if only…

Our Language by English professor Simeon Potter, which was first published in 1950, is the kind of book that you can dip into from time to time and learn something new, even if you have previously read it from cover to cover. During one such recent dip, I came across the following passage:

Another interesting thing we shall observe is the way in which natural emphasis overrides strict logic in word order. ‘He only died last week’ may be denounced by modern precisians on the ground that it flouts one of those rules of proximity whereby the modifying adverb should be placed as near as possible to the word, phrase or clause it modifies. ‘He died only last week’ or ‘It was only last week that he died’ should stand. Stress, intonation, and pause, however, make everything clear, or even clearer, when only is detached. ‘He only died last week’ implies no ambiguity and no misplaced emphasis.

Professor Potter continues by citing a concrete example:

Mr Vernon Bartlett once opened a wireless talk on world affairs with the words: ‘I am not an expert on China. I have only been there twice in my life’. Natural emphasis and intonation were just right: the hearer’s attention was arrested at once. ‘I have been there only twice in my life’ would have sounded unnatural and pedantic in comparison.

It is with diffidence that I challenge the conclusions of such an eminent linguist, but the first point to make is that the example selected is an example of spoken English, and there are many subtle differences between the spoken and written versions of a language. Professor Potter may be right to point out the value of stress and intonation in the conveyance of meaning, and that it isn’t always necessary to adhere to strict rules of grammar when speaking, but written English requires a stricter interpretation of the rules.

Naturally, I wondered what Henry Fowler, author of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, had to say on the subject. Although this book was published as long ago as 1926, it is still a useful guide for anyone who cares about the clarity and precision of what they write:

I read the other day of a man who ‘only died a week ago’, as if he could have done anything else more striking or final; what was meant by the writer was that he ‘died only a week ago’. There speaks one of those friends from whom the English language may well pray to be saved, one of the modern precisians who have more zeal than discretion, and wish to restrain liberty as such, regardless of whether it is harmfully or harmlessly exercised.

It looks as though I’m on the wrong side of the argument. Fowler, in his inimitable style, provides a detailed explanation:

…illogicalities and inaccuracies of expression tend to be eliminated as a language grows older and its users attain a more conscious mastery of their materials. But this tendency has its bad as well as its good effects; the pedants who try to forward it when the illogicality is only apparent or the inaccuracy of no importance are turning English into an exact science….

The design is to force us all, whenever we use the adverb only, to spend time in considering which is the precise part of the sentence strictly qualified by it, and then put it there—this irrespective of whether there is any danger of the meaning’s being false or ambiguous because only is so placed as to belong grammatically to a whole expression instead of to a part of it….

It may at once be admitted that there is an orthodox placing for only, but it does not follow that there are not often good reasons for departing from orthodoxy. For he only died a week ago no better defence is perhaps possible than that it is the order that most people have always used and still use, and that, the risk of misunderstanding being chimerical, it is not worth while to depart from the natural.… But take next an example in which, ambiguity being practically possible, the case against heterodox placing is much stronger: Mackenzie only seems to go wrong when he lets in yellow [a reference to colour printing]. The orthodox place for only is before when, and the antithesis between seeming to go and really going, though not intended, is apt to suggest itself, makes the displacement here ill advised.

Fowler summarizes his recommendations in the final paragraph:

The advice offered is this: there is an orthodox position for the adverb, easily determined in case of need; to choose another position that may spoil or obscure the meaning is bad; but a change of position that has no such effect except technically is not only justified by historical and colloquial usage but often demanded by rhetorical needs.

The key point, though, is that written English doesn’t come with helpful auditory clues, so any deviation from these rules does run the risk of creating ambiguity. It is significant that both academics chose as their heterodox example the act of dying, which has the singular effect of excluding the subject of that verb from being the subject of another verb for evermore. It is therefore easy to see that ‘only’ must refer to another part of the sentence.

If, instead of dying we substitute a common action such as attending a meeting, then the arguments put forward by the two eminent professors are fatally weakened:

He only attended the meeting last week.
He attended the meeting only last week.

These are possible answers to two different questions. The first version implies that the subject attended the meeting but didn’t contribute to the discussions, while the second suggests that prior to last week’s meeting, his attendance record has been questionable.

To further illustrate this point, I imagine a garage that both repairs and services motor vehicles. It wants to erect a sign to let potential customers know about its services. There are three options:

1. ONLY CARS SERVICED ON SATURDAYS
2. CARS ONLY SERVICED ON SATURDAYS
3. CARS SERVICED ONLY ON SATURDAYS

The subtext of #1 is that you cannot get your van or minibus serviced on a Saturday, only your car; of #2 that you cannot get your car repaired on a Saturday, only serviced; and of #3 that you cannot get your car serviced during the rest of the week, only on a Saturday. In other words, changing the position of ‘only’ alters the meaning of the sentence, and which of the three options the garage chooses must reflect the services it does offer, or it runs the risk of attracting a torrent of abuse from would-be customers who feel they have been misled.

There is another consideration: the use of ‘only’ ironically, as in the following exchange:

What has X done for [insert your favourite football team here]?

He’s only scored thirty goals this season.

It clearly makes no sense for the respondent in this exchange to say “He’s scored only thirty goals this season”, because a tally of thirty goals in a season is one that any striker would be proud to have notched up. What he is really saying is along the lines of “What more do you want?”

What conclusions can be drawn from this discussion? The principal use of language is to convey meaning, and grammatical rules are there to help in this process, although this is not to suggest that such rules should always be followed. However, if you do break such a rule, whether deliberately or in ignorance, then you should be aware of the possible ambiguities in your message.

If only it was that simple.

no gentleman

Some of you will know that I sometimes use the pseudonym ‘lofuji’ in internet forums, and this post is about the origin of the name.

Lo Fu-ji (pinyin: Lao Fuzi) is the star of a comic strip that first appeared in Hong Kong in the 1960s, Lo/Lao being his surname and Fu-ji/Fuzi an archaic honorific roughly equivalent to Lo Esq. (Mr Lo would be Lo Sin Sang), which reflects his old-fashioned outlook on life. In fact, it would not be unfair to label him a reactionary. He has been marketed in the West as Old Master Q, a meaningless sobriquet.

The cover of each comic book is a comment on a typical aspect of life in Hong Kong. The cover pictured below is a particularly apposite example: it is impossible to play Chinese chess in public here without first attracting a few spectators, followed by at least one of those spectators telling the players which move they should make next. I gave up playing in public decades ago for precisely this reason, even though I’ve never been beaten by a Chinese opponent. I originally attributed this to disbelief that a gweilo would know how to play, but I regularly see games being played in parks and gardens in Hong Kong, and they always draw a small crowd, and there will always be at least one kibbitzer in that crowd. Incidentally, I also used to play wei ch’i in public, but I never received any advice from the sidelines, mainly because although most locals are aware that it is an ancient Chinese board game, few know how to play it.

Lo Fu-ji (red characters; back to the viewer on the above cover) has two friends: Chun Sin Sang (Mr Chun; yellow characters; Lo’s opponent), who wears what can almost be described as a modern uniform in Hong Kong, short-sleeved cotton shirt with slacks; and Tai Ban Siu (‘Big Sweet Potato’; light brown characters), who wears clothes that are similar to those worn by Lo. This is their standard attire, but all three regularly appear in costume in the strips.

Lo also has an enemy, Mr Chiu, who appears regularly in the actual strips but never on the cover. The pair frequently play vicious practical jokes on one another, and when they’re not doing this, they’re usually fighting. Lo comes out on top in some exchanges, but in others he is discomfited:

Be sure to start in the top right-hand corner and work downwards when reading each strip.

In fact, fighting and physical violence play a large part in the strips, from casual fisticuffs following a heated argument to being confronted in the street by a knife-wielding robber and Lo’s reaction. Lo is a kung fu expert, although this doesn’t always work in his favour:

There is also a strong element of the supernatural in many of the strips, and ghosts often make appearances. The following strip, another featuring the rivalry between Lo and Mr Chiu, invokes voodoo, and Mr Chiu gets his comeuppance in a most bizarre fashion.

Another common theme is the ridiculing of locals who have embraced Western fashions: long hair, flared trousers, floral shirts, etc. The prejudices of the artist are clear in such cases, because when such figures do appear, their faces are always ugly, one might say almost simian. The following strip, featuring just such a figure, also illustrates the undue deference shown by many locals towards gweilos in the 1960s and 1970s, which has still not disappeared completely seventeen years after the handover of sovereignty.

While many strips highlight longstanding concerns in Hong Kong, others have become dated. The following strip, for example, reflects the prevailing atmosphere in a typical Chinese restaurant thirty years ago, when dim sum were usually wheeled around in large steaming trolleys, and the person pushing the trolley shouted out its contents. And securing a table was a difficult task in which the restaurant chose not to get involved.

Most of the strips have no writing, so they can be appreciated without any knowledge of Chinese. I must confess that I don’t find these cartoons particularly funny, but Lo Fu-ji, who is certainly no gentleman, provides a good insight into a uniquely Chinese sense of humour, which I still don’t understand fully after more than forty years.

a special relationship

Twenty-five years ago, give or take a few hours, Paula and I were running frantically through gridlocked traffic in Central on our way to an unmissable appointment, our wedding at City Hall. We’d been forced to abandon the car taking us to the ceremony, and we made it with very little time to spare.

A few months later, I introduced Paula to rock climbing in the Lake District. Given my age at the time, I felt that we’d be restricted to climbs graded no harder than ‘severe’, but on our third day out, having already climbed a couple of severes, Paula suddenly asked whether we could do something harder. Well, I managed to fiddle my way up a climb graded ‘very severe’ (VS), and a few days later we set off to do a climb that I’d identified as being at the low end of the VS range of difficulty.

That day didn’t quite go to plan, because someone was doing a climb that crossed our intended route, so I was forced onto another climb (described in Young Sid) that was at the top end of the VS range. Two weeks later, we were doing Kipling Groove, which is a grade harder, which I’d climbed twenty years earlier and which I’d never expected to do again.

The result of my wife’s not so subtle encouragement was that I ended up climbing at the highest standard in my entire climbing career during the 1990s, at a time when I had imagined myself to be past it. Consequently, mere thanks seem like a poor response. Nowadays, our principal physical activity is cycling, and for the most part the tables have been turned: I make sure that Paula is thoroughly cream-crackered after an outing, although I’m left in the same condition at the end of a day too, because I don’t believe in merely pootling along.

I’m not trying to put forward any kind of a blueprint for a successful relationship, but having activities that we enjoy doing together certainly helps. And we both liked intense physical activity before we met. And we haven’t had a real argument in years, although we have mock arguments all the time, because they’re much more fun than sitting in glum silence.

Anyway, I thought I’d post a few of my favourite photos of Paula from the last five years to celebrate twenty-five years together:

The first photo was taken shortly after we moved to Fanling and shows Paula holding a hot ngau lei so (cow’s lips), a type of deep-fried bread that is delicious hot, disgusting cold. The second shows Paula alongside an angels’ trumpets bush a short walk from our house that used to flower every couple of months when this photo was taken in 2011 but has since been cut down, while the third was taken on the same day in the cultivated area between our village and the eastern edge of Fanling. We like flowers.

Both these photos were taken at our friend Tom’s country store in the remote village of Sham Chung, which is the 36km halfway point on what I’ve previously described as a Saturday morning adventure. The first photo shows an empty plate (we never leave any of Tom’s pan-fried noodles) and two empty glasses, so we’re probably about to set off home.

I don’t expect to be around twenty-five years hence—there’s a strong possibility that I’d be dead already if Paula wasn’t around to keep me going. I’d certainly not be anywhere near as fit, so every new day is something to look forward to. More joke arguments; more fun.

* * *

This piece of music sums up how I feel today.

the new west

You see yon precipice—it almost looks
Like some vast building made of many crags,
And in the midst is one particular rock
That rises like a column from the vale,
Whence by our shepherds it is call’d, the Pillar.

William Wordsworth, The Brothers.

Pillar Rock, in Ennerdale, is one of the most spectacular pieces of rock architecture in the Lake District, second only to the summit crags of Scafell, a monstrous carbuncle on the northern flank of what is otherwise an unremarkable mountain. After our exertions on Corvus the previous year, it seemed like a fitting venue for another climb.

Following a number of failures, the Rock was first climbed by local shepherd John Atkinson on 9th July 1826, believed to be by a line now known as the Old West Route, which is no longer regarded as a rock climb. It is no coincidence that both this ascent and the earlier failures were by shepherds, because the topography of the Rock makes it fatally easy for sheep to wander across and jump down to ledges from which they subsequently cannot escape and must be rescued.

The route that I chose on this occasion was the New West Climb, pioneered by George and Ashley Abraham and two companions three-quarters of a century after the Rock’s first ascent. It was graded ‘difficult’ by the Abraham brothers, and it retains that grade now, although there are at least fifteen harder grades (depending on who you ask). It follows a line of grooves and chimneys on the right of the face shown on the photograph above, which is known to climbers as the West Face of High Man and which represents no more than a quarter of the full, precipitous extent of the Rock. According to the latest guidebook, it ‘finds its way through areas of rock usually reserved for harder climbs’.

Should a translation of this quote from the guidebook be needed, then I would point to the complete absence of big ledges on the climb, which have the effect of lessening the sense of exposure. In other words, for such an apparently easy climb, it is quite scary. There is another problem: Pillar Rock is one of the most inaccessible cliffs in the district, with a mandatory walk of several miles up the valley followed by a 2,000-foot slog up the hillside to reach the foot of the West Face. A tough assignment for a nine-year-old boy.

The following sequence of photos provides only a flavour of the climb.

The first part of the climb is neither steep nor difficult.

Getting steeper.

The start of ‘a fairly difficult groove’ (this is a quote from the 1968 guidebook).

Further up the ‘difficult groove’.

Approaching the top of the ‘difficult groove’.

An easy but exposed traverse connects one chimney with the next.

This one’s a tight squeeze.

Very exposed slabs near the top of the climb.

Just one more chimney and we’re at the top.

I suggested above that this was a tough assignment for a nine-year-old, but Siegfried completed the climb in good style. However, by the time we’d descended to the Forestry Commission road immediately below the Rock, it was obvious that he was flagging, so I told him to take a rest while I ran down the valley to the car. Although private cars are banned on such roads, I then drove back up the valley to pick him up. The New West Climb is one of only a handful of routes of this standard in the Lake District that are worth doing, and its remoteness is part of the attraction, but do make sure that you’ve enough left in the tank to complete the walk out. Had a key gate on the road up the valley been locked, which it should have been, then Siegfried would have had to walk all the way back to where I’d originally parked the car.

murder most foul

Although George Orwell’s reputation as an essayist is founded on his longer essays (Inside the Whale; England, Your England; Charles Dickens, etc.), some of his shorter pieces also provide interesting snapshots of life in England between the ends of the two world wars. Decline of the English Murder (1946), for example, laments the changes that had taken place in the nature of murder, from the domestic poisoning dramas of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods to the essentially anonymous murders that had taken place during the Second World War, where the murderer frequently didn’t know the identity of the victim.

In this essay, Orwell lists ten cases from what he calls ‘our great period in murder’ to suggest that there is a ‘family resemblance’ running through them:

Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson. In addition, in 1919 or thereabouts, there was another very celebrated case, which fits into the general pattern but which I had better not mention by name, because the accused man was acquitted.

Although six of the ten cases involved poison, and the victim(s) in seven of the ten cases were either husband or wife of the accused, leading Orwell to construct an imaginary scenario for the ideal murder from the point of view of a typical reader of the News of the World, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the author cherry-picked his cases to support his ‘family resemblance’ hypothesis.

Why else would he ignore one of the most notorious murders of the period, the Camden Town murder? It is notorious precisely because it has never been solved, although the principal suspect was tried for the crime, and acquitted. A brief account of this baffling case follows.

*  *  *

The year is 1907. Emily Dimmock worked as a prostitute in the King’s Cross area of north London and lived at 29 St Paul’s Road, a thoroughfare that runs parallel to the main Midland Railway (MR) line from St Pancras to Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Leeds, with Bertram Shaw, a dining car attendant on MR trains.

Shaw had written to his mother to say that he’d recently married, and at around eleven o’clock on the morning of 12th September, his mother appeared, unannounced, at the house in St Paul’s Road to meet her son’s new bride. In fact, Shaw had promised Emily marriage, but only if she abandoned her previous lifestyle; although they lived together as man and wife, the promised marriage never happened.

The landlady informed Mrs Shaw that her son’s ‘wife’ was still in bed, and the two spent about fifteen minutes in conversation while they waited for Shaw to return from his shift on the railway. When he did return, he knocked on the door of the couple’s apartment but received no answer. He then discovered that the door was locked, and when he had unlocked it, he saw immediately that the parlour had been ransacked. Drawers had been emptied, and their contents were strewn across the floor.

The folding doors leading to the bedroom were also locked, and the key was missing, so Shaw had to break in. The blankets from the bed were in a heap on the floor, while the sheets covered something on the bed from which a trickle of blood had found its way on to the floor. Shaw pulled back the sheets to reveal Emily’s naked body, lying face down. Her throat had been cut so savagely that her head had almost been severed.

Some of Emily’s personal possessions were missing: a gold watch, a silver cigarette case bearing Shaw’s initials, a silver chain and a purse. None of these items was ever found. A postcard album had had some of its contents removed, and the french windows leading into the garden were slightly ajar. However, the likelihood that theft was the motive for the murder was slim, because more valuable items had not been taken.

When the divisional police surgeon examined the body, he estimated the time of death to have been between four and six o’clock that morning, and there were signs that the killer had washed himself before departing. The murder weapon was never found, and police spent the rest of the day trying to piece together Emily’s movements the previous day.

Shaw had been with her until shortly after 4pm, at which time he left to catch the train to Sheffield on which he worked. His employers were able to confirm his movements, meaning that he could be ruled out as a suspect. Under the pseudonym Phyllis, Emily had been well known in the Rising Sun public house in Camden Town, and it was there that the police located their first key witness, a ship’s cook called Roberts.

Roberts had been paid off a few weeks earlier and was engaged in spending the rest of his money before heading back to sea again. He had met ‘Phyllis’ in the Rising Sun four days earlier and had gone back home with her then and on the following two nights. He did not see her on the evening before the murder, because Emily told him that she had a prior engagement, but he provided the police with a tantalizing clue.

On the morning of the day before the murder, he had been dressing when a letter was pushed under the door of Emily’s apartment. She showed it to him, and he was able to tell the police about its peculiarities. In part, it read

Dear Phillis [sic],
 Will you meet me at the Eagle, Camden Town, 8.30 tonight, Wednesday?

It was signed ‘Bert’. Emily then took a postcard from a drawer and showed it to Roberts, who noted that the handwriting was the same, even though the signatory was different:

Phillis darling,
 If it please you meet me 8.15 p.m. at the [a sketch of a rising sun].
 Yours to a cinder,
  Alice.

Emily then proceeded to burn the letter, presumably because it had been signed by a man and would cause her problems if left lying around. The postcard was returned to the drawer. The charred remains of the letter were found in the fireplace by the police, but the postcard did not come to light until Shaw started to pack before abandoning the apartment. It was found under a sheet of newspaper that had been used to line a drawer, and Roberts confirmed that it was indeed the postcard he had seen.

There were four other postcards with the same handwriting in Emily’s album, and it was clear that the writer must have been a regular associate. But who was that writer? The police circulated copies of the postcards to the press, and the News of the World printed a copy of the ‘rising sun’ postcard over the caption: ‘Do you recognize this handwriting?’

Someone did. Ruby Young was also a prostitute, and she wrote a letter to the newspaper identifying the writer as ex-lover Robert Wood, a young artist and engraver whose work had impressed William Morris. However, before she could post it, she was visited by Wood, who asked her to say, if asked, that they always met on Monday and Wednesday evenings (the night before Emily’s murder was a Wednesday).

Having convinced Ruby to do as he had asked, Wood then asked an old friend, who had seen Wood in the Eagle public house on the evening before the murder in the company of a young woman, not to mention the woman if questioned (Wood was not a regular in the Eagle). Wood explained that this was necessary to prevent his father from hearing about his consorting with prostitutes.

Although Ruby Young had agreed to Wood’s request, she was worried, and she confided her anxieties to a female friend, who breached Ruby’s confidence by repeating the story to a journalist. The reporter’s newspaper immediately informed Scotland Yard, and a senior detective was sent to interview Ruby, who was asked to arrange a meeting with Wood. The detective would be present. Wood was arrested as he shook hands with his former partner.

Following an identity parade in which several people picked out Wood as having been in the Eagle on the evening before the murder in the company of Emily Dimmock, Wood was formally charged with murder. It was Wood’s good fortune, when the case came to trial, to have secured the services of the leading defence barrister of his era, Sir Edward Marshall Hall.

Hall was convinced of Wood’s innocence, but the challenge of constructing a credible defence was made more difficult than it might otherwise have been by Wood’s attempts to establish an alibi. There was also the problem of Wood’s strange personality: he was utterly incapable of understanding the dire predicament in which he found himself, and his affected manner would not endear him to a jury.

Most of the background research for the defence was done by a junior colleague of Hall, Wellesley Orr, who believed the evidence of the ship’s cook to be of critical importance. Orr also considered it essential that Wood be called in his own defence; if this was not done, Wood would certainly hang. However, Hall opposed this, mainly because Wood’s personality would make him an unreliable witness. Nevertheless, he allowed himself to be overruled.

The prosecution case was strong: the attempts to construct an alibi; the burnt letter seen by the ship’s cook, which had been written by Wood; the ransacking of the apartment in search of the ‘rising sun’ postcard; and, most damning of all, an eye-witness who would testify to having seen Wood in the vicinity of St Paul’s Road around the time established for the murder.

Hall scored his first point for the defence with his cross-examination of the policeman who had drawn up a street plan of the St Paul’s Road area. The eye-witness who claimed to have seen Wood had done so at 5.05am, but Hall forced the policeman to admit that the street lights had been switched off at 4.37am, which meant that the visibility at five o’clock would have been poor, especially given the light drizzle and muggy atmospheric conditions at the time.

When cross-examining Roberts, the ship’s cook, Hall was able, by subtle questioning, to manoeuvre the witness into a position where he was forced to concede that he may have invented his story. For example, the alleged text of the letter, written on a Tuesday, had used the word ‘tonight’ in reference to an assignation on Wednesday, which Hall pointed out was not usual practice and which Roberts was unable to explain.

The aim of the defence in a criminal trial is not to ‘prove’ that the defendant is not guilty but to point out the ambiguities in the evidence. The eye-witness originally testified to having seen Wood ‘walking away from the house’ (no one saw anyone actually leaving the house), but Hall forced him to concede that whoever he saw, that person was merely ‘walking down the street in a direction away from the house’ and that this was consistent with ‘passing by’.

Hall was able to cast doubt on the testimony of almost all the prosecution witnesses, but his biggest challenge still lay ahead: the testimony, on his own behalf, of Robert Wood. He opened with the big question:

“Did you kill Emily Dimmock?”

Wood smiled but said nothing.

“You must answer!”

“I mean, it is ridiculous,” replied Wood.

“You must answer straight.”

“No, I did not.”

Even the prosecuting barrister could do little to penetrate Wood’s apparent intellectual detachment. The defendant seemed to be viewing the trial as an observer rather than as a participant, and, when not in the witness box, he spent a lot of his time sketching other participants. Despite Hall’s heroic efforts, Wood appeared to be doomed, and the judge was expected to sum up in favour of the prosecution. However, the crucial sentence in that summing-up meant that the jury would have no alternative but to acquit:

In my judgement, strong as the suspicion in this case undoubtedly is, I do not think the prosecution has brought the case near enough home to the accused.

So who did murder Emily Dimmock? As already noted, Marshall Hall was absolutely convinced of Wood’s innocence when he accepted the brief to defend him, but many years later he confided to his daughter that he had changed his mind. His reasoning is not on record, but the attempts to cobble together a convincing alibi for a time that was not relevant to the time of the murder may be more important than the above account suggests. After all, forensic pathology was in its infancy as a scientific discipline, and the night of the murder was warm and muggy, so it is possible that Emily had been dead for much longer than the police surgeon who examined the body had deduced.

Schizophrenia was not a recognized condition in 1907, but there is evidence that Wood was a sufferer: his emotional detachment is certainly suggestive. And then there are the sketches and drawings made by Wood in court and while on remand in Brixton Prison, two of which I reproduce here:

Despite the small sample size, it is possible to conclude that Wood was obsessed with the motif of the rising sun, except that in the second picture the sun appears to be setting. What state of mind does this picture suggest? An old man, apparently dying in the snow, the shivering dog, and the enigmatic caption ‘Silence’; what would a modern-day psychologist make of it? There were no such experts in 1907, which is probably just as well for Robert Wood.