21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (28 page)

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Nowadays, the flat cap has been replaced by a dodgy gelled hairdo, the club scarf is a more elaborate printed affair emblazoned with a logo, but the rattle is rarely to be seen at all.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

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