What would Martha think? The acid test for a rookie reporter

What would Martha think? As a rookie reporter that was the question I often asked myself. A former mentor, the late, great Des Maguire, introduced me to Martha and her newspaper-reading husband.

The Irish Farmers Journal news editor didn’t like to discourage fledgling reporters so, if he was offered a dull story, he would take a puff on his pipe and say it was grand, but was it a “Gee whiz, hey Martha” kind of story? I had no idea who Martha was, but I imagined her pottering around the kitchen while her husband read the newspaper. He would occasionally exclaim “Gee whiz, hey Martha” when he read something interesting, and Martha would drop her spatula in excitement.

I seriously doubt that my article about the opening of the suckler beef premium scheme would have caused Martha to drop her spatula. But I always aspired to write something that would stop her in her tracks.

I thought of her again this week when I was scrolling through the archives of this newspaper during a prolonged period of procrastination. My eye caught a reference to cricket fighting and I immediately thought: Martha would be intrigued by this. Did violent and bloody fights break out at cricket matches in the 1930s?

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But on further perusal I discovered the article was about the less violent pastime of watching crickets fight each other. Less violent for the humans, of course. I’m sure the poor crickets would say otherwise if anyone cared to ask them.

The Irishman’s diarist of the early 1930s was surprisingly well-informed about cricket fighting and told how the crickets were weighed on tiny scales and placed in a jar. The referee invited battle by tickling them with a pig’s bristle. “Irritated, angered, with no refuge in sight, the crickets flash into cannibalistic action,” he wrote.

At first, I wondered if the diarist had indulged in a few generous goblets of brandy before penning the piece. Brandy sounds like the drink of choice for an Irish Times correspondent in the 1930s. He would, of course, be wearing a smoking jacket and dictating the article to his pencil-skirted, bespectacled secretary.

But on further investigation, I learned that he was entirely accurate. Cricket fighting has been going on in China for more than 1,000 years and reportedly contributed to the fall of the Song empire in the 13th century. Chancellor Jia Sidao spent more time thinking about crickets than dealing with political and military issues and, before he knew it, the empire had collapsed around his ears.

Cricket fights are brief, and the winner is determined when one cricket retreats or stops chirping. The activity has inspired scientific studies, including one from Stanford University which focused on the refusal of defeated crickets to fight again unless they are tossed in the air by their trainers. The researchers found that tossing the insects in the air activated their flight response and restored their aggressiveness.

It took me all of five minutes to find a slew of reports on cricket fighting online, but it made me wonder how that Irishman’s diarist and his editors checked the veracity of reports filed by correspondents almost a century ago.

Inevitably, a few rogue stories slipped through. May I present the incredible dissolving bathing suit, as reported by Alex Boese’s Museum of Hoaxes? He found news reports filed from the French Riviera in December 1930 about a new synthetic swimsuit fabric which immediately dissolved when it encountered salt water. The articles were written by a friend of Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Webb Miller, who recalled the incident in his memoir. Miller’s friend had heard that a British millionaire had ordered many of these swimsuits and gave them to his female guests for late night swimming at his parties on the Riviera.

After the story was published, the journalist’s managing editor asked that several costumes be sent to him at the request of a swimsuit manufacturer who advertised with the newspaper. The journalist investigated further and discovered, with a sinking heart, that the story was a hoax. Thinking fast, he told his editor he couldn’t send the swimwear as it would dissolve in the salty sea air. But the editor persisted and suggested a hermetically sealed box. The journalist put a handful of pulverised breakfast cereal into a tin box and shipped it across the Atlantic. The editor was appeased and queries about the story disappeared, just like the fictitious swimsuits.

The only appropriate response to that is: “Gee whiz, hey Martha.”