Category Archives: 20th century

1900: The sad death of Mrs Wank

In August 1900 the New York press reported the sad death of Mrs Lyda Wank. According to the New York Times, Mrs Wank was out driving with her young son Jesse in an open-top carriage. The horses pulling the carriage were spooked and:

“..Mrs Wank became frightened. She begged the driver to stop them and let her out, but the driver could not quiet the animals long enough…”

The panicked Mrs Wank tried alighting the carriage while it was still moving, however:

“..in her excitement her foot missed the step and she was thrown. Her skirts caught in the step… and she fell with her head between the wheels. The hind wheel passed over her neck. When she was lifted from the pavement a moment later she was dead.”

Doctors later concluded that the victim died almost instantly of a broken neck. According to census records she was the wife of Samuel I. Wank. Their son Jesse, who was nine years of age when his mother died, later became a Broadway producer.

Source: New York Times, August 2nd 1900; US Census records 1900, 1910. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1913: Obscene war songs from the Ivory Coast

Maurice Delafosse was a French anthropologist and researcher who spent several years living and working on the west coast of Africa. Delafosse specialised in native languages and other cultural and behavioural aspects of tribal groups.

Writing in the first decade of the 1900s, Delafosse described how native Africans in what is now the Ivory Coast responded to threats or hostility, in this instance from the Okou:

“The women would assemble and, with their back to the enemy, make violent and exaggerated thrusts of the buttocks in the direction of the hostile party, while shouting “My arse for Okou!”

According to Delafosse, the menfolk would resort to a time-honoured tradition: the obscene song. He recorded some of the lyrics used:

“Okou is our enemy, cut off his head!”
“Okou is the excrement out of my backside!”
“Okou enjoys the sexual company of dogs!”
“The genitals of Okou are rotten and smell of feces!”

Source: Maurice Delafosse, Revue d’Ethnographie et de Sociologie, No. 4, 1913. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1902: Zuni clowns drink urine, tear apart live animals

The Zuni are a Native American tribe whose ancestors lived along the Zuni River in what is now New Mexico. Like other American tribal groups, the Zuni had a rich cultural heritage, particularly in the production of arts and crafts.

They were also known for their lively communal events which included games, rodeos and entertainment by a group of clowns called the Koyemshi. Performances by the Koyemshi began with jokes and slapstick, much as one might expect from Western circus clowns. But Koyemshi clowns didn’t stop there, as government researchers reported in 1902:

“Each [Koyemshi clown] endeavours to excel his fellows in buffoonery and in eating repulsive things, such as bits of old blanket or splinters of wood. They bite off the heads of living mice and chew them, tear dogs limb from limb, eat the intestines and fight over the liver like hungry wolves… The one who swallows the largest amount of filth with the greatest gusto is most commended by the fraternity and onlookers. A large bowl of urine is handed to a Koyemshi, who … after drinking a portion, pours the remainder over himself by turning the bowl over his head.”

Today there are approximately 10,000 descendants of the Zuni (but no active Koyemshi) living in the United States.

Source: Bureau of American Ethnology, 23rd Annual Report, 1901-1902. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1932: Australian musician enjoys whipping, fish hooks in breasts

Percy Grainger was an Australian musician, best known for his esoteric and inventive compositions, in particular his popular arrangement of the English folk tune Country Gardens.

Something lesser known is that Grainger was also into sado-masochism and sexual activities involving violence and cruel fantasies. Grainger’s favourite hobby was whipping, both as a ‘giver’ and a ‘receiver’. He owned a large collection of leather whips of all sizes and often took them on tour.

Writing about his sexual proclivities in 1932, Grainger described himself as:

“..a sadist and a flagellant… my highest sexual delight is to whip a beloved woman’s body. Her screams, her struggles to evade the whip, the marks of the whip arising on her body, all give me a feeling of male power and exultation that swells my love and devotion towards my sweetheart a hundredfold, and makes our love-life more intense and impulsive.”

Grainger’s impulses were apparently worse in his youth. Again writing in the 1930s he recalled a recurring fantasy from his teens that involved:

“..sticking two fishhooks, slung on four pulleys, one into each of a woman’s breasts, and then pulley-raising the fishhooks till the weight of the woman’s body caused the fishhooks to rip thru (sic) the breast flesh…”

Source: Misc. letters and essays by Percy Grainger, including “Read this if Ella Grainger or Percy Grainger are found dead, covered with whip marks” (1932), “Notes of whip lust” (1948) and letter to Karen Holten, March 19th 1909. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1961: Italian artist sells his own dung for price of gold

In 1961, Italian avant-garde artist Piero Manzoni manufactured 90 small cans, claiming that each contained his own dung. Their lids were numbered and signed by Manzoni; each can bore a label reading:

ARTIST’S SHIT
Net content 30 grammes
Preserved in its natural state
Produced and packaged in May 1961

Manzoni sold his cans of dung for $US37 each, basing this on the equivalent per-gramme price of gold. In recent years Sotheby’s has sold cans of Merde d’Artista for 124,000 euros (2007) and 97,250 pounds (2008).

Source: Various, including Piero Manzoni and Germano Celant, Manzoni, 2007. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1941: Ugandan wizard dispatched with unripe bananas

Fabiano Kinene, Seperiano Kiwanuka and Albert Iseja all appeared before a Ugandan court in 1941, charged with murdering an old man in their village. According to the defendants, the victim was practising witchcraft and they were acting to defend the village.

Kinene claimed the victim was discovered in the middle of the night, “naked, with strange objects and acting surreptitiously”:

“They caught him performing an act which they genuinely believed to be an act of witchcraft… they killed him in the way which, in the olden times, was considered proper for the killing of a wizard… Death was caused by the forcible insertion of unripe bananas into the deceased’s bowel, through the anus…”

The court lowered the charge from murder to manslaughter, ruling that acts of attempted witchcraft might constitute a “grave and sudden provocation”.

Source: R v. Fabiano Kinene, 1941, cited in Ugandan Law Review. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1901: Human meatballs sold in China

At the turn of the 20th century, parts of rural China were ravaged by drought, leading to crop failures and famine. American journalist and Christian missionary Francis Nichols toured Xian province, where more than two million people had perished, and saw evidence of cannibalism in the sale of human meatballs:

“By and by, human flesh began to be sold in the suburbs of Xian. At first the traffic was carried on clandestinely, but after a time a horrible kind of meat ball, made from the bodies of human beings who had died of hunger, became a staple article of food, that was sold for about four American cents a pound.”

Many Chinese believed that foreign imperialism and the spread of Christianity were responsible for crop failures and famine. This anti-foreign sentiment fuelled the Boxer movement of the same period.

Source: Francis Nichols, New York Christian Herald, 1901. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1903: Army officer confesses to fornicating with fruit

Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) was a London-born physician and author who specialised in research into human sexuality, particularly sexual behaviours that departed from what was considered normal, at least in Ellis’ time. His interest and specialisation in sexuality was ironic, given that Ellis’ own marriage (to suffragist and women’s rights campaigner Edith Lees, an open lesbian) was largely sexless.

Writing in 1903, Ellis detailed his interviews with “GR”, an unnamed officer who had served with the Indian colonial army. “GR” admitted to an active bisexual sex life: from interaction with other boys at school, to encounters with a host of foreign prostitutes, to affairs with his fellow military officers.

Much more peculiarly, when partners were unavailable and “GR” turned to self pleasure, he confessed to making “carnal use” of fruit, specifically, melons and papaya. According to “GR”, masturbating with tropical fruit was “most satisfactory”.

In the same work, Ellis also details his discussions with Captain Kenneth Searight, a notorious pederast who was also stationed in India. Searight kept a diary listing his sexual liaisons with no less than 129 local boys, describing their ages, appearance and the number of orgasms with each.

Source: Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 1903. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.

1913: Marie Stopes claims ignorance of sex

Marie Stopes (1880-1958) was a Scottish-born botanist and author. She became famous for promoting sex education for women and awareness of female contraception, opening the first birth control clinic in Britain.

Stopes graduated with a bachelor’s degree in botany from University College in London before her 21st birthday. Within two years she had also earned a science doctorate and a PhD. In 1911, she married Reginald Ruggles Gates, a Canadian scientist, but within a year their political differences and personal incompatibility had taken a toll on their relationship.

In 1913 Stopes sought the dissolution of her marriage to Gates. When seeking annulment, Stopes made some astonishing claims. She swore that the marriage had not been consummated, mainly because Stopes was unaware what sexual intercourse actually was. She claimed to have discovered the reality of her situation after visiting the museum and reading an anatomical text.

Stopes was medically tested and discovered to be virgina intacta. She was granted a divorce in 1916. Two years later she penned her controversial but groundbreaking sexual guide, Married Love.

Stopes regularly asserted that her motive for educating married women was to spare them the misery of sexual ignorance that she had endured. Some historians and biographers, however, view Stopes’ claims of marital ignorance with scepticism.

Source: Various, including William Garrett, Marie Stopes: Feminist, Eroticist, Eugenicist, 2008. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.