R.D. Blumenfeld on Drinking.

Countering the American Sumptuary

A concise biography of American-born editor and journalist Ralph David Blumenfeld appears in the site Encyclopdia.com. He was long-lived, from 1864 until 1948, with serious illness ending his professional work in 1936. Most of his adult life was spent in Britain where he became naturalized in 1907. An influential Fleet Street editor, Blumenfeld rose to editor-in-chief of the Daily Express, a post held until 1932.

His German-born father had immigrated to the American Midwest where he founded a German-language newspaper. The son worked for the father as compositor. Following a stint as telegrapher he wrote for newspapers in Chicago and New York, ending as editor before the age of 30.

Blumenfeld settled in the U.K. in 1894 to sell linotype equipment, setting journalism aside.* He was successful, with many media owners as clients, but could not resist the lure of working journalism. He re-entered the field in 1900, still in Britain.

With Canadian Max Aitken aka Lord Beaverbrook and another Canadian, Beverly Baxter, he injected an American flavour to British journalism. The Daily Express became quasi-American in mien, featuring human interest stories in large-type format with blaring headlines.

(I discussed Baxter in my post “When the Americans Arrived”. Indeed, Baxter had a smooth interviewing and writing style that bespoke a North American background. Bluemenfeld had been a mentor (as other sources disclose)).

In 1930 towards the end of an eventful career, Blumenfeld wrote a portrait of drinks and drinking at Christmas: “Seeing old Year out in wet England”. Printed in a Washington, D.C. newspaper, it offered Americans demoralized by years of Prohibition and illicit drinking a tantalizing view of foreign drinking ways.

Reading the opening paragraphs, I was reminded of Beat writer Jack Kerouac’s portrait of a Manhattan cafeteria in the novel Visions of Cody. Kerouac described how an array of luscious foods, routine in New York, dazzled the skint Beat wanderer, one whose revolutionary writing couldn’t penetrate the commercial publishing houses of Manhattan.

Glazed cakes and pastries in a blaze of Technicolor denoted conventional society, on whose margins most artists were fated to move. Blumenfeld presented the array of drinkables available in London in similar fashion, for a non-artist but equally bereft readership.

Beer is not mentioned except by implication. One photo shows beer being drawn in a pub, in another men dressed like bankers are judging beer at a competition. I discussed a similar event of that era in my post “The Bitter Test”.

A snippet from Blumenfeld’s article typifies his style:

His [shop] window is a blaze of electric lamps, shining on imitation snow and ice. Lying on the snow are sledges piled high with every drink you can imagine. There are bottles of very old brandy which you may buy for the price of a bottle of inferior bootleg gin, graceful Hock bottles with their long stems, jolly, fat Hollands [a gin], clarets, Burgundys, Bordeaux, bottles of Scotch and bottles of Irish, and in a sledge all to themselves the succulent, insidious French liqueurs so dear to women and so cheap to buy.

On he went with readers’ eyes widening apace:

…at one end of the display Santa Claus is loaded to the white and bushy eyebrows with kummel, white port, Gordon’s gin—the real, not the synthetic—Rhine wine, vodka, and a sack over his shoulder from the neck of which peep the golden tops of bottles of champagne by such firms as Heidsick, Pol Roger, Pommeroy, Lemoine …

Blumenfeld also sketched the wine vaults at London Docks. They were built by the great engineer Rennie in the early 1800s and served bibulous London for two centuries. An invitation to taste wine and nibble snacks in the cellars was a sign of social distinction.

The ranks of drink connoisseurs were even fewer, then, a select group of writers, publicists and professionals.

By revealing the arcana of wine and beer in 1930 Blumenfeld forecast our own time where expertise and interest – for wine, beer, coffee, etc., – is far more widely disseminated. Ditto for foods, cars and the other emblems of a consumer society.

Increased democracy, freer enterprise, and the information age have made it so.

A painting of R.D. Blumenfeld appears in the UK’s National Portrait Gallery.

….

*See the death notice printed in Australia.

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