Hampshire – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Thomas De Quincey on the sewers as a conduit for small boys from Winchester College to the downtown pubs

With his guide to the Ziph language, and with the death of a Savoyard organ-grinder’s white mouse, of which he was probably not the author in any sense.

The Mousie's Funeral, from <i>The Sunbeam</i> in 1882.

London organ-grinding tweets for October 2017

Lukewarm barrel organ-ish ephemera from Hackney, London and thereabouts.

A bull attacks the first public train service in Russia, causing the ceremonial organ-grinder to teeter dangerously.

London organ-grinder tweets for September 2017

Barrel/street organ stuff.

Napoleon as Harlequin, tumbler, fraudster, monkey (?): Come, come, honest gents, have you ever seen a comedy like that!

Organ-grinding tweets for August 2017

The latest barrel organ news from Hackney, London.

Organ grinders and monkey and marmot migration

Any proto-ecologists don’t seem to have cared very much.

The recto of the Anglicised business card.

Don’t piss on the wall

Gents, Level C, Royal Hants County Hospital, Winchester.

In which the Spanish Inquisition strikes down a translation and saves an English sailor from a fiery fate

Werner Thomas (* 1931) is an accordionist from Switzerland credited with composing a tune popularly known as the “Chicken Dance” or the “Birdie Song” while working as a restaurant musician in Davos during the early 1960s The Chairmans, however, describe him as a composer, and say that his masterwork was actually finished by 1957 and…

The invisible ethnicity of Inspector Richard Tanner of the Met

The British-Jewish detective who hung the German murderer of a London banker. With photos of his tombstone in Winchester’s West Hill cemetery.

Richard Tanner, late Inspector in the Metropolitan Detective Police Force. Born October 30th 1831, died October 19th 1873. [Also wife and mother-in-law.]

Bread made of Catalan woman

Someone once told the English that “tapas bar” was Spanish for “exotic chav drinking hole”. El Sabio in Winchester has taken Alfonso, our royal name, in vain and concocted a quasi-Spanish menu that proves nothing more than that they are perfectly suited to running an English-style tapas bar. Pan de Catalana (which they believe is…