You couldn’t go a week in the 80s as a kid in Britain without someone saying Oompa-Loompa stick it up your jumper.
You did this action too, pumping your hand to make a weird bulge under your jumper through a hoop made with one arm and a pretend arm made from an empty sleeve.
Oh here’s a YouTube).
Entertainment before the internet!
(I never know if “jumper” is a word outside the UK? A sweater, a pullover.)
It’s funny how these things come into your head after honestly decades. I think it’s about having a kid of a certain age that erupts memories of being that age yourself.
Free association was developed by Freud in the 1890s and is a sort of interior Wikipedia rabbit-holing. It’s a kind of divination of the self that reveals personal truths, inaccessible before you begin pulling the thread: the logic of association is a form of unconscious thinking.
So I remembered this phrase and the admittedly peculiar trick (which is still entertaining as it happens) and went digging and it’s not to do with Oompa-Loompas (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964) but actually spelt umpa, umpa.
It was a common phrase apparently and was notably a song by The Two Leslies (I’d never heard of them) from 1935.
Here it is (YouTube). Listen!
A jolly comic song in classic BBC Received Pronunciation!
B-side, also on that YouTube: “Miss Porkington Would Like Cream Puffs.”
A weird era in the UK.
In the shadow of the first war. So much loss, the vanishing of the old aristocracy and the rise of the middle class. Tensions rising ahead of the second war (the Nazis had already opened the concentration camps but nobody knew).
Also the transition to radio from the era of music hall and “variety,” what the BBC would later term “light entertainment.”
Then I listened to the lyrics.
And Umpa, Umpa opens with a bleak verse about the workhouse??
‘Twas Christmas Day at the workhouse and you know how kind they are
Umpa, umpa, stick it up your jumper
Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la
The lyrics.
The grub was drub, the meat was tough, the spuds had eyes like prongs
They said they were King Edwards but they looked more like King Kong’s
The master said “this pud is good” and a pauper shouted “ah!”
Umpa, umpa, stick it up your jumper
Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la.
The workhouse system was quite the way of doing things.
They were established in 1631 as a way to set poorer people to work
and, via the New Poor Law of 1834, evolved into a organised system of welfare and punishment that helped destitute people only if they entered a workhouse, where they were put to work in a fashion that was deliberately generally pointless.
The system was finally abolished in 1930.
So deliberately putative but I get the impression that somehow they saw it as a a kindness?
I read the Wikipedia page on Workhouses and then on Boards of guardians – the workhouses were locally organised, run by “guardians” elected only by the landowners who paid the poor tax.
What made The Two Leslies think of workhouses for their song?
So Jung talks about synchronicity, moments of coincidence in the world or acausal interconnectedness, and my feeling is that by being attuned to and following these threads then you might dowse the collective unconsciousness (also an idea from Jung) and perhaps read the mind of society itself.
Now my kid goes to a club in Peckham on the weekends and there’s a grand and beautiful old building that we pass on the way.
I’ve always noticed it.
It has a sundial at the top which has a slogan: DO TODAY’S WORK TODAY
I loved it, took a photo and posted on Insta.
Maybe this could be a motto for me? I thought.
I looked it up.
You guessed it, it was the HQ of the local Board of Guardians and ran the local workhouses.
Here’s a history of the Camberwell workhouses. (Camberwell and Peckham are neighbouring neighbourhoods.)
I say “ran” the workhouses.
Here are quotes about Peckham workhouses from the late 1800s:
it was used as a workhouse where the city paupers were farmed.
And
The master of the workhouse received a given sum per head for ‘farming’ his disorderly crew.
“Farmed.”
Sundial mottos are always a little dark.
The Board of Governors sundial that I saw is listed in the British Sundial Society database and there’s a whole book of sundial mottos called, well, A Book of Sundial Mottos (1903) which you can find on archive.org:
without . shadow . nothing
time . is . the . chrysalis . of . eternity
the . scythe . of . time . carries . a . keen . edge
as . the . hour . that . is . past, . so . life . flies
But even so, in the context of workhouses, Do Today’s Work Today hits different.
Not to get too heavy but Albeit macht frei, Works Sets You Free, right? Auschwitz was opened in 1940.
An attitude that cynically connects work and redemption. Perhaps a something in the air in the 1930s, these slogans don’t come out of nowhere. Maybe that’s what The Two Leslies were picking up when they wrote their bit, without knowing it, with the Second World War still in the future, and the discovery of the camps even deeper into the future unknown, somehow the thread of that knowledge was there in 1935, something unsayable that the collective unconscious found a way to say.
Umpa, umpa.
You couldn’t go a week in the 80s as a kid in Britain without someone saying
You did this action too, pumping your hand to make a weird bulge under your jumper through a hoop made with one arm and a pretend arm made from an empty sleeve.
Oh here’s a YouTube).
Entertainment before the internet!
(I never know if “jumper” is a word outside the UK? A sweater, a pullover.)
It’s funny how these things come into your head after honestly decades. I think it’s about having a kid of a certain age that erupts memories of being that age yourself.
Free association was developed by Freud in the 1890s and is a sort of interior Wikipedia rabbit-holing. It’s a kind of divination of the self that reveals personal truths, inaccessible before you begin pulling the thread:
So I remembered this phrase and the admittedly peculiar trick (which is still entertaining as it happens) and went digging and it’s not to do with Oompa-Loompas (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964) but actually spelt
It was a common phrase apparently and was notably a song by The Two Leslies (I’d never heard of them) from 1935.
Here it is (YouTube). Listen!
A jolly comic song in classic BBC Received Pronunciation!
B-side, also on that YouTube: “Miss Porkington Would Like Cream Puffs.”
A weird era in the UK.
In the shadow of the first war. So much loss, the vanishing of the old aristocracy and the rise of the middle class. Tensions rising ahead of the second war (the Nazis had already opened the concentration camps but nobody knew).
Also the transition to radio from the era of music hall and “variety,” what the BBC would later term “light entertainment.”
Then I listened to the lyrics.
And Umpa, Umpa opens with a bleak verse about the workhouse??
The lyrics.
Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la.
The workhouse system was quite the way of doing things.
They were established in 1631 as a way to and, via the New Poor Law of 1834, evolved into a organised system of welfare and punishment that helped destitute people only if they entered a workhouse, where they were put to work in a fashion that was deliberately The system was finally abolished in 1930.
So deliberately putative but I get the impression that somehow they saw it as a a kindness?
I read the Wikipedia page on Workhouses and then on Boards of guardians – the workhouses were locally organised, run by “guardians” elected only by the landowners who paid the poor tax.
What made The Two Leslies think of workhouses for their song?
So Jung talks about synchronicity, moments of coincidence in the world or acausal interconnectedness, and my feeling is that by being attuned to and following these threads then you might dowse the collective unconsciousness (also an idea from Jung) and perhaps read the mind of society itself.
Now my kid goes to a club in Peckham on the weekends and there’s a grand and beautiful old building that we pass on the way.
I’ve always noticed it.
It has a sundial at the top which has a slogan:
I loved it, took a photo and posted on Insta.
Maybe this could be a motto for me? I thought.
I looked it up.
You guessed it, it was the HQ of the local Board of Guardians and ran the local workhouses.
Here’s a history of the Camberwell workhouses. (Camberwell and Peckham are neighbouring neighbourhoods.)
I say “ran” the workhouses.
Here are quotes about Peckham workhouses from the late 1800s:
And
“Farmed.”
Sundial mottos are always a little dark.
The Board of Governors sundial that I saw is listed in the British Sundial Society database and there’s a whole book of sundial mottos called, well, A Book of Sundial Mottos (1903) which you can find on archive.org:
But even so, in the context of workhouses, Do Today’s Work Today hits different.
Not to get too heavy but Albeit macht frei, Works Sets You Free, right? Auschwitz was opened in 1940.
An attitude that cynically connects work and redemption. Perhaps a something in the air in the 1930s, these slogans don’t come out of nowhere. Maybe that’s what The Two Leslies were picking up when they wrote their bit, without knowing it, with the Second World War still in the future, and the discovery of the camps even deeper into the future unknown, somehow the thread of that knowledge was there in 1935, something unsayable that the collective unconscious found a way to say.
Umpa, umpa.