Endoscope fun

 After my fun trying to photograph a typewriter serial number I had a look into the cost of endoscope cameras, and basic units are amazingly cheap these days - for less than the cost of a couple of beers I picked up this little toy from Amazon

to which I added a USB C converter and plugged it into my Ubuntu laptop, ran up cheese (a webcam management app), and selected the USB device, and hey presto! - it just worked

and if you've ever wondered what a 20c coin looks like in close up, here's a test image

Ok, it's not the greatest quality photograph, but I'm quietly impressed that it took me longer to get it out of the Amazon delivery satchel than it did to get it working ...

Finding Catherine

 Really this post should be titled 'Finding Katherine'.

As is my wont, I thought I would delve a little into the life of Catherine Scragg, the young woman assaulted on a train near Shrewsbury, close to the border between England and Wales, in August 1887.

I do this, in part, to humanise them and make them more than simply a name on a page.

At first Catherine seemed incredibly elusive, she seemed not to exist in the 1881 census.

Well that just shows that you shouldn't believe everything you read in the newspapers. Catherine was in fact Katherine, and was in fact born in 1866, making her 21 or 22 at the time of the attack not 25 as in some of the reports of the time.

As newspapers of the time tended to copy from each other with wild abandon, and fact checking was an unknown construct, the mistakes were reproduced over and over again.

However, the Shropshire Assizes for October 1887 correctly list her as Katherine Scragg. As there's only one Katherine Scragg in the 1881 census for the Stoke on Trent area (her parents lived in 41 Talbot Street in Hanley - checking on Google StreetView suggests that the house is long gone - and she was returning from a visit home when she was attacked) we can be reasonably certain that she was the same Katherine Scragg listed in the 1881 census as a pupil teacher.

But what of her life after the assault?

Well, there is a Katherine Scragg listed in both the 1891 and 1901 census listed as working as a school teacher in Cheslyn Hay in the English midlands between Wolverhampton and Lichfield, and not really that far from Stoke on Trent.

I'm not able to find when she died, but there's a hint that she may have married later in life, but to run that down is going to require a trip to the library to use their copy of  ancestry ...

Goodbye Lubuntu, hello Ubuntu

 

You might remember, back in October, that after my troubles with the latest Ubuntu upgrade and my Lenovo Ideapad, as an experiment I installed Lubuntu on the old Dell Latitude E5250 that I'd bought J as a stopgap machine when her old machine carked it at the start of the pandemic.

As an experiment it was pretty successful, and it's lack of external dependencies - no cloud storage for one - made a useful machine, so useful in fact that I've found myself using it for some family history stuff, especially where I don't necessarily have access to good fast internet. 

Despite the machine being being nine or so years old the machine's pretty responsive, and the keyboard is nice to type on and the screen is nice and bright.

And certainly Lubuntu does not stress the machine - it really is light and fast, and gets the most out of old hardware.

Lubuntu is however a community maintained distribution and as such updates can lag behind the main distribution, and as the machine seemed to be becoming a production machine, I thought I would move it over to standard Ubuntu before I had too much work on it.

So, I backed up my work to a USB stick, burned myself a bootable USB with the latest version of Ubuntu, and rebooted the machine.

I basically just followed the bouncing ball as regards the installation, reinstalled my extra software and copied back my data. Probably took a bit over an hour, but certainly less than two.

On first use the machine seems as capable under Ubuntu as it did under Lubuntu, but as with all these things only time will tell ...

Whose typewriter is this?

 

At Lake View House, we have a collection of Henry Handel Richardson memorabilia, books with dedications by her, an old school book with her notes, a copy of the poems of Lord Byron won as a prize for English at the Presbyterian Ladies College, a pair of her sunglasses, in truth, not that much to memorialize someone, but as, like a lot of Australian writers, musicians and artists of the time, she buggered off to Europe at the first opportunity, and apart for a short visit in 1912, never came back, spending the last part of her life in Hastings on the English south coast.

So it's not really surprising that we don't have a lot in the way of artefacts to memorialize her.

It's said that the desk in the study of Lake View is her writing desk, and displayed on it is a typewriter, an Imperial 55,  made in Leicester by the Imperial Typewriter company.

Now one might be tempted to assume that it's Henry Handel Richardson's typewriter, except it can't be.

Firstly, when I was working through the various editions of her books we hold, I checked them against both the State Library of Victoria and the National Library of Australia, and discovered by pure happenstance that the State Library holds Henry Handel Richardson's typewriter, gifted by Clive Probyn, a well-known Henry Handel Richardson scholar, in 2009.

The State Library also holds a postcard showing HHR's typewriter.

Now, I havn't seen either the typewriter or the postcard, but let's assume for a moment that they match and that the provenance of both items has been checked.

This would tend to suggest that the typewriter at Lake View was not hers.

However, it might be that she bought it as a second typewriter for use by her personal assistant during her last years when she was dying of cancer.

Now when I was documenting the contents of Dow's pharmacy, I chased down the date of the dispensary typewriter to 1924, in part by using the Typewriter Database.

Well, this particular typewriter is s/n 288219

I apologize for the crappy photograph - while the serial number is easy enough to read with the aid of a dentist's mirror it's hidden underneath the platen mechanism and almost impossible to photograph with a normal camera or phone - one of these little endoscope style cameras would probably be the solution - but trust me it's 288219.

So plugging that number into the typewriter database, what do we find?

machines with serial numbers between 284000 and 305929 were built in 1948, two years after HHR's death, making it rather unlikely it was owned by HHR itself - I don't have any provenance documentation, but the earlier 1970s insurance documents, while they mention the writing desk do not mention the typewriter, suggesting that perhaps it was acquired later.

 It could be that the typewriter was purchased and belonged to HHR's long term personal assistant and secretary Olga Roncoroni with whom she had an enduring and close relationship, and who acted as HHR's executrix after her death.

Olga herself died in 1982 and it is possible that some of the memorabilia that we hold came via her estate.

Solved!

I've found some additional documentation that gives a partial provenance.

The item actually has no connection at all to either Henry Handel Richardson or Olga Roncoroni. 

In fact, the item was donated by a lady whose mother lived in Lake View in 1910, and whose grandfather was a journalist at the Federal Standard newspaper in Chiltern.

Of course, the ages don't quite line up with the date of manufacture - if the journalist grandfather was in his twenties in 1910, he would likely be in his sixties when the typewriter was manufactured.

Old journalists of course never retire, and perhaps he kept working well after normal retirement age...

Finding Fanny Elizabeth Bull

 Over on one of my other blogs I've recounted the story of Fanny Elizabeth Bull, a young governess, who was assaulted - let's be honest, was subject to an attempted rape, in a second class compartment of  a South Eastern Railway train in August 1885.

Like all such accounts, quite horrific.

However the case is unusual as it went to prosecution - at the time the only way for a woman to bring a case of violent assault to court was to initiate a private prosecution, and most didn't, for fear of the damage to their reputations.

Fanny unusually, and with the support of the railway company did, and her assailant, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to three months hard labour.

Finding information about the case was quite easy, fortunately as Fanny was most definitely Fanny Elizabeth her name was quite easy to search for on both Welsh Newspapers online and on the Gale Newsvault via the State Library of Victoria.

And knowing both her name and the name of her assailant, it was really easy to find the outcome of the case on the Old Bailey's website.

And then I thought I might try and put a little bit of flesh on the bones, and find Fanny's age, and confirm her employment.

This turned out to be harder than it should be.

The assault took place in 1885, and she was said to live in Brixton, which then as now was part of the Borough of Lambeth and she had joined the train at Eltham, travelling towards New Cross.

(Just to add to the fun the station she joined the train at is now Mottingham, and not the current Eltham station, which opened some twenty years later - at the time Fanny joined the train, the station was officially Eltham for Mottingham, and universally and confusingly called Eltham).

The newspaper reports describe her as a young governess who lived at home, suggesting she was unmarried, and taking a guess I put her between 20 and 25.

And then I hit a problem.

The England and Wales censuses for 1881 and 1891 are behind a paywall, and you need an account with one of the family history behemoths - which I don't have anymore.

I did manage to find the basics by using FindmyPast without signing up for a subscription, but I couldn't view the actual census documents - which was a problem as neither the 1881 or 1891 census listed her profession, and there were other Fanny Elizabeth Bulls living in London at the time who were roughly the right age and working as housemaids and domestic servants.

Was it an incomplete transcription or was the information simply not there?

And then I had an idea - our library has a subscription to Ancestry, so not knowing anything about how the setup worked, I emailed them asking about access.

Well, they did have a subscription, but you needed to go to the library to use it - it's only a ten minute walk away - the benefits of living in a small town - so I asked them to reserve me a timeslot on one of the public computers.

This turned out to be a really good thing to do - when I got there, there were no patrons, only Anna and Julie the duty librarians, and as a bonus, Julie runs the local family history group.

So I got some individual tuition on using Ancestry, and in around fifteen minutes confirmed that her occupation was not listed on the 1881 or 1891 census form, but she was listed in 1911 as being a Head mistress at the moderately prestigious Trevelyan School in Haywards Heath. In fact I probably spent more time talking to Anna and Julie than I did researching.

I was also able to confirm that Fanny Elizabeth was born in 1861 in Mortlake, and died 1916.

As far as I've been able to find out, she never married.

I'm pleased to see that she seems to have succeeded in life, despite her traumatic experience.

A tide of obsolescent machines

 According to the ABC, the end of Windows 10 as a supported operating system, means that recycling facilities are going to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of older machines incapable for running Windows 11.

I don't think so.

While there might be a migration in the corporate world to Windows 11, I think we won't see that happen with home users - after all if your machine still works, why replace it?

Money's tight, and home users don't really care about support - there are still Windows 7 machines out there happily emailing and surfing away.

People will only migrate when they find that they can't do something on their old machine, or it dies on them.

As to linux?

Nah, while undoubtedly it's the case that you can put Linux on an old machine and the standard apps will let you do just about everything your old windows machine would, there's still a perception that Linux is (a) difficult (b) requires severe halitosis and poor personal hygiene to use - in fact to use ubuntu or one of the other standard distributions you need nothing more in the way of skills that your average user already has.

There's also the problem that no matter how easy it is to use Linux, getting it onto a machine is complicated - you have to download an image, use something like Rufus or Etcher to make a bootable USB, then boot the machine from the USB, etc etc.

While it's easy it's not the most user friendly process, and can even trip people who know what they're doing - like a bootable ISO or dd image?

So, while I expect the recyclers to be selling off a lot of ex corporate Windows 10 hardware, I don't expect home users to join the upgrade rush, nor do I expect a sudden uptick in the number of home linux users ...

Batteries!

 When I set up my second hand Canon Powershot, I of course checked it, set the date and time and did some test shots.

What I didn't do was power it on and off and see if it held the date and time information. My bad.

So, it was a bit of a surprise when I came to use it and found the clock needed to be reset again. Actually it needed to be reset every damn time I turned it on - it turns out that the configuration memory has a little button battery to power it and this needs to be replaced every so often.

Now with an old camera, indeed an old anything, manufacturers do have a tendency to remove the documentation from their websites, invariably leading to some frantic googling of enthusiast sites.

Not so Canon - the documentation on replacing the time and date battery was online, and not only was it clear, the procedure was straightforward, just a matter of getting the correct battery from ebay, pulling out the old one, and hey presto - we were in business...