Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA)

Finally, after a hiatus of more than 2 years due to COVID our little group got to meet again.  It honestly felt like we were ‘coming home’ as we arrived at Ralph Connor house.  There was a such an easy flow to the meeting and, as ever the members were so engaged and congenial the time seemed to fly by.  As Cynthia put it when we were gathering ourselves to leave, “It felt like we had met just recently instead of being separated for so many years.”

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The Strawberry Shortcake

Of course, we had the celebratory Strawberry Shortcake.  This has become a tradition for our group.  For me the strawberry theme is a nod to the strawberry picking in “Emma” the day before the journey to Box Hill for a picnic.  I imagine there may have been a strawberry shortcake in one of the many cartons the servants lugged to the site.  Others may identify with different references in the novels. 

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The Presentation

Murray and Marina made a lively joint presentation on the theme, “Officers and Tars – Regency Period England”.  Both Murray and Marina were good sports about letting us interrupt their carefully curated and organized information as we spontaneously peppered them with questions throughout.

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It was great fun finding out the navy origin of some of the phrases we use today.  For example, ‘The bottom of the barrel’.  Water was a necessary but scarce commodity on all naval ships.  In many instances the water was collected from the Thames River which at that time was basically a sewer.  The solid waste would sink to the ‘bottom of the barrel’.  Accordingly, when you drank from the bottom of the barrel you were ingesting the worst of the worst. Blech!!! 

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If you weren’t able to attend the meeting, corner Murray and Marina at some future meeting and ask them to unleash their naval vocabulary – and especially ask about the reason sailors refer to ships as ‘she’ or ‘her’.

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And here’s an interesting note.  A lot of seamen wore gold earrings.  This was not an affectation.  Earrings could be used as money if they found themselves in need.  Also, many sailors had their name and home town engraved inside the earring so that if they were killed there was a means of identifying them and sending their remains home – a pre-cursor to dog tags.

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Clearly life was hard for seamen in those early times.  Press gangs roamed the towns where the ships were moored, whacking people across the head to ‘press’ them into service.  Even children as young as 12 could not escape these hoodlums.  Scurvy, storms at sea and lightning killed more men at sea than battle ever did. 

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Marina’s late husband, David was in the Canadian navy from 1953 through 1979. Although military people are always in danger of being in harm’s way this was a relatively peaceful period war-wise and apparently David felt like his time in the navy was one of the happiest periods of his life – complete with telling tall tales and visiting ports of call all over the world.

As it turns out Eileen’s daughter is currently in the U.S. military and she was able to share information about her daughter’s adventures (but not too much…after all a mother only wants to know about non-scary stuff.

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Future Meetings

After enjoying our cake and coffee, we settled in to discuss potential themes for our meetings running through to December 2023.  That may seem a long time from now but in fairness the gestation period of a good presentation can be many months. 

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If you weren’t at the meeting but have topics of interest, please forward them to Lorna and we will slot them into our calendar.  Please note, suggesting a topic doesn’t mean you are obliged to develop the presentation.  Someone else might like to adopt it or…you might find someone would like to partner with you in developing material.

Hope to see you at the next meeting in October.

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