Books of The Times

Cuckoos

    This post will complete my completely unintended trilogy of essays about books published by The Times (of London). You probably read carefully the one about “Fourth Leaders” and were intrigued by the post about the book the Times published that covered the period from 1882-1932. These books were generally the products of employees of that august newspaper. Another commercial endeavour involved publishing material produced by the readers. The books consist of “Letters to the Editor” and the titles of those books usually include  the word “Cuckoo.” I will begin by discussing the books and conclude with a few remarks about the birds.

Why the Cuckoo?

    For many years many of the letters sent to The Times had as their subject the cuckoo, particularly the FIRST cuckoo. The cuckoo was regarded as the bringer of spring and there was what can be accurately described as a ‘competition’ to be the first to report the hearing of a sound which meant that spring had arrived.

    Letters would come from all over the Kingdom and there were some geographical rivalries involved. The reports first made, were often the subject of more letters questioning the likelihood say, that the bird could be around John o’ Groats before being heard near Land’s End.

    As well, there were additional cuckoo letters involving ornithological issues as this example indicates: “SIR: The report of the first cuckoo of  spring is always eagerly anticipated but less experienced bird watchers frequently getting it wrong, confusing the call of Columba palumpus for Cuculus canorus “ from the Reverend Arthur Moss Mar. 25 1985 [I.e. wood pigeon for the cuckoo].

    Then there were the more frivolous spin-offs and spoofs. One reader wrote in from Ulan Bator: “I heard today the first cuckoo of this year. Is this a record for Outer Mongolia?” Another wrote on April 21, 1972 that he had just heard Delius’s “On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring” and wondered if that was a record.

    Given the long tradition of cuckoo letters and their popularity,  having the word in a collection of Time’s letters made sense.

The First Cuckoo, The Second Cuckoo, etc.

    The first collection came out in 1976 and bore the title:The First Cuckoo : A Selection of the Most Witty, Amusing and Memorable Letters to The Times, 1900-1975. (It was also published as Your Obedient Servant: A Selection of the Most Witty, Amusing and Memorable Letters to The Times, 1900-1975. “Your Obedient Servant” was a valediction often used.)

    The introduction and the selection of letters were done by Kenneth Gregory who is also associated with the other editions as well. In a review, Paul Theroux (whose recent book, interestingly enough, is the subject of a recent post below) notes: “It could not have been an easy harvest. Mr. Gregory had to sift through 300,000 letters in order to arrive at the hundreds he includes. Crickets, servants dogs, Christian names, and birds; these are the predictable subjects. But a recipe for porridge? Quaker nudity? The salvage of bones? The physical danger of kissing the Bible?” There are only two about cuckoos.

   The letter writers are often famous and include Neville Chamberlain, T.S.Eliot, Conan Doyle and Vita Sackville-West. George Bernard Shaw contributed his first letter in 1898 when he was 42 and his last in 1950. There were many in between.

The famous often wrote about grave matters of international significance (see, e.g. John Masefield on the “White Slave Trade.") Less important issues sometimes bothered them. Here is what Julian Huxley had to say about rhinos or rhinocerons.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES:

    Sir, In your issue of July 30 you employed ‘rhinoceri’ as the plural of rhinoceros. This is surely a barbarism, although on referring to the New English Dictionary I find to my surprise and regret that it is one of the usages cited.

    This plural has given writers of English considerable trouble. Besides rhinoceros, rhinoceroses, and the above-mentioned rhinoceri, the N.E.D. quotes rhinocerons, rhinoceroes, rhinocerotes, and rhinocerontes.

    Rhinoceroses would appear to be the least objectionable, but even this still has a pedantic sound. Has not the time come when we can discard our etymological prejudices, accept the usage of the ordinary man, and frankly use ‘rhinos’? Confusion will not arise, since the slang use of rhino for money is moribund, if not dead.

    Zoo for Zoological Gardens has now become accepted usage: I hope we may adopt the same common-sense principle for some of its inmates with embarrassingly long names. In addition to rhino, I would plead for hippo and, with a certain diffidence, for chimp.

Yours faithfully,

Julian S. Huxley

Aug. 17, 1938

    The Second Cuckoo was published in 1983. In a long and very funny letter the Literary Editor of The Times indicates that The First Cuckoo “was a prodigious commercial success” and he jokingly regrets that The Times was doing it again.

“Rival Calls From a Second Cuckoo”

 Sir:

    It is a matter of grief and vexation to your salaried hacks that the most interesting part of your organ is usually on the page opposite this, written gratis by amateur blacklegs. Years ago management consultants conducted a marketing survey among our readers, who were invited to put ticks on a form indicating which parts of The Times they read. A small number put no ticks at all, indicating they were not readers but swanks, wishing to display themselves as Times readers by carrying the paper under their arms. We journalists were somewhat miffed to learn that the bits we wrote, although deeply wonderful and pretty heavily ticked, did not really score as well as the bits that come free, such as Letters to the Editor, and to the bits that we are paid to include, such as the Agony Column. These are The Times that try men’s souls…..

Yours, in earnest hope of publication,

                                 Philip Howard - July 22, 1983.   

The Last Cuckoo

     This one was published in 1987 and the sub-title is: The Very Best Letters to The TImes Since 1900. It contains a very short and funny introduction by Bernard Levin. Apart from a Table of Contents it also has a helpful subject index and a list of contributors.

    Searching for these books one also finds The Next to Last Cuckoo… but this is likely just a knock-off of one of the originals.

Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo.

    The book pictured above is not published by The Times and it is not a collection of letters. It is about the cuckoo.

    The Times has not published a ‘first cuckoo’ letter since around 1940. The author of the book above wrote a letter to The Times with the title “The Last Cuckoo” in 2002. In it, he noted that for the first time in decades he had not heard the cuckoo in late April in Dorset. The letter was not published.

    The call of the cuckoo (and the song of the nightingale) are now rather rare. The number of cuckoos has declined dramatically. To find out why, read the wonderful book above. It came out a couple of years ago and if you can’t find it, get his latest book The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy.

It too is a wonderful book and the cuckoo is again discussed, but the story is a melancholy one.

Sources:

The review by Theroux is found in The Times, April 29, 1976. The letter by Howard is found on July 22, 1983. See also the long introduction by Gregory and the short foreword by Levin in The Last Cuckoo.

P.S. For those of you who have begun to see my postscripts as something like A.J.P. Taylor’s footnotes (the interesting bits) and are in search of gossip, read up on Bernard Levin, the author and journalist who was often on British TV. This poor Jewish boy became the “big love of my life”, says Arianna Stassinopoulos. You know her better as Huffington and she had her own post.