Devonshire's East Devon magazine September October 2018

FASHION & BEAUTY
But here’s the thing...
Karno himself, the
master of ‘pie-in-theface’
slapstick humour
was born in Paul Street
in Exeter and the
expression “a right Fred
Karno’s” is still used
to describe a chaotic
Devon-born
group. Throughout his
Fred Karno
career as an impresario
he often told those who
asked, “I was Devon born and proud of it!”
The film Stan & Ollie will be the climax of
the BFI London Film Festival on 21 October.
and go on general release in January.
The boys are back in town
THE WAY OUT WEST ‘TENT’ - the Devon
chapter of the Sons of the Desert, the Laurel &
Hardy fan club of Great Britain - announced
that they were “bristling with feverish
excitement” following the announcement of
the imminent release of a new film starring
Steve Coogan as Stan and John C Reilly as
Ollie (pictured above).
The immortal duo, stars of more than 100
black and white films, never made it down to
Devon on their farewell tour of the UK (which
is what the film is about) but Stan Laurel
did appear at the old Hippodrome Theatre
in Exeter prior to his Hollywood career. So
too did fellow performer, Charlie Chaplin.
Both comics were members of Fred Karno’s
famous music hall touring company and
frequently teamed up in one particular sketch
called The Mumming Birds which Stan
described in his autobiography as “One of
the most fantastically funny acts ever known”,
and regularly brought the house down with
their patter and knock-about antics.
Secret signs
Members of the Way out West tent (all ‘tents’
are named after their films) will be easy to
spot in the queue at the box office at local
cinemas as they exchange their not-so ‘secret
signs’
Spot them by the Stan Laurel “head scratch”or
the the Oliver Hardy “tie-twiddle”.
Now you see them…
LOOK OUT OF THE WINDOW OF A PLANE
circling ExeterAirport and you could miss
them.
Those feint lines below you have only been
revealed by this summer’s intense heatwave
and show them to be the outlines of a Roman
farm in a field of grass at Bicton, which was
last worked some 2,000 years ago.
Due to the lack of moisture in the soil many
new archaeological discoveries have been
made and quickly recorded because most fade
back into the landscape again following rain.
Historic England’s aerial surveys have
revealed Neolithic ceremonial monuments,
Iron Age settlements, square burial mounds
and now “our” Roman farm for the first time.
Harvest home
AN ANCIENT TRADITION practised in
Devon up until the end of the 19th century
was that the last cart out of the harvest field
should always be driven by a woman.
Now it’s harvest season again, the most
important date in the farming calendar, with
the Harvest Moon due to make its appearance
between 21st and 23rd of September
Today there are some 18, 577 people employed
in farming in the county but how many of
them are women the NFU were unable to
tell us.
If those Victorian maids managed to get out
of the field without hitting the gateposts it
was reckoned to be “a good thing” and they
were declared “mistress of the harvest” for a
year. What happened if the spatially unaware
amongst them failed in their mission we are
not told.
JOHN FISHER
hubcast
.co.u k
What’s on in Devon
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