ALICE GOES TO PIECES

I love jigsaw puzzles and my friends Sheila and Roger recently gave me this delightful miniature Wentworth wooden puzzle featuring Alice in Wonderland. There are just 40 pieces, so its absolutely perfect for an afternoon tea-break especially since, as with all Wentworth puzzles, it has specially-cut pieces shaped like knives, forks and spoons, teapots, cups and saucers,

“Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. 
"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more." 
"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."

The picture shows a cavalcade of characters from Lewis Carroll's book together with a selection of memorable quotes...

What particularly intrigued me was the label in the Hatter's topper: not the usual Tenniel-dictated price-tag, 'In this Style 10/6', but – as far as I know – the uniquely-worded message: 'FOR SALE, ENQUIRE WITHIN'!

"IN THIS STYLE..."

CAPTION COMPETITION
THE RESULTS!

The photo I asked you to caption was of a somewhat demented-looking Hatter bearing down on an overdressed Disneyland visitor (hat, gloves and pearls) back in 'sixties...



Your suggested captions included references to the millinery high- (0r low-) lights of guests at the recent Royal Wedding; what I take to be allusions to Irish leprechauns (prompted, I guess, by the Hatter's "wearing of the green") combined with the ubiquitous reference to underwear; and the halluciagenic effects of magic mushrooms.

One or two other entries suggest that their authors were themselves under the influnece of substances that probably oughtn't to be investigated more closely!

This competition was graciously adjudicated – from an anonymous list of entries – by Guest Judge, GILL, and here are the results, beginning with the...

RUNNERS UP

Boll Weavil

EDITOR'S PICK "The thing I love about Internet dating is you never know who you're going to meet. I just tapped in 'smartly dressed man' and I'm SO excited to see who turns up."

"Would you be ready for the underpants shots now. I have my foinest Shamrock's on for the lady so I do."


David Weeks

A rubber-head and a mannequin, in a fantasy setting. So where has reality gone?


Good Dog

“Back and to the left... Back and to the left... Back and to the left...”

“Will somebody please explain to this frightful little man that however sure he thinks he is, I’m not his, my name isn’t Heather, and I do not feel at all lucky!”

“And I thought that Sarah Palin and her Tea Party was just plain nuts.”


Nicholas

"You think that's a hat? THIS IS A HAT, LADY!"


Roger

Prince Andrew goes to his daughters' milliner.


SharonM

Woman to Hatter: "I know a princess who would just love your hat for the next royal wedding!"


Sheila

She (proudly): I've got a hat!
He (in an Australian accent): That's not a hat - now this is a hat!


Suzanne

HIGHLY COMMENDED "Alice? Oh! My! God! How many mushrooms did they give you?"

"Alice, you have to kick that mushroom habit"

"Can I be the porpoise to your whiting?"


Snow White Sanctum

Hatter to Woman: "Hey lovely, since your husband's busy birdwatching, how'd you like to come join me for some tea?"


TokyoMagic

"Hey, Mr. Hatter... coffee, tea or ME???"



And now – roll on drums, toot on trumpets – the FINALISTS!!

THIRD PLACE

Boll Weavil

Woman: "These tabs ARE good stuff. Mine are kicking in already..."

SECOND PLACE

Andy J Latham

Take the damn picture George, I do NOT wish to be hatted again!!

FIRST PLACE

Suzanne

"Well hellooo! Wanna hunt some snark?

CONGRATULATIONS

to Suzanne and the other finalists and thanks to Judge Gill and to everyone who threw their hats into the ring!

The photo was originally posted on the blog of the very excellent Mr Kevin Kidney

IF YOU WANT TO GET AHEAD...

Speaking about hatters...

David and I went to a fabulous exhibition recently at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones is a perfect exhibition: packed with fascinating stuff, but not so big and sprawly that you get totally exhausted by walking and looking.

The premise is simple and direct - an exploration of what people have worn on their heads over the years around the world and how those hats - over 300 of them, ranging across many centuries - have inspired modern hatters such as Jean Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, Christian Dior, John Galliano and, of course, Stephen Jones.

And in telling that story, the exhibition inevitably touches on why people wear hats.

"A hat," says Jones, "makes clothing identifiable, dramatic - and, most importantly, Fashion.... It's the cherry on the cake, the dot on the 'i', the exclamation mark, the fashion ficus. Everyone from showgirls to dictators knows that by wearing a hat they will be the centre of attention."


The co-mingling of helmets, fezzes, turbans, Egyptian Anubis-head masks, Doge's caps and plastic Cinderella tiaras for little Disney princesses, alongside all manner of beautiful and bizarre headgear from the roaring twenties via the swinging sixties to the latest and zaniest creations of Mr Jones and Co is fascinating, informative and fun.

The use of materials is only limited by the confines of the milliner's imagination and ingenuity and the hats on show are made of leather, fur, feathers and flowers, baubles, bangles and beads - not to mention twigs, twisted wire, paper, lollipop sticks, shoes (left, courtesy of Dali) and sheets of heat-twisted plastic that end up looking like the wearer has been hit on the back of the head by a bucket of water...


Here's Stephen Jones talking about his career...

There are many surprises: obviously from the extraordinary scope of 'ideas' (a hat designed to look like a jellyfish with trailing tentacles, a little cap based on the London underground sign); but also from opportunity to scrutinize a number of hats that once adorned famous heads - from Queen Victoria's Bonnet and Prince Albert's topper to hats designed by Cecil Beaton for Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn (right) in the stage and film versions of My Fair Lady, a Marlene Dietrich beret and an amazingly exotic concoction worn by Carmen Miranda.

The exhibition also allows the visitor to take a peek into the Aladdin's cave that is the milliner's studio and workshop: a place littered with pins and pencils; tracing paper and cardboard; pots of glue; scissors and shears; blocks for shaping; weird, spiky contraptions for measuring heads and making patterns; sketches; swatches of material; bales of fabric; cascades of ribbons and cornucopias of bells and buttons and bows.

From one such fantastical laboratory, here's a glimpse into the making of a typical (and suitably patriotic) Stephen Jones hat...

So hats off to Mr Jones and the V&A for a diverting exhibition that remains on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 until 31 May; open daily 10.00–17.30, Fridays 21.30.

The exhibition is accompanied by an elegant adornment for every hat-wearer's coffee-table: Hats: An Anthology is a superbly illustrated book offering an intriguing insight into the world of millinery. Drawing on the V&A’s extensive collection of hats, Stephen Jones’s own archive as well as iconic headgear from around the world, the book's various chapters examine the inspiration behind the creation of hats, the history of their construction, the lure of the hat shop and, finally (and I quote), 'the etiquette and occasion of hat wearing for the client'.

So, if you really want to get ahead...

CEREALISATIONS

Sticking with the Carrollian theme of the last couple of days, here's an alternative Mad Tea - or, rather, Breakfast - Party...

Incidentally, have you ever wondered where Messrs Snap, Crackle and Pop came from? Well, it all started in 1933 when Kellogg's were promoting Rice Krispies with a radio commercial that announced:

Listen to the fairy song of health, the merry chorus sung by Kellogg's Rice Krispies as they merrily snap, crackle, and pop in a bowl of milk. If you've never heard food talking, now is your chance.

At this point, the American illustrator Vernon Grant enters the story. Grant was well known for creating pictures featuring nursery rhyme characters, gnomes and fairy folk and, inspired by that radio commercial, drew three elves whom he named 'Snap', 'Crackle' and 'Pop'.

Vernon Grant showed his illustrations to Kellogg's who instantly bought the characters and commissioned Grant to create a long-running series of adverts and premiums (give-aways) featuring these three personifications of Rice Krispies' krispiness!

Click on images to enlarge

Curiously - since we've recently been talking about hats and hatters - each of the Rice Krispies kids sports a highly individual type of headgear.

According to Kellogg's mythology, SNAP is the eldest and leader of the group. He is a baker, wears a chef's hat and solves the problems his two brothers create...

CRACKLE is the good-hearted, fun middle child who gets stuck keeping order between his brothers’ personalities and wears a red-and-white-striped stocking cap...

POP is the mischievous, clumsy younger child who plays jokes, doesn’t take things seriously and wears a band leader's hat.

There was also a fourth (but short-lived) elf named POW who represented the explosive nutritional value of Rice Krispies! Ah, well, three's company, four's a crowd...

Snap, Crackle and Pop have got through various metamorphoses with the passing years, taking on three-dimensional puppet form in the 'forties....

Click on images to enlarge

And in the 'fifties having their own pop (or snap-crackle-and-pop) band...

The explanation for the 'sound' of Rice Krispies is that, as they are toasted, the cooked and dried rice 'berries' puff up to many times their normal size. Since the weight of the rice berry and its material mass remains nearly the same, the rice material is stretched to formthe very thin walls of the Rice Krispies structure. When subjected to a change in heat (such as cold milk being poured onto them), a severe 'stress' is set up and these thin wall fractures - creating the uneven absorption of milk by the cereal bubbles and a resulting SNAP! CRACKLE! POP!

Amazingly, Snap, Crackle and Pop are still busily working for Kellogg's today, and not just in the USA and Britain, but in various other parts of the world, where they are known by other names: in Sweden, for example, they are Piff! Paff! Puff!; in Finland, Poks! Riks! Raks!; in Germany, Knisper! Knasper! Knusper! and in Mexico, Pim! Pum! Pam!

Whether the Rice Krispies in those countries actually make those sounds is, I'd suggest, open to debate!

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

Of course, if you don't like tea...


That's if you'd drink anything offered to you by this party host!

Anyway, today, I'd like to introduce you to a more benign - but no less strange - account of that famous mad tea party from Jonathan Millers' 1966 TV film, Alice in Wonderland...


This avant-garde production was shot in crisp monotone of a nineteenth-century Daguerreotype and was informed by the satirical sensibility of Miller's co-written cult 'sixties revue, Beyond the Fringe. Indeed, the film featured two of Miller's BTF co-stars, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett along with such starry names as Peter Sellers, Michael Redgrave, Finlay Currie, Alison Leggatt and John Gielgud playing Lewis Carroll's Wonderlanders without the aid of fur and whiskers as if they were merely Alice's eccentric Victorian relations.

I still vividly remember the controversy that raged in the press about the production ("Alice strictly for grown-ups...") and the huge excitement that I felt at seeing something that was so radically revisionist.

Wilfred Brambell (the father in Steptoe and Son) was a fiercely intimidating White Rabbit...


Leo McKern (later the eponymous Rumpole of the Bailey) was a boozy Duchess-cum-Nanny...


...and Gielgud as the Mock Turtle, accompanied by an unlikely Gryphon in the person of media pundit, Malcolm Muggeridge, danced a version of 'The Lobster Quadrille' that provided one of the decade's oddest and yet most hauntingly poignant television moments...


Anyway, back to that mad tea-party: here Alice (played by the hitherto unknown Anne-Marie Mallik) spends a bemusing afternoon in the company of the Hatter (Peter Cook), the March Hare (Michael Gough) and the Dormouse (Wilfred Lawson). The music - as is fitting for such a totally 'sixties offering - was by Ravi Shankar...

If you've never seen this extraordinary interpretation of Alice, it's currently available on a DVD issued by the British Film Institute as is Jonathan Miller's other brilliantly directed TV play, Whistle and I'll Come to You, based on the ghost story by M R James and featuring an unforgettable performance by Michael Hordern: two period masterpieces that shouldn't be missed...

MAD ABOUT TEA

I'm really fond of a nice cuppa and on a recent visit to Oxford - sometime home of Lewis Carroll and birthplace of 'Alice' - I picked up a rather particular tea-bag...


An odd souvenir, I know, but that's me...

Now, some of you may recall my boring you about this before but there's actually no such character as the MAD HATTER.

Yes, yes, I agree that's what people call him - and the film magazines have recently been carrying photos of Johnny Depp (right) who will be playing the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's forthcoming film of the book - but Lewis Carroll never calls him the Mad Hatter - not once!

The author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland only ever speaks about him as "the Hatter".

What's more, Carroll never refers to that curious afternoon's entertainment that the Hatter presides over as 'The Mad Hatter's Tea-Party'.

Don't believe me? Check out Chapter Seven and you'll find it's entitled 'A Mad Tea-Party' - no Hatter's.

You'll also find that it was held in the garden of the March Hare's house, so it really, absolutely wasn't the Hatter's tea-party!


Where then does the Hatter's damaging reputation for madness come from? Well, it seems that it's all down to the word of a CAT... What's more, a Cheshire Cat...

'In that direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, 'lives a Hatter: and in that direction,' waving the other paw, 'lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.'


'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you ca'n't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'

'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.

'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'

So, there you are: the only reason we have for calling the Hatter 'Mad' is because we're told he's mad --- and by a character, please note, who not only believes that he's mad himself but that everyone else is mad as well.

There is, of course, a saying (coined long before Lewis Carroll's time): 'As mad as a hatter', the origin of which is somewhat vague...

The felt used in hat-making was 'cured' with the use of mercury and prolonged inhalation of the fumes frequently led to mercury poisoning, resulting in such neurological damage as confused speech and distorted vision. It was a regrettable side-effect of the millinery trade and often brought about an early death.

However, the symptoms of mercury poisoning are 'excessive timidity, diffidence, increasing shyness, loss of self-confidence, anxiety, and a desire to remain unobserved and unobtrusive,' which doesn't sound even remotely like the bombastic bully encountered by Alice.

There is a further theory that Lewis Carroll based the Hatter on Theophilus Carter, a former servitor at Lewis Carroll's college, Christ Church, who invented an alarm clock bed, exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, that tipped out the sleeper at waking-up time!

That certainly sounds pretty mad but his alleged reputation for being referred to in Oxford as 'The Mad Hatter' derives from the fact that he later owned a furniture shop and is said to have been in the habit of standing in the door of his shop wearing a top hat.

Not the maddest behaviour you've ever come across, I'll bet. Nevertheless, legend has it that the illustrator of Alice's Adventures, Sir John Tenniel (right), travelled to Oxford especially to sketch him for his pictures of the Hatter.

This, however, seems amazingly unlikely since when Lewis Carroll's alter-ego - mathematics don Charles Dodgson - suggested a child who might serve as an artist's model for Alice, Tenniel retorted that he no more needed a model to draw a child that Mr Dodgson needed a set of mathematical tables to work out his sums!

So, is it really feasible that Tenniel would have bothered to take the train from London to Oxford simply in order to sketch the local furniture-shop-man? I think not!

Finally, an observation on that price tag of 10/6 (ten-shillings-and-six-pence in British pre-decimal currency) that Carroll never mentioned but which Tenniel added to the Hatter's topper and which virtually all subsequent illustrators (and most filmmakers) have felt obliged to copy...


This sum - half-a guinea - suggests that it was quite an expensive titfer and it has been calculated that if one were able to purchase it today it would cost £72 or $105!

Anyway, Hatters are popping up all over the place just now, blog-friend, Good Dog sent me this cover art by Dustin Nguyen for the DC comic, Batman Detective Comics issue #841, showing the Masked Crusader attending a wacky Wonderland tea-party where the Hatter (inspired by an illustration by Arthur Rackham) sports a topper that, at only 8/11, is a tad cheaper than Tenniel's headgear!

Click image to enlarge

For more information on those tea-bags that got me started on all this, visit The Mad Hatter Tea Company.