one surprise, no characterisation worth mentioning, and little in the way of plot. It is simply a “what if” kind of story that poses a question that is interesting as far as it goes, and it is well written in that it keeps the reader’s interest, but that is probably the most that can be said about it.

© John Welford

The Road to Wigan Pier, by George Orwell

George Orwell (real name Eric Blair, 1903-50) is best known for two classic works, namely Animal Farm and 1984. However, he wrote a great deal more than those two books, producing both fiction and social commentary. His 1937 book “The Road to Wigan Pier” falls into the latter category.

The book is in two parts. Part 1 describes the appalling social conditions he found on his three-month journey in 1936 in the industrial north of England (he visited Sheffield and Barnsley as well as Wigan), where mass unemployment was rife at the time. 

Part 2 is a discussion that outlines Orwell’s views on Socialism. Orwell took the line that the conditions he had seen could be alleviated by Socialism, so that was a very good reason why the country should become Socialist.

The existence of Part 2 became a real problem for Orwell in that his publisher, Victor Gollancz, who had commissioned the project, was initially reluctant to publish anything other than Part 1, because he believed that the advocacy of Socialism would prove to be too controversial. However, he later changed his mind and published both parts, providing his own critical introduction that commented on what followed.

The Road to Wigan Pier has been criticized on several fronts, one being that Orwell concentrated on the conditions of working men and ignored the plight of women in the industrial towns. Another problem was that he took no account of the attempts at self-improvement that many working-class men were making.

The title might present a puzzle to some people, in that piers are features of seaside towns and Wigan – not far from Manchester – is well inland. The original “Wigan Pier” was a wooden platform from which barges were loaded with coal on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. It had actually been demolished a few years before Orwell visited the town, but the name had stuck for the area of warehouses and wharfs and is still in use today. A replacement “pier” has been built, although the district is now devoted to culture and entertainment rather than industry.

© John Welford

The launch of Penguin Books

According to the founder of Penguin Books, Allen Lane, he was inspired to start publishing cheap paperbacks when he had time to kill on Exeter station (he was returning to London after paying a visit to Agatha Christie) and was hard-pressed to find anything suitable in the station bookstall. All that was on offer were reprinted classics and pulp novels.

There was clearly a gap in the market for contemporary writing aimed at a mass audience. What was needed were books that were easy to read, convenient to take around with one, readily available and very reasonably priced. The Penguin imprint, which began in July 1935, would concentrate on popular fiction, particularly crime, and biography.

Allen Lane’s genius was to make his Penguin books easily recognizable, which he did by sticking to a consistent cover design that was colour-coded to show the type of content – dark blue for biography, orange for general fiction, green for crime fiction, etc. 

The first ten titles, all published at the same time, were reprints of books that Allen Lane thought would sell well, and he was correct with some of his guesses, but not all. They included crime novels by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, fiction by Ernest Hemingway, Compton Mackenzie and Eric Linklater, and a biography of Shelley. 

However, some of his first batch of authors are little known today. That is a risk that publishers always take – but by printing in volume and getting good marketing deals from outlets such as Woolworths, the gains easily outweighed the losses and Penguin Books sold a million volumes in its first ten months, each one priced at sixpence.

Penguin Books soon expanded into other fields, such as the Pelican imprint for non-fiction titles and the Puffin children’s book imprint.

The success of Penguin Books showed that it was possible to get people reading good books if the product was attractive and properly marketed. Literary writing was now a mass-market commodity.

© John Welford

Poets of the 1930s: what inspired them?

The 1930s saw an explosion of poetic activity in Great Britain, with poets such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day Lewis coming to the fore. There were several factors that linked the “Thirties Poets”, and most of them were known to each other and other literary and artistic figures of the time, even if they were less well known to the public at large.

They were, for example, almost all attracted to the Left in politics despite coming from privileged backgrounds. They were the generation that had been of school age during the First World War and had therefore come to know of its horrors second-hand, for example through the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others. They were therefore protest poets of a different kind from the previous generation.

So what were the influences that inspired these poets to write? What was it about the 1930s that would not allow this small coterie of talented writers to stay silent?

We can define the Thirties as the period between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the outbreak of World War Two in 1939. The first event produced economic shockwaves that had huge consequences across the world, and the second was, in some ways, the ultimate consequence, although many other factors contributed to the second major cataclysm of the 20^th century.

The 1930s saw the rise of Fascism in Europe, clashing head-on with Communism in a number of arenas, most notably Spain, where civil war broke out in 1936 and attracted a number of British intellectuals to fight on the Communist side. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, posing serious questions to the democracies of Europe as to how they should react. In Italy, where Fascism as such was born, another totalitarian dictator, Benito Mussolini, took his country to war in 1935 by invading Abyssinia.

A number of the Thirties poets had direct experience of the rise of the Nazis in Germany. W. H. Auden went to live in Germany on leaving Oxford University in 1928 and was joined there by Christopher Isherwood (a prose writer whose works inspired the musical “Cabaret”) in 1929. Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Edward Upward also had first-hand experience of 1930s Germany, and their anti-fascism and consequent pro-communism were the result of that experience.

On the home front, the interplay of the forces of right and left was also being played out in the 1930s. It was widely agreed that Liberalism was failing. It had not produced a “land fit for heroes” after the end of World War One, and Britain was governed for a time by a coalition of parties that seemed unable to take the country forward in any particular direction. For a young person who wanted answers and a sense of purpose, the choice had to be towards one extreme or the other.

Oswald Mosley had been a Labour MP, but he formed his “New Party” in 1931 that, as soon became clear, was a British Nazi party. At first, some intellectuals were attracted by Mosley’s no-nonsense approach. These included W. H. Auden, but he and others were soon repelled by the thuggery that Mosley’s “Blackshirts” demonstrated on the streets of London, especially towards Jews and immigrants.

The alternative was the politics of the Left. The Labour Party, under Ramsay Macdonald, was discredited because it had thrown in its lot with the Liberals and Conservatives in the National Government, so other parties of the left that presented a more openly Marxist front were far more attractive. The story of the connections between British poets and intellectuals and the various factions of the far left is a complex one, not least because Marxist cliques and parties, then as now, rarely present a united front and the scene is forever a shifting one. However, none of the poets of the Thirties was right-wing in attitude, and none of them was apolitical.

Another factor that pushed the poets towards Communism was their general admiration for the young Soviet Union, led by Stalin. Here was a state, built on a political philosophy that they admired, that was succeeding while the West was failing. It has to be remembered that, although several of them had direct experience of Berlin under Hitler, they did not have the same familiarity with life under Stalin’s regime. Indeed, the full story of how Soviet Communism actually worked, with its show trials and mass starvations, was unknown to all but a very select few until many years later.

What the poets and intellectuals did know about was conditions in their own country. Economic depression inevitably leads to unemployment, which hits the poorest hardest. During the Thirties, this led to a massive North-South divide, because the industries that suffered most from changes in world conditions were predominantly based in the North. In 1934 the town of Jarrow in north-east England (from which the “Jarrow Crusade” was to march to London in 1936) had unemployment of 67.8%. At the same time, unemployment in High Wycombe (in the leafy Home Counties near London) was only 3.3%. The south could even be said to be prosperous not only in relative but in absolute terms, with new light industries springing up and large numbers of substantial semi-detached houses marching out along the high roads in “ribbon development”.

With very few exceptions, the poets and writers of the Thirties had no direct experience of economic deprivation. George Orwell (who described himself as “lower upper middle class”) had no need to make himself poor so that he could write “Down and Out in Paris and London” (1933). The poets were mainly split between public school (i.e. fee-paying) and Oxford and public school and Cambridge. That did not, however, prevent them from having social consciences.

On top of the political and economic conditions of the time, poetic inspiration also came from social changes that became apparent during the decade. Class distinctions were still well defined, but the poets came to regard the middle class as “doomed”, in that its moral certainties were open to question. These in turn had been based on strict applications of religious precepts, which the poets had been subjected to during their schooldays, so a rebellion against humbug, rigidity and sexual Puritanism was hardly to be wondered at.

Other developments included a revolution in terms of popular entertainment. Talking pictures made the cinema a highly popular destination, even for those with little money to spare on leisure activities. Given that most films were American in origin, the influence of American culture began to be felt in Britain.

Dancing was also extremely popular among the lower middle class. Together with the cinema, the “palais de danse” encouraged the habit of “going out”, especially among young adults. For those who preferred to stay at home, such as older people, the loudspeaker radio brought entertainment and world news into the home.

The keyword of the decade must therefore be “awareness”. People of all classes were becoming more aware of life beyond the narrow confines of their work and family. They could see and hear for themselves what was going on, be that in terms of political developments or the cultures of other nations.

For the poets, there was much against which to protest, although the audience for their writings was always a limited one. Poetry had little to do with the mass media, and the works of Auden, MacNeice and Co, warning of disaster ahead, would only have had readers in their hundreds. It was only in the forties that a reasonably large poetry-reading public emerged, by which time the disasters had already occurred. 

© John Welford

There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe: what does it mean?

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,

She had so many children she didn’t know what to do;

So she gave them some broth without any bread,

And she whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed.

This may just sound like a nonsense rhyme but it does have a real meaning behind it. Like many so-called nursery rhymes it was political in origin, dating from the reign of King George II of Great Britain (reigned 1727-60).

George was the second king of the Hanoverian dynasty (from which the current royal family are descended), coming to the throne in 1727, but he was not very popular with the British public. He had been born abroad and found the English language difficult. He also found the business of governing not to his liking and tended to leave the major decisions to his much more able wife, Queen Caroline. He therefore acquired the nickname of “the old woman”.

He also found that the leading minister of the day, Sir Robert Walpole, was able to control Parliament and that he had very little influence over what the members of parliament did. They were therefore the unruly children of the rhyme.

Many people in the country had been ruined by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1721, and King George was keen to involve Britain in foreign wars, notably the series of struggles that became known as the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-8). This meant that there was very little money in the public purse (“broth without any bread”). 

The king demanded that Parliament should remain in constant session and that its members should attend every day to vote the way he wanted them to, although, as mentioned above, it was Walpole who really controlled matters. A demand that MPs vote in a certain way is referred to as a “whip”, which derives from the “whipper-in” on the hunting field who kept the hounds in line. 

The “children” were therefore soundly whipped and sent to “bed”, namely the House of Commons.

The shoe in the rhyme could also be a reference to marital fertility, as symbolised by the throwing of shoes as the bride and groom left for their honeymoon. George and Caroline were certainly fertile, having eight surviving children.

The “old woman” rhyme was therefore a way of poking fun at the inadequacies of an unpopular king, with its meanings hidden in such a way that anyone reciting it could not be accused of directly insulting King George.

© John Welford