1942: “Now a ban on Jews buying flowers has come out,” an exasperated Victor Klemperer wrote on 16 March. “Not a day without a new decree against Jews.”
Source: Victor Klemperer, To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942–1945, ed. Martin Chalmers (1999), p. 28
1941: For Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Dresden, life grew steadily more difficult. “A new calamity:” he wrote in his diary on 10 August, “Ban on smoking for Jews.”
Source: Victor Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1933–41, ed. Martin Chalmers (1998), p. 407
1940: In Britain’s hour of need, “heroes in jerseys and sweaters and old rubber boots” stepped forward to man an armada of “fishing boats, steamships, barges and pleasure steamers” that crossed the Channel, braving shellfire and Stuka attacks, to pluck the British Expeditionary Force off the beaches of Dunkirk. That’s the way British propaganda portrayed it, but it wasn’t all like that. The Royal Navy had to requisition small craft in Devon whose owners declined to volunteer and the fishing fleet of Rye in Sussex collectively refused to go.
Source: Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (1991), pp. 96–8
1939: In the 1880s, David McConnell was a salesman in New York State, trudging from door to door, selling books. McConnell’s sales gimmick was a giveaway bottle of perfume. He soon found that his customers preferred his scent to his Shakespeare, so in 1886 he turned his back on literature and set up the California Perfume Company. In 1939, the company was renamed Avon, after the river that runs through Shakespeare’s hometown.
Source: Reader’s Digest Book of Facts (1985), p. 128
1938: The British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington announced that he had calculated the precise number of protons in the universe:
15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,
181,555,468,044,717,914,527,116,709,
366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296.
Source: Sir Arthur Eddington, The Philosophy of Physical Science (1939), p. 170
1937: One advantage of having a poet as a father – Paul and Candida Betjeman grew up listening to customized nursery rhymes:
Ba Ba centipede,
Have you any jelly,
No sir, no sir, it’s all gone smelly.
Source: John Betjeman, Letters, I: 1926 to 1951, ed. Candida Lycett Green (1994), p. 368
1936: The airship Hindenburg was the largest flying machine ever built; measuring 245 metres from stem to stern, it was only 24 metres shorter than the ocean liner Titanic.
Source: Rick Archbold, Hindenburg: An Illustrated History (1994), p. 144
1934: Alistair Cooke, who had recently begun work as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, married Ruth Emerson. The bridegroom was presumably on time for the ceremony; the bride, as tends to happen, was perhaps a little late; the best man failed to turn up at all. After waiting for an hour, Cooke got one of the guests to stand in. Who was the unreliable best man? Charlie Chaplin.
Source: Nick Clarke, Alistair Cooke: The Biography (2002), p. 114
1933: The abbreviation V.I.P. first appeared in Compton Mackenzie’s novel Water on the Brain, where it stood for “Very Important Personage”.
Source: Compton Mackenzie, Water on the Brain (1933), p. 111
1932: Large mobs of emus, migrating from the interior of Western Australia to the coast, pecked and trampled crops in the state’s wheat belt, especially around the town of Campion. The farmers, many of them First World War veterans, clamoured for the authorities to deploy machine guns against the marauders. A contingent of soldiers armed with Lewis guns was sent into battle, but the birds were too speedy and too wily, scattering into small groups and dashing for cover as soon as the guns opened up. “Major Meredith and his merry men” claimed a thousand kills, but the inglorious campaign failed to impress anyone, and was scathingly referred to as the “Emu War”.
Source: Journal of Australian Studies, 2006
1931: As Arnold Bennett lay dying from typhoid in his flat near Marylebone Road, the local council gave permission for straw to be spread in the busy street to muffle the noise of traffic, possibly the last time this was allowed in central London. Bennett died at nine in the evening of 27 March. “It was a night of rain. The straw became sodden and slippery. Just after midnight a milk dray skidded and overturned, sending its load of churns crashing along the pavement below the flat in a thunderous din.”
Source: Reginald Pound, Arnold Bennett: A Biography (1971), p. 367
1930: Grown-ups fretted over grown-up issues like political instability and job insecurity, but for 13-year-old Roald Dahl, 1930 marked the start of the “great golden years of the chocolate revolution”. The limited chocolate choice of the 1920s was suddenly transformed; “the entire world of chocolate was turned upside-down in the space of seven glorious years, between 1930 and 1937”.
The Mars bar first appeared in 1932; Chocolate Crisp was launched in 1935 and renamed Kit Kat two years later; Aero also went on sale in 1935; Quality Street made its debut in 1936; and Maltesers, Rolo and Smarties were introduced in 1937.
Source: Felicity and Roald Dahl, Roald Dahl’s Cookbook (1991), pp. 150–5
1928: Picture palaces lured film-goers with their aura of glamour. According to Denis Norden, at the Empire Leicester Square in London, ushers lined up before opening time, lit Havana cigars and puffed smoke around the foyer.
Source: Enter the Dream-House: Memories of Cinemas in South London from the Twenties to the Sixties, ed. Margaret O’Brien and Allen Eyles (1993), p. 39