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The City of Westminster website is serial­ising the diary of a mid-nineteenth century wharf clerk named Nathaniel Bryceson.

Highlights include visits to the gallows to watch execu­tions, the purchasing of cheese, and Bryceson’s meetings with his romantic interest Ann Fox (it is noted in the intro­duction that some of these episodes are written in “surpris­ingly explicit language”, though the nearest I’ve found so far is an entry from 2 January 1846 in which he ‘tastes her puddings’).

(Westminster City Council, via The Cat’s Meat Shop)

No causal connection has wealthy beginning

In the middle of 1944, a series of appar­ently innocuous answers in the crossword puzzle of the Daily Telegraph rang alarm bells at MI5. In the space of a few weeks, the words ‘Utah’, ‘Omaha’, ‘Neptune’, ‘mulberry’ and ‘overlord’ all featured as solutions to the crossword. What was signi­ficant was that these were all codewords relating to the soon-to-occur (and supposedly secret) Allied invasion of Normandy.

Coincidence? Espionage? Treason? The answer, like the solution to a good cryptic clue, is as appealing as it is obvious.

P. E. Warburton’s culinary tip #1: It can take as long as 36 hours to boil a camel to the point at which it can be devoured in its entirety.

Totally unsur­prised to learn that the first attempt to walk across the Nullarbor Plain was met with a certain amount of difficulty.

Scuttlers

The ‘scuttlers’ of nineteenth century Manchester: like our ‘larrikins’, but with a more honest name. Author of a just released book on the gangs of nineteenth century Manchester and London says he was fascinated by the “unchanging role of dress and personal appearance as a sign of belonging to a gang”. An example is the ‘donkey fringe’ hairstyle, “which required close cropping at the back but an angled fringe at the front, with the hair longer on the right”.