21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) Read online

  Most people remember the distinctive orange packet with the ’70s bubble lettering – it was foil, and you would tear it open to reveal the individually cellophane wrapped sweets inside – but Spangles actually date back to the early 1950s.

  Effectively just boiled sweets with a bit of a fizzy edge to them, the classic packet contained the following flavours: lemon, lime, pineapple, orange, strawberry, and blackcurrant. But there were a number of variations over the years, with entire packets featuring one flavour, such as tangerine, acid drop, or barley sugar.

  There was even an Old English range, which ran for some time, and included cough candy and liquorice among its selection.

  Mars stopped making Spangles in the early ’80s, but they brought them back to limited success in the mid-’90s. To be honest, I don’t think they were really trying all that hard, as the ’90s versions only came in two flavours – orange and blackcurrant – so it is no surprise that they vanished again shortly afterwards.

  Dodo Rating:

  Liquorice Pipes

  Famous pipe smokers of the world include Harold Wilson, Monsieur Hulot, Tony Benn. And seven-year-old Steve Stack, walking home from school puffing away on a liquorice pipe.

  A thick leathery wad of black liquorice in the shape of a pipe, with a sprinkling of red sugar at the end to suggest the soft glow of burning tobacco, this was actually a sweet that was sold to kids.

  To be honest, it was a bit too much liquorice to eat in one go, and it stuck in your teeth for ages afterwards, but the fact that hardly anyone smokes a real pipe any more would suggest that it didn’t really encourage the kids of yesteryear to take up the habit.

  Dodo Rating:

  Maverick Bar

  As this is my book I feel I can allow myself a couple of selfish entries. I doubt if many of you can remember the Maverick, but it was my favourite chocolate bar, and if I want to include it, I bloody well can.

  The Maverick was Nestlé’s answer to the Fuse bar from Cadbury’s. It had similar ingredients – raisins, biscuit, and toffee pieces – but was more rough and irregular, where the Fuse was a pretty standard cuboid. The Maverick trumped the Fuse in that it also had a layer of caramel.

  It was very nice, so it was. I used to have one every lunchtime.

  At least I did from 1997 to 2000, when they were suddenly, and without warning, discontinued. It seems that the combination of patchwork-coloured wrapper and remarkably bland TV ads failed to ignite the desires of our chocoholic nation. I was gutted.

  Still am, to be honest.

  But this story has a sort of happy ending. Seven years after the demise of the Maverick I was writing my first book, It Is Just You, Everything’s Not Shit, and was interviewing the nice people at www.aquarterof.com about sweets and snacks, when I happened to mention my sadness at the lack of Mavericks. A few months afterwards I received an email from Sol at A Quarter Of; one of their suppliers had found a decade-old box of Mavericks and she wondered if I wanted a couple. Her husband had tried one the night before and was still alive so she thought it was safe enough.

  I jumped at the chance and was stupidly excited when the jiffy bag turned up containing three bars. I got stuck straight in to one of them, sharing pieces with my kids. It was everything I remembered: crunchy, chewy, chocolatey, caramelly, and lovely.

  If a little bit stale.

  I lived to tell the tale and ate the remaining two bars shortly afterwards. I got a bit emotional when I finished off the last one, knowing that it was the last time I would ever taste my favourite chocolate bar.

  Nothing has since managed to take its place. Not even the KitKat Chunky. I shall learn to live with my loss.

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  ALL THE OTHER STUFF

  Where I have plonked everything else …

  Post Office Tower Restaurant

  The revolving restaurant at the top of the Post Office Tower (now known, of course, as the BT Tower) closed in 1980, partly out of security fears. The IRA had tried to blow it up in the early ’70s and it was seen as too high (in both senses) a risk location.

  The Top of the Tower restaurant, to give it its proper name, first opened in 1966 and was run by the people behind Butlins Holiday Camps. The main dining area revolved a full 360 degrees, offering an unprecedented view of London. It took 22 minutes to complete a full circuit, which makes it faster than the London Eye.

  The menu was proper posh for the time, all in French, and included such delights as La Darne de Saumon d’Ecosse, Le Rumpsteak, and Le Gammon Grillé. Minimum charge was £2.50 and ‘patrons having ordered their food and wine may sit and watch the ever-changing view until they choose to leave’.

  The original establishment has been closed for over 30 years, but there had recently been talk of the restaurant re-opening in time for the London Olympics in 2012, with more than one famous celebrity chef rumoured to be taking charge, but BT have now cancelled any such plans.

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  Telegrams

  During the 1930s, over 65 million telegrams were being delivered every year, in the UK alone. Hand delivered, that is.

  Before the days of email, faxes, and mobile phones, a telegram was often the quickest and most confidential way to send urgent information. The sender would write out the message using as few words as possible (they were charged per word), and hand it over to the telegraph officer (usually at the post office), who would send the message via a radio signal (often Morse code) to the office nearest its recipient. There it would be decoded, written out, and given to a delivery boy to hand over personally.

  The role of delivery boy was taken very seriously, and there were strict rules about uniform and behaviour. There was even an early morning exercise regime. It was a very responsible job and the older boys even got to ride motorcycles to speed up delivery.

  One of the most famous telegrams was sent in 1910, when the captain of a ship sailing to Canada spotted Dr Crippen among his passengers. He got a message to Scotland Yard, who sent a detective on a faster ship to arrest the murderer upon his arrival.

  My own favourite telegram was sent by American humorist Robert Benchley when he first visited Venice. It read: ‘Streets full of water. Please advise.’

  By the 1960s, the volume of telegram traffic had dropped to about 10 million a year, but the service limped on, making a loss, until 1981, when it was taken over by the newly privatised British Telecom and finally put out of its misery. Stop.

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  Carbon Copy Paper

  Another victim of our digital age. Although you can still come across it from time to time in some form, when a waiter takes your order at a restaurant, for example, the need for carbon copy paper has more or less vanished from our lives.

  Every office, and many homes, would have had a stash of the stuff. In case any of you are too young to remember, it was a thin sheet of paper with a coating of ink on one side. It was used, usually when typing, between two blank sheets to create an instant copy of your document. It could also be used for handwritten copies, which was helpful to the waiter taking orders.

  It was pretty weird stuff. You had to be careful when handling it to make sure your document didn’t end up with ‘blue thumb’, and its properties, quite literally, wore off with use, but it did the job nicely.

  Until, that is, computers came along. Nowadays it is just a matter of clicking SAVE to ensure that a copy of your letter, invoice, or manuscript of yet-to-be-published book [pauses to save document entitled 21st Century Dodos] is stored forever. Unless your computer crashes, or your hard drive fails, or you encounter the blue screen of death, of course. Carbon copies did have the advantage of being physical things and immune to computer bugs.

  Actually, computers are where carbon copy paper lives on, albeit in a virtual sense. Every time you cc someone in on an email, you are, whether you know it or not, creating an electronic carbon copy.

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  Concorde

  I live near Heathrow airport an
d twice a day, every day, my house would shake as if there were a small earthquake underfoot, and a noise similar to the one Donkey Kong makes when bashing down the girders (only a lot louder) would drown out all other sound.

  If any other plane were responsible for such disturbance, then I’d have written to my MP, complained to the highest authority, and refused to pay my taxes until they fitted a muffler but, somehow, the fact that it was Concorde made it OK – exciting, even. Catching a glimpse of that ivory bird as it flew overhead was a highlight of the day.

  It was a peculiar beast in almost every respect. The only commercial plane to fly faster than the speed of sound, it was conceived in the late 1950s when several countries were investigating supersonic transport, including Britain and France. With considerable backing from their respective governments, BAC and Aerospatiale joined forces to work on Concorde, so named to reflect the friendly arrangement that had brought it about.

  By the time test flights were taking place in the late 1960s, most of the other countries had dropped out of development, and many had placed orders for Concorde themselves. But even though over 100 orders were taken, a great many were cancelled because of concerns over cost and, in the end, only 20 were manufactured, of which 14 made it into commercial service.

  Concorde had looks and it had speed. Its peculiar wing and nose design made it unlike any other aeroplane in the skies, instantly recognisable. It could fly at more than twice the speed of sound (Mach 2.04, 2,173 kph or 1,350 mph) and that meant that it cut hours off long-distance flights. It still holds the record for the fastest transatlantic airliner flight of 2 hours, 52 minutes, and 59 seconds, at an average speed of 1,920.07 kph (1,193.08 mph), which it achieved on 7 February 1996 between JFK and Heathrow airports.

  It cost a pretty penny to fly on, though; at least it did once British Airways paid off the government and assumed full ownership in 1983. As a result, passengers tended to be top businessmen (who were charging it on expenses), Hollywood actors, or rock stars.

  That wasn’t the only drawback. It was, as I mentioned at the beginning, bloody noisy, and several countries refused to allow it to pass through their airspace. By the time of its retirement it was only running a select number of routes.

  Quite why the decision was taken to ground the aircraft in 2003 is unclear. British Airways and Air France claimed it was uneconomical to continue flying following a decline in passengers after the (only ever) Concorde crash in 2000, and the 11th September attacks in 2001, but there are suggestions that it was simply more profitable to fly the Concorde routes with traditional subsonic planes.

  Whatever the reason, in October 2003 the fleet of Concordes took to the air for a final time. A series of flights around the UK enabled the general public to say farewell to this historic craft. People turned out in their thousands.

  There was a last-minute attempt to save the fleet, when Sir Richard Branson offered to buy the planes from BA to rebrand as Virgin. The offer was declined, presumably in part because the two companies loathe each other.

  Some of the remaining craft are now on display in museums around the world, and there is a rumour that a private consortium is attempting to make one of the planes airworthy again, with plans to fly it over London for the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games.

  Now that would be amazing.

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  Passing Back to the Goalie

  It used to be a staple part of any football match. With a score 1–0 up, with 15 minutes to play, the defender would pass back to his keeper, who would pick up it and then spend, oh a good two or three minutes standing around until the referee reminded him of the point of the bloody game, and he would throw it back out to that same defender who would dribble it a few yards before hoofing it all the way back again.

  It was dull as anything to watch.

  So dull, in fact, that in 1992 FIFA brought in a law banning the keeper from handling the ball following a back pass. This was as a direct result of 1.4 billion people falling asleep during the 1990 World Cup Final between Argentina and West Germany. To this day, half of the viewing audience have no idea who won the match.

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  Football Rattles

  It was the iconic image of a football fan – flat cap, knitted striped scarf, and big wooden rattle.

  Nowadays, the flat cap has been replaced by a dodgy gelled hairdo, the club scarf is a more elaborate printed affair emblazoned with a logo, but the rattle is rarely to be seen at all.

  It did make an unholy racket and I am sure most fans don’t miss it, but it does seem odd that something so fundamentally linked to the history of the game simply doesn’t appear any more. We can probably blame the hooligans for that; any object that could be used as a weapon is banned from the terraces.

  Not that we have terraces any more, either.

  The wooden football rattle was actually a modified version of a classic percussion instrument known as a ratchet or noisemaker, and its dulcet tones can be heard in Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and in other compositions. It is a popular instrument in traditional Jewish music, and was also once used by policemen instead of a whistle.

  But it is best known in this country as a noisy wooden contraption used to cheer on your team during the big match, sort of a clockwork precursor to the klaxon.

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  Typewriters

  Literally as I sat down to type this entry for the book (on my trusty laptop), word came through the internet (via Twitter, my main source of up-to-the-minute news these days) that the last typewriter factory on the planet was closing its doors.

  Godrej & Boyce shut their plant in India in April 2011 because, quite simply, they aren’t getting many orders any more. This is, perhaps, not all that much of a surprise. In fact, it may have been more of a surprise that someone somewhere was still making them at all.

  But they were. And now they have stopped.

  The origins of the typewriter go back to the early 1700s, when Englishman Henry Mill patented a mechanical writing device, and many similar inventions were created over the proceeding 150 years or so until the Rev. Rasmus Malling-Hansen, a Danish chap, brought the Hansen Writing Ball to market, the first commercially produced typewriter.

  Hansen’s was probably the first of these contraptions to write faster than a person could with a pen, and so became very successful, with machines still in use in the early 20th century. However, no one person ‘invented’ the modern typewriter; it came about through trial and error, with many boffins beavering away at their own variations until manufacturers settled upon a standard version by the 1910s.

  At the height of their popularity – they were pretty much essential for businesses across the globe – they were selling in their hundreds of millions every year. Smith-Corona sold 12 million machines in the last quarter of 1953 alone. But by the 21st century, global sales had fallen to less than half a million a year.

  Despite modern technology and the swanky world of word processing, many writers still insist on typing their work on an old-fashioned typewriter. Bestselling novelists such as John Irving and Paul Auster are famous for their reliance on clunky old keyboards. Auster even wrote a whole book about his typewriter called, unsurprisingly enough, The Story of my Typewriter.

  Despite their enormous influence on the 20th century, the typewriter is no more. There are plenty in circulation, however, and, as they are pretty chunky bits of machinery, the likelihood is that they will hang around for some time to come.

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  Penfriends

  Do you remember penfriends?

  Before the days of emails, instant messaging, and Twitter, people used to write to each other. Some of these were writing to complete strangers.

  There were many magazines, most notably Look and Learn, that featured penfriend columns – sort of lonely hearts ads, but without the love interest – in which people, usually kids, would write a few words about themselves and hope to receive letters from other r
eaders. If you were particularly taken by an ad, you would send an introductory letter to the magazine itself and they would pass it on. If you received a reply, then the chances are you would start a correspondence.

  Many schools also ran penfriend clubs, often organised by international organisations, which hooked up kids from countries all over the globe.

  Of course, most of these epistolary relationships lasted no more than one or two letters, but some went on to become lifelong friendships, or even blossomed into romances that years later led to marriage. How sweet.

  Penfriends and penfriend clubs still exist, but they have been somewhat overtaken by modern technology, most of us being happy to fire off an occasional email or to start relationships online.

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  Tennent’s Lager Can Girls

  You know how it is, you are sharing a six pack of beer with a bunch of mates and you lose track of which can belongs to whom, and then you start arguing. Strong words are exchanged, punches are thrown, and before you know it, you are all down the A&E with various bits of a glass coffee table sticking out of your heads.

  Some time back in the 1950s, breweries had the bright idea of putting a different picture on each can in a six pack so that drinkers could identify their bevvies by the illustration on the front. But what pictures to go for? How about some attractive ladies? Splendid idea. If you started the evening with Debbie, then you stuck with Debbie all night. Not only did the concept reduce the number of punch-ups, it promoted monogamy.

  Of course, some people complained that such images were sexist, but that didn’t stop hundreds of women launching their modelling careers on the sides of cans. Nor did it stop millions of men from drinking from them.

  Although many companies employed these tactics, the most famous ladies were the Tennent’s lager lovelies, all of whom were photographed by Mel Gillies. The last set of lager lovelies featured on cans in 1989.

  When I mentioned on Twitter that I was writing this entry, I received an instant response from @lucebrett who can remember playing with the empty cans that her father and his friends had finished with, her ‘low-rent Barbies’ as she called them. I had no idea they had been put to such uses.