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A Man Of Two Eras. 20th Century Victorians

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
2,516
Neither truly fortean nor even a question, just a random ramble on an odd realisation.

The other day i started watching the first Johhny Weismuller Tarzan movie. I have no idea how i knew his name or attached it to his face but i instantly identified Jane's father as the British actor C Aubrey Smith. He was a mainstay of 30s and 40s Hollywood movies, typically playing the colonel type. According to Wikipedia he was also the partriarch of the British acting enclave in Hollywood at the time - the David Nivens and Ronald Colemans et al.

And something which feels odd and improbable dawned on me. The movie was made in 1932 and Smith looked to be about 70. Therefore he must have been a fully fledged, bona fide, grown up, top hat and tails, horse drawn carriages and jack the ripper "Victorian". It turns out in fact he was 38 by the time old Queen Vic died. More than that, the mid 20th century movie star had been a famous 19th Century professional cricketer.

Now the maths is clearly very simple. And pretty much anyone of note in the early 20th Century will have been born or even reached adulthood in the 19th. But HG Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle are fixed in the mind as being of the earlier age. Churchill was "victorian" too but in his youth, not his maturity. But "Hollywood star" and "victorian gentleman" are such incompatible categorizations it feels utterly impossible that they could overlap at all.

I don't think i have a point, except to wonder if I'm odd in finding it quite so odd.

Anyhow here's 1940s Hollywood star C Aubrey Smith, contemporary of Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis and Errol Flynn
1596731524291.png


And here's 19th Century professional cricketer C Aubrey Smith, contemporary of Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes and William Gladstone.

1596731661957.png
 
Yes, must have been a huge contrast from Smith's teenage years in a smoggy London, to the bright sunlight and palm trees of 1940's Hollywood.

I also wonder this, when did the Modern era of History truly begin?

Few things have clear borders....there are overlaps, grey areas etc.

But I think the world we live in was very much getting into gear by the last few years of the Victorian era, and London had grown from about 1.3 million people to recognisable 7 million people during her reign.

If pushed, I would think that the 1880's were where one era noticeably fizzled out and another started taking over.
To be fully in a different era in terms of walking around London and living life, and of another older mindset, it would be as far back as the 1830's.
From the Telegram onwards people could beginning to think in terms of international communication which did not takes days....the possibilities of the world opened up.

A number of things we associate with the modern world were available for commercial use/purchase whilst Victoria was on the throne:

1840 Penny Black postage stamp
1844 First Telegram
1863 First London Underground services (steam)
1864 First Association Football game played under codified rules (Battersea Park)
1874 Typewriters for sale
1878 Electric street lights introduced to London
1886 Cars produced for sale
1888 First Kodak cameras sold
1888 First known film shot in the UK
1890 First London Underground services (electric)
1890's Telephones viable and available for purchase.

[1894 Radio demonstrated, though first commercial station was 1920.]
 
All but the first three of the above list would have happened in Smith's lifetime.

But it leads to another observation. The 20th and 19th century feel like different worlds. But the 21st and 20th do not.

Someone of his era and age would have known a world without planes and automobiles. But 80, 90, 100 years on Planes , Trains and Automobiles have not been superseded by anything other than faster models. Digital streaming and internet vlogging may be technologically very different but at the point of delivery aren't really distinct from television.

Even the sense of history and time is muted by access to moving pictures. The First World War still feels very much like part of our world despite ending over a century ago.

Maybe that's at the heart of it. Film. It feels like true history is the stuff that happened before we could capture it's moving image.
 
It was a time of immense technological progress all right - only 66 years after the first powered flight, we'd stuck a geezer on the Moon.
 
Neither truly fortean nor even a question, just a random ramble on an odd realisation.

The other day i started watching the first Johhny Weismuller Tarzan movie. I have no idea how i knew his name or attached it to his face but i instantly identified Jane's father as the British actor C Aubrey Smith. He was a mainstay of 30s and 40s Hollywood movies, typically playing the colonel type. According to Wikipedia he was also the partriarch of the British acting enclave in Hollywood at the time - the David Nivens and Ronald Colemans et al.

And something which feels odd and improbable dawned on me. The movie was made in 1932 and Smith looked to be about 70. Therefore he must have been a fully fledged, bona fide, grown up, top hat and tails, horse drawn carriages and jack the ripper "Victorian". It turns out in fact he was 38 by the time old Queen Vic died. More than that, the mid 20th century movie star had been a famous 19th Century professional cricketer.

Now the maths is clearly very simple. And pretty much anyone of note in the early 20th Century will have been born or even reached adulthood in the 19th. But HG Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle are fixed in the mind as being of the earlier age. Churchill was "victorian" too but in his youth, not his maturity. But "Hollywood star" and "victorian gentleman" are such incompatible categorizations it feels utterly impossible that they could overlap at all.

I don't think i have a point, except to wonder if I'm odd in finding it quite so odd.

Anyhow here's 1940s Hollywood star C Aubrey Smith, contemporary of Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis and Errol Flynn
View attachment 28685

And here's 19th Century professional cricketer C Aubrey Smith, contemporary of Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes and William Gladstone.

View attachment 28686
And in a Fortean synchronicity C Aubrey Smith was a winning answer on TV quiz show Pointless today!
 
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It feels like true history is the stuff that happened before we could capture it's moving image.

Conspicuously missing from your timeline of technologies is any mention of sound-recording. It may be my own immersion in ancient sounds, from my earliest years has made the Victorians seem a lot less remote to me. That plus the fact that I grew up knowing a lot of old folk born during Victoria's reign. My own maternal grandmother was one but I was also introduced to at least three centenarians, who would have been born around 1860 - one my great grandmother! There isn't anything sensible a kid will ask of these brief encounters with ancients, really, though much longer contact with my grandmother gave me some awareness of her Victorian roots. A beard of dribbled ice-cream on our chins would have her comparing us to Ally Sloper - a reference I was not to understand until decades later! People born late in Victorian times were just approaching retirement-age, when I was a sprog!

Sound recording makes experience of that period very immediate, though it can underline cultural changes. As a technology born in Victorian times, the curtain was raised not on its contemporaries - a few home recorded cylinders preserve the voices of kids - but on the culture that was already formed at that point. Those recording and those listening had their tastes and habits formed in the mid-19th Century. The Victorian strand of culture faded gradually, surviving the winnowing of the First War but reduced to a hoarse whisper by the Second.

Some extreme archaeophony here, including the voice of Molkte, who was born in 1800!*

*Traditionally, this is taken to be the last year of the Eighteenth Century!

It is probably the evolving sounds of our own language which will best connect with the past and underline the changes. We can hear the speaking voices of Florence Nightingale, Arthur Sullivan, Gladstone and Tennyson still. The voice of the last named surprises people with a rustic burr, where they had expected gentility. I grew up*, however with the singing voices of Galli-Curci, Clara Butt, Caruso, McCormack and Chaliapin to give me my first impressions of what soprano, contralto, tenors and bass should sound like. You will not hear their like today! :pipe:

*This was the age of the Beatles, incidentally. Microgrooves did not arrive in our household until the later sixties!
 
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Yes I think I started a thread on here a number of years ago about the eerie sensation from old sound recordings of listening through a time tunnel to people still somehow alive out "there" in the past, unsure if we can hear them here in the future.
 
The overlaps of inviduals' histories can be quite startling. Bertrand Russell, who died in 1970, knew Gladstone, and his grandfather, who brought him up, met Napoleon.
Looking at Wikipedia's (yes, I know) "List of last survivors of historical events" I see that our C Aubrey Smith was nine when the last participant in the Storming of the Bastille died.
On a personal note, my Grandmother (born 1911) had a Great-grandfather who died aged 98 in 1921 and who had seen the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester Railway in 1830.
 
My great grandfather was born in 1894 and I met him a few times in the early 80s. So I suppose I've met an actual Victorian. Thinking about him now it strikes me how very un-Victorian he seemed!
 
In a similar vein to C Aubrey Smith, the iconic Wild West figure Wyatt Earp, the lawman, gambler and quickshooter of Tombstone, Dodge City and Gunfight at the OK Corral fame, lived til 1929 and spent his latter years hanging round Hollywood where he purportedly was met and befriended by the young bit part actor John Wayne ( this is mostly reported as fact, but apparently there is some question mark over it...though he certainly knew John Ford , and Wayne acted as if he himself had known Earp)

 

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I know that a lot of the early stars had been vaudeville performers. I am not sure why but I was a bit surprised when I found out. I think that, like you @gattino I just find the two thing to be so incompatible it is hard to see the overlap that is so obvious when you think about it.

I did know a fairly "proper" Victorian as my mum had an uncle who was 100 years old when I was a very small child. He will have been born around 1880 and so grew up as a Victorian, even if he didn't spend many adult years as one.
 
It was a time of immense technological progress all right - only 66 years after the first powered flight, we'd stuck a geezer on the Moon.

Yes, this. This time span continues to astound me. I've not lived 66 years yet, but was alive to see (and vaguely remember man landing on the moon). Historically speaking, the technological leaps and bounds made within that time are quite the achievement.
 
Thomas Hardy only died a few weeks before my mother was born. Looking him up just now this isn't as extraordinary as it sounds to me, as he was only 68 so could conceivably have lived another 40 and seen the Beatles.
 
It's fascinating to get a sense of the crossing of such seemingly separate eras. One of my grandmothers was born in 1900, but I never thought of her as a Victorian until now.

This thread also reminds me of something I read many years back, probably in an old Guinness Book of Records (and I am sure I have mentioned it before on these forums, but never found the source). I am fairly sure that it stated that the last person with a parent born in the 18th century died as recently as the early 1960s. Medically possible, of course, but I'd love to find the original book, if anyone can help!

Edited to remove the apostrophe from "grandmothers". Auto-suggest doesn't always know best!
 
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It's fascinating to get a sense of the crossing of such seemingly separate eras. One of my grandmother's was born in 1900, but I never thought of her as a Victorian until now.
Yes, I only realised my grandfather was a Victorian a few years ago. It made me question the way they are usually portrayed in film and TV - I know he lived through much of the 20th Century but there was nothing of the cliched Victorian about him!
 
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The most repeated, and impressive, example of this in recent years is , quoting from one of many websites:

"
ARROW

PRESIDENTS

President John Tyler's Grandsons Are Still Alive
BY JASON ENGLISH
FEBRUARY 18, 2018
Getty Images


GETTY IMAGES

Here's the most amazing thing you'll ever read about our 10th president:
John Tyler was born in 1790. He took office in 1841, after William Henry Harrison died. And he has two living grandchildren.
Not great-great-great-grandchildren. Their dad was Tyler’s son.
How is this possible?
The Tyler men have a habit of having kids very late in life. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, one of President Tyler’s 15 kids, was born in 1853. He fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. in 1924, and Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 1928.
 
The most repeated, and impressive, example of this in recent years is , quoting from one of many websites:

"
ARROW
PRESIDENTS

President John Tyler's Grandsons Are Still Alive
BY JASON ENGLISH
FEBRUARY 18, 2018
Getty Images


GETTY IMAGES

Here's the most amazing thing you'll ever read about our 10th president:
John Tyler was born in 1790. He took office in 1841, after William Henry Harrison died. And he has two living grandchildren.
Not great-great-great-grandchildren. Their dad was Tyler’s son.
How is this possible?
The Tyler men have a habit of having kids very late in life. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, one of President Tyler’s 15 kids, was born in 1853. He fathered Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. in 1924, and Harrison Ruffin Tyler in 1928.

I recall posting that as a WTF fact ages ago. Apparently his two grandchildren are still alive in 2020 (Covid19 notwithstanding).
 
I've got a few examples of this sort of thing - from the world of The Novel.

Firstly, you can find on the net somewhere a radio interview between HG Wells and Orson Welles! They were discussing - obviously - the latters radio adaptation `The War of the Worlds`. To me it seems strange that these two guys even ever met - as they seem to belong to such seperate eras - but it makes logical sense as Welles radio stunt was early thirties (I think) and Well, H.G died around 1945, if memory serves.

Then there's D.H Lawrence. In my mind's eye he's quite a `modern` author who wrote about the late twenties and thirties and was -maybe, sort of - a contemporary of the `Pylon poet` generation - but in fact he was born in Victorian times and died in 1930! I think this may be because of the trial around the belated publication of `Lady Chatterley's Lover` - which, incredibly, took place in the early sixties -seems to sort of update him.

Lastly, Leo Tolstoy. In Moscow there is a Tolstoy Museum based around a house in used to live in when he was there. In there you can listen to a recording - a `gramophone` recording - of Tolstoy himself speaking! The author of `Anna Karenina` in his own words! Now, I knew that the guy must have spoken - but I never thought that nybody had recorded him doing so and it's quite an odd experience to hear his voice!
 
Thomas Hardy only died a few weeks before my mother was born. Looking him up just now this isn't as extraordinary as it sounds to me, as he was only 68 so could conceivably have lived another 40 and seen the Beatles.
A chance to re-post a couple of photos I took last year in old St Pancras churchyard (London). Thomas Hardy was supervising the disinternment of graves and dismantling of tombs in the 1860's to enable the expansion of the Midland Railway. He helped stack the grave-stones against an ash tree and presumably everyone went down the Pub. The tree has since grown around the stones.

Hardy_tree.jpg Hardy_tree 02A.jpg
 
Pablo Picasso's artistic career spanned over five generations of my family. Born in 1881, roughly the same time as my great-great grandfather, he was producing art from an early age and was an established artist by 1894, four years before the birth of my great grandparents.
He was still working when he died in 1973, three years after I was born.
 
I find it slightly odd that I was born in 1971, which was 26 years after the end of the Second World War, and that seemed an eternity back then. However, I now realise that at this point there's been a longer period since I started University - 31 years - and that feels like no time at all. Hmmmm.
 
This thread also reminds me of something I read many years back, probably in an old Guinness Book of Records (and I am sure I have mentioned it before on these forums, but never found the source). I am fairly sure that it stated that the last person with a parent born in the 18th century died as recently as the early 1960s. Medically possible, of course, but I'd love to find the original book, if anyone can help!

Yes you're right it was the Guinness Book of Records:
"The last Briton with 18th century paternity was Miss Alice J Grigg of Belvedere Kent, died 28 April 1970, whose father William was born on 26 October 1799."

First appeared in the 1980 edition and all through the 80s; I haven't checked later editions to see when it was dropped.
GBR doesn't give her age, but gerontology.org says she was born in 1863.

oxo
 
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