Blackout: More Gripes

[drplokta]

"5p" was not a feasible price to charge in England until 15 February 1971 when "p" was introduced as an abbreviation for new pennies after decimalisation of the currency. Willis's heroines in 1940 have problems with the Victoria and Jubilee lines being unavailable, which they blame on the Luftwaffe. This is a little unfair, because the Victoria line opened in 1968 and the Jubilee line opened in 1979, so they'd have had quite a long wait for their trains even without the Blitz. Even more impressive, one of them manages to catch a Circle line train, seven years before it appeared on Tube maps and nine years before it had any formal existence. There are no circumstances in which a feasible route from Daventry to London by train goes via Hereford. I do not believe (but can't find conclusive evidence) that tokens were used in Underground turnstiles in 1940. I am also dubious about the notion that you could make a blazer out of tweed, but again can't find anything conclusive.

London is not as big as Connie Willis thinks it is. Bomb damage causes one character to have to walk two miles from Stepney to find a bus -- but Stepney is less than two miles from the City, and is also less than two miles from at least a dozen Tube stations on several different lines (even lines that actually existed in 1940). Furthermore, there is no way that the Blitz could disrupt public transport enough for a healthy 24-year-old in a hurry to take three hours getting from Euston to a department store on Oxford Street -- because it takes less than half an hour to walk it.

Comments

[aca.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's spectacular! :)

[affinity8.livejournal.com]

I love history geekery. (got here via nwhyte.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I was willing to be sympathetic to Willis for not getting that the old "Charing Cross" underground station was what is now called Embankment, and what is now Charing Cross used to be the two stations called Trafalgar Square and Strand. Now that's urban transport history geekery. But I lose all sympathy when I hear she has the Jubilee Line open in WW2! Like I said with the skunk cabbage, the clue is in the name. Unless this is the steampunk alternate history where it was opened during Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

It's not like you can't find a ton of bitmaps of Harry Beck's maps on the Web.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Oh good grief.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure Harris tweed jackets can be had cut in the blazer style ... but whether they'd have been found in the 1940s? I'm a lot less sure about that.

(I'm now feeling really good about the level of flak I took from Americans over the Merchant Princes books; far as I can tell, my wrongness was about an order of magnitude smaller than Connie's. Despite still being annoying to some.)

[flick.livejournal.com]

I am also dubious about the notion that you could make a blazer out of tweed, but again can't find anything conclusive.

Not sure about this, although it may be a regional / time-bounded thing.

[frostfox.livejournal.com]

Google finds 92 thousand hits for tweed blazer.

The rest? Not really hard to find out the opening dates of the Underground lines, even those of us in the unheard of hardships of Beyond Zone Five, know this.

FF

[rdmaughan.livejournal.com]

Do you need to get your blood pressure checked before reading further? I'm not sure this book is good for you.

[gummitch.livejournal.com]

He's doing it so we don't have to. Rather noble of him, really.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Oh good grief...

The underground never had turnstiles as such to the best of my knowledge - prior to the introduction of machine-readable tickets in the eighties and nineties the tickets were collected by hand. There were ticket vending machines (referenced in e.g. one of the Lord Peter Wimsey books) but they took cash, not tokens.

[yea-mon.livejournal.com]

And back in the day you could get a 'platform ticket' to see someone off and take a little 'trip' on the tube at discount price ;)

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Searching for "tweed blazer" finds many, but predominantly for women. My gut feeling is that's relatively recent and because anything goes in women's fashions. A men's blazer would have been Navy Blue. if it's tweed, it's a jacket.

[drplokta]

In the novel, it's a schoolboy's blazer, but not actually school uniform.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Pardon?

I don't know about the 40s, but my memories of the 50s are that no-one would wear anything that looked in the least like school uniform unless it was school uniform.

(Look, I have to concentrate on this, because these posts are making me almost want to look at this book and find how many mistakes I can find that you haven't mentioned.)

[drplokta]

To be fair, again, the blazer was being purchased by an obnoxious mother and not by the boy himself.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

The schoolboy's blazer definitely is a little men's blazer. (Not to be confused with the Elves, Gnomes and Little Men Marching and Chowder Society.)

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Late to the party... FYI - the school uniform for the very minor public school I attended was a Harris Tweed "Blazer" - the prefects would wear prefects trim on theirs.

So it's not COMPLETELY beyond the realm of possibility.

That was 1980 though, but frankly, given they liked to talk about the long school history it's not beyond the realms of possibility.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

FYI - a little late but ho hum... my school "blazer" at St Edmunds was, in fact, a Tweed Jacket... not sure this mitigates what I suspect is an error as I don't think there are all that many extremely minor public schools which used Tweed Jackets in that way.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I read and enjoyed Firewatch, despite the wonky historical bits.

I read Doomsday Book, but couldn't see why it won a Hugo.

I read To Say Nothing of the Dog, and wasn't overly impressed. The JKJ homage was weak and laboured, and the comedy of manners aspect had none of the grace that her early shorts had (Blued Moon stands out as an example of what she is capable of). Still couldn't see what the Hugo voters saw in it, and was really quite irritated by the goofs in the depiction of Oxford and Coventry.

Can't say that I'll bother with this one, if these goofs are anything to go by.

[tchernabyelo.livejournal.com]

Can she have her poetic license revoked?

This is truly appalling. I'd love to hear her excuse for such incredible lack of research.

(Here, like others, via nwhyte).

[nmg.livejournal.com]

This rather reminds me of a Thog in this month's Ansible:

Dept of Flaunted Historical Research. '"Just a minute, Mr. Todd, you're a shilling short here." / "Ah, terribly sorry, I must a dropped it." He laboriously counted out three pennies, a ha'penny, and six farthings.' (Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, 1994)

[arwel-p.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness. I thought I'd written most of Wikipedia's British coinage articles so it would be obvious how the denominations tied together! :)

[redbird]

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how clear you make the articles if people don't read them.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

There's a lot more wrong with The Beekeeper's Apprentice (which I flicked through at a friend's) than that. For starters, it's a blatant Mary Sue.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

3d + ½d + 1½d = 5d ... she's read somewhere that 1 shilling = 5 new pence, and missed or failed to understand the "new", hasn't she?

[arwel-p.livejournal.com]

Yup, 39 years ago today since the big switchover. I remember going to get a haircut that day (since school was closed) and asking the barber if he wanted fifteen pence or three bob!

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

A blazer is inherently casual. Tweed is casual, but in a different way. The tweed equivalent of a blazer is a hacking jacket (or a sports jacket for the seventies throwbacks/forwards).

Yes, you can *wear* a tweed jacket in such a way as it can do the same job as a blazer. But it will be cut differently and no-one would call it a blazer. The equivalent would be "riding coat" in that time period, IIRC.

[timill]

Moreover, a blazer is summer wear, and a tweed jacket is non-summerwear.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

A similar currency cock-up occurs in The Beekeeper's Apprentice quoted in the latest Ansible.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Two hours ahead of you, Steve...

[armb.livejournal.com]

Obviously this is supposed to be an alternate history, with discreet clues so the observant reader can work that out for themselves, in the same sort of way that Hanville Svetz is able to recover a unicorn from the "past" in Niven's The Flight of the Horse.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I am so not reading this. I hated the first one with a deep and bitter hate. Outraged Historian is Outraged.

[ianmcdonald.livejournal.com]

please, please, more of this...

[drplokta]

One more, especially for you. A pillar box is a post box, not a telephone box, so it's not much use telling someone to go to the pillar box on the corner to make a phone call.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Waaaaaaa!

This reminds me so much of various Marvel comics of the 60s and 70s, where the police were all armed, post boxes were the tin-on-a-pole US type, London had steam trains with cow-catchers, and Daredevil once took a submarine to Wales, England.

[graham-bell.livejournal.com]

Well, they got the last bit right at least.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Except you can't get by submarine to the village of Wales - and as I was born in Sheffield and living there when I read the comic, you can guess how well it went down./

[gillo]

That one is spectacular. The woman has been to England. Why in hell would she mix that up?

[gillo]

You may like to know that my school net nanny software blocks your LJ as likely to corrupt young minds! Considering it's in Coventry, I think you are doing them a service!