Gin o’Clock – Part Sixteen

With so many independent distillers surfing the wave that is the ginaissance it is easy to get sniffy about the attempts of the big supermarket chains to enter the premium gin market. Their obvious advantages is reach – regrettably, no one these days is too far from any of the majors – and price – they are able to occupy a price range considerably below those that the independents can or deign to charge. Tempting as they may be, are they any good?

Our first featured gin is to be found at Lidl – my bottle cost £9.99 for 70 centilitres – Castelgy London Dry Gin. It comes in a squat green bottle with a screw cap, the label at the front bearing a rather Teutonic coat of arms and boasting a 100% pure grain spirit. Perusing the label at the back of the bottle I find that it is produced in Germany – no surprise there – by Eckerts Wacholder Brennerei GmbH. They have been in the business for 125 years and produce a wide range of spirits and  liqueurs. Castelgy doesn’t appear on their website so, presumably, it is distilled on licence for Lidl. The rear label on my bottle came with a helpful recipe for gin and tonic.

At just 37.5% ABV it is a little undercooked for my taste but made up for its lack of punch with a more intense the morning-after headache than I normally experience. Apart from the pure grain spirit base, mentioned twice on the labelling, it is a little vague as to the botanicals, mentioning only juniper (natch) and coriander. There is certainly some citrus component in there, probably orange peel, and my taste buds seemed to detect ginger. To the nose it has a rather antiseptic odour with juniper dominating and a schnapps style smell coming through. It is clear and to the taste it seemed quite bland with a surprisingly perfumed sensation coming through. The aftertaste was stronger than I had anticipated and this is where the spices, probably ginger, come to the fore. As my first gin of the evening I had to wait for the aftertaste to dissipate before moving on to my next one.

All in all, it was much better than I had feared and would make an acceptable – and cheap – base for a cocktail. You need to choose your tonic with some care to neutralise, if that is possible, the strong after burn.

The other gin featured this time is Asda’s Triple Distilled Premium Gin, retailing for about £15. The bottle is a dumpy bell-shaped affair with a screw cap. The labelling is elegantly minimalist but at least the botanicals are disclosed – juniper, lemon peel, liquorice root, orange peel, coriander, orris and angelica, staple ingredients all. There is no indication who distilled it for them other than it was in the UK. To the nose the juniper was to the fore and the citrus elements were detectable. A clear spirit it was pleasing to the taste, slightly oily and the coriander and citrus was in evidence. The aftertaste was strong but not unpleasant with a hint of spice and liquorice. It was a well-balanced spirit, particularly in comparison with Castelgy, and whilst it is stronger at 41% ABV it did not give me the kind of headache that makes you consider, albeit fleetingly, giving up drinking.

I suppose you pays your money and you makes your choice. I’m not sure I would recommend either as starting points for exploring the ginaissance but if you are watching your pennies, there are worse places to start.

Until the next time, cheers!

There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Sixty Two

Joseph Hansom (1803 – 1882)

I was rereading one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories the other day. The protagonist rushed to the scene of the crime in a Hansom cab, the principal form of taxi in those days. It set me thinking about who designed the carriage and this led me to the unfortunate character that was Joseph Hansom whose ingenuity and ill-fortune earns him a place in our illustrious Hall of Fame.

Working as an estate manager at Caldecote Hall, near Nuneaton, Hansom came up with a revolutionary design for a safety cab. It could hold two passengers with the driver seated at the back, communication between the two parties being effected through a trapdoor in the roof. Its principal advantage over contemporary rivals was that it had a low centre of gravity – large wheels and a lower cab and suspended axle – which meant it was much more stable when cornering. Being light and capable of being drawn by only one horse – making it cheaper for the cabbie to operate – it was faster and more manoeuvrable than many of its rivals.

Hansom applied for a patent on December 23^rd 1834 and the first Hansom cab travelled down the Coventry Road in Hinckley in 1835. The design was a great success and Hansoms soon replaced the more expensive to run four-wheeled Hackney carriages as the vehicle of choice for hire. In its heyday there were up to 7,500 Hansoms plying their trade in London and they were to be seen in other major cities in the UK as well as Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg and New York. The last London Hansom driver handed his licence in as recently as 1947.

Although others, principally, John Chapman, made modifications to the design, mainly to improve passenger comfort, Hansom’s design stood the test of time. As the holder of the patent you would expect Joseph to have received a handsome reward for his ingenuity. Alas, he didn’t. He sold his patent for the cab to a company for the sum of £10,000. The company immediately got into financial difficulties and reneged on the payment leaving Hansom without a penny.

Throughout his life Hansom was dogged by ill-luck. Starting out as an architect – he designed over two hundred buildings including Plymouth Cathedral – he and his partner, Edward Welch, overcame stiff opposition to win the commission to design and build Birmingham Town Hall in 1831. It is a beautiful building with tall pillars and a Roman feel about it but costs soon spiralled out of control and as the architects had stood surety for the builders the edifice brought their company crashing down into bankruptcy.

In 1843 Hansom together with Alfred Bartholomew started an architectural journal called the Builder which is still going today, although it was renamed Building in 1966. Aimed at architects, builders and workmen it found a profitable niche but, as you might expect, Hansom didn’t share in the rewards. He had to relinquish his control over the journal because of lack of capital.

Whilst his name was immortalised in the cab that he designed – there is a blue plaque in his memory outside one of his former residences, 27, Sumner Place in South Kensington – he didn’t receive a bean for his ingenuity. It must have been particularly galling for him to summon a cab. For that reason, Joseph, you are a worthy inductee into our Hall of Fame

If you enjoyed this, why not try Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone which is now available on Amazon in Kindle format and paperback. For details follow the link https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=fifty+clever+bastards

Double Your Money – Part Twelve

Jabez Balfour and the Liberator Building Society

The wonderfully and, as it turned out, appropriately named Jabez Balfour (1843 – 1916) is probably one of if not the greatest fraudster in British financial history. His first name – it is Hebrew for one who causes pain and sorrow – was a popular moniker until its lustre was inevitably tarnished by its association with Balfour. Ostensibly a pillar of society – he was a member of parliament for Tamworth (1880 – 1885) and Burnley (1889 – 1893) and the first mayor of Croydon – Jabez made his mark in financial circles by encouraging the working man to save hard and buy their own home.

The Liberator Building Society, of which Balfour became managing director at the age of 37, was positioned to improve the fortunes of the down-trodden. Prominent non-conformist ministers were appointed to the Board to give it respectability and to encourage their flocks to invest. Profits, Jabez claimed, would go towards funding house building and improving living conditions of the poor.

By 1888 the Society had amassed assets of some £750,000 and whilst some of the monies were used to fund good works most of it funded the purchase of properties owned by Balfour at exorbitant prices or to fund wildly speculative projects. One such scheme was to turn mudflats in the Isle of Wight into an upmarket seaside resort.

The final decade of the 19^th century heralded a downturn in the economy, hitting speculative ventures and causing investors to look more closely at where they had placed their monies. The press, particularly the Economist and the Financial Times, took a particular interest in the fortunes of the Liberator. Their investigations revealed that the society together with its connected companies mainly traded with each other and overvalued assets were assigned to whichever company was about to announce its trading results, to exaggerate the strength of balance sheets and increase the dividends payable. The companies’ auditors were often impoverished non-Conformist ministers who glad of a few bob signed the accounts off on the nod. Balfour’s own auditor was his tailor!

Balfour might have got away with his fraud had economic conditions not deteriorated. In 1892 rumours swept the City that the Liberator was in trouble and in October it was forced to shut its doors, leaving at least 25,000 depositors ruined. Half were over 60 years of age with limited means. A 70-year old spinster from Hertfordshire went mad and a bookseller in Peckham cut off his own head. Several directors were arrested but Balfour had scarpered – to Argentina.

Thanks to the perseverance of Inspector Frank Froest of Scotland Yard Balfour was kidnapped after 13 months on the run and returned to Blighty to stand trial. Sentencing him to 14 years in November 1895 – he served eleven – the judge said “No prison doors can shut from your ears the cry of the widow and orphan whom you have ruined”. The Economist was more sententious “to the worldly-wise, the mixing up of religion and business and the public appeals for Divine guidance in company matters, are regarded ..as marks of the Pharisee and as danger signals which it would be unwise to ignore. Balfour’s conduct would have been bad enough under any circumstances, but the hypocrisy which permeated it from beginning to end made it infinitely more contemptible than if he had been an ordinary financial scoundrel”.

Balfour wrote a best-seller, My Prison Life, upon release and in August 1915, at the age of 71, went to work in a tin mine in Mandalay. He was sent home, the manager fearing the heat would kill him, and he died of a heart attack on the London to Fishguard train six months later en route to another mining job.

Munificence Of The Week

Badgers – not sure what to make of them. In one part of the country they are a pest and being exterminated; in other areas, they are being treated like royalty.

I read this week that the Environment Agency has spent £313,000 building a luxury sett for badgers, complete with larder, sleeping area, communal area and latrines, in an attempt to lure them away from an existing sett dug into the banks of the river Steeping in Lincolnshire. As an added bonus there is even £50 worth of peanuts on offer. This is the same agency that has refused to spend £800,000 to remove silt from and to dredge the Steeping to give local (human) residents extra protection against flooding. Madness.

But we are not the only ones at it. At Oamaru in New Zealand, blue penguins have had to cross an increasingly busy road to get from their nests to the sea. Not anymore. Locals have built a 25 metre underpass to allow the penguins to avoid the wheels and it is going down a storm. The penguins have taken to it and the press report I read this week said that the feedback was “almost universally positive”. Who were the naysayers, I wonder? Those who enjoyed driving at them, perhaps?

App Of The Week (2)

Did you know that in the first eight months of 2016 73 people have died in selfie-related incidents, up from 39 in 2015 and 14 in 2014? The hotspot, apparently, is India where 76 have killed themselves in pursuit of the ultimate selfie, often posing by a railway track.

Rather than just acknowledge that this is Darwinism in action, some PhD student, Hemank Lamba, I read this week in the MIT Technology Review, is hard at work trying to develop an app that will alert people to the fact that the selfie they are about to take is putting them at risk.

What’s wrong with common sense? How soon will it be before we hear that someone was killed consulting an app before taking a selfie as they stand on the edge of a cliff? The world has gone mad!