How Popeye won the war and lost the truth

I WANT to tell you a funny story about Popeye. But first I want to tell you how I came across the story, because that’s quite funny too.
I read it in the Journal of Criminology, which is not a publication I often read, and not a place you might expect to find stories about pipe-chomping cartoon sailors.
To be more precise, I read it on the Internet Journal of Criminology – and the internet, of course, is a place you might find almost anything.
Including, as it happens, a lot of stuff about Popeye. Some of which you may have heard, some of which may be dimly familiar, some of which, as a result, you may believe.
You know Popeye, of course. He may even have convinced you as a child to eat your greens.
As he said in 1931 in a ‘special letter to me children frens’: “Dear kids – the reasin why I yam so tough an’ strong is on account of I has et spinach when I was young.”
Good old Popeye. Quality propaganda, that.
It’s been credited with bringing about a huge rise in America’s consumption of spinach, and indirectly even with influencing the outcome of World War II.
“America was ‘strong to the finish cos they ate their spinach’ and duly defeated the Hun.”
That’s how TJ Hamblin put it in a 1981 British Medical Journal article entitled Fake.
He went on, however: “Unfortunately the propaganda was fraudulent. German chemists reinvestigating the iron content of spinach had shown in the 1930s that the original workers had put the decimal point in the wrong place and made a tenfold overestimate of its value. Spinach is no better for you than cabbage, brussels sprouts, or broccoli.”
So there we have it. A neat object lesson in checking your facts – and, incidentally, in the power of lies, or oft-repeated mistakes.
Except that this lesson comes with a huge footnote. Because Hamblin himself appears to have got his facts wrong, or at least a little muddled.
And he didn’t cite his sources, which is the main reason he’s taken to task in the Journal of Criminology by Dr Mike Sutton (who presumably published his paper there because he’s its editor, not because he was uncovering anything criminal).
As Sutton tells it (and he does provide copious citations):
• Spinach probably is no ‘better for you’ than other greens
• It may contain more iron than beef, but not by as much as is sometimes claimed
• The rise in its popularity in America began before 1928, when Popeye was created
Most crucially, that misplaced decimal point, which has been referred to hundreds of times online and in more-or-less learned articles, was probably made up by Hamblin.
Despite popular assumption, the sailor character wasn’t invented to advertise canned spinach – he only started recommending it in 1931, three years into his career as a newspaper strip.
And – at least as drawn by his creator EC Segar – Popeye never actually claimed spinach as a source of iron.
The first time he’s seen eating spinach (raw leaves from the ground, not out of a can), he explains: “Spinach is full of Vitamin ‘A’ an tha’s what makes hoomans strong an’ helty”.
Which is at least partly true.
As teachers and propagandists have known for centuries, humour is a good way of passing on information and getting it remembered.
Unfortunately, it can help just as much in the planting and nurturing of lies, either deliberate or inadvertent.
As does repetition. Those factoids about Popeye, spinach, iron and that apparently fictitious decimal point are much more widely disseminated than Sutton’s careful research on the subject – and no doubt more widely believed.
It’s all part of what Sutton calls “socially embedded codswallop”.
And there’s more than plenty of that around.
Sutton relates it to racism and hate crime; problem gambling; drug, alcohol and child abuse; online urban myths, hoaxes and scams.
I think he’s right. I also believe most of what he reports in his article.
Even though I only read it online.


THERE can hardly be a better summing-up of what science is all about than the motto of the Royal Society, “Nullius in verba”. Or, roughly translated: “Take no one’s word for it.”
Dr Mike Sutton refers to the Bellman’s Fallacy, so named for the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s great comic poem The Hunting of the Snark, who claims: “What I tell you three times is true.”
Sutton says: “There is no scientific law which says the more frequently a belief is voiced, or the more people that believe it, the more likely it is to be true or become true.”
Those who believe, for example, that what is good for “the market” or the Stock Exchange is good for the rest of us, take note.
Likewise those who believe that the British economy can only be saved by hacking the public sector to bits.
It’s seldom been put better than by Ira Gershwin: “The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.”

We didn't think it could be all over - it is now

TOMORROW will be a very strange day. Barring holidays and sickness, it will be the first Saturday for 30 years that I haven’t gone to work.
I have at various times been on the payroll of seven different newspapers. Each time I have left one, it has been my choice, to move on to another. Until this time.
Considering the history of the British press, I may be lucky, but this is the first time a paper has folded under me.
The shock is all the greater because no one – except, perhaps, a handful of News International chiefs – could have seen it coming.
As one colleague, a professional tipster, put it: “If you’d wanted to bet a fortnight ago on which Sunday paper would be the first to close down, you could have got 1,000-1 against the News of the World.”
The biggest-selling English-language paper in the world. A paper with a proud 168-year history behind it. A paper still read, until last Sunday, by almost a quarter of the adults in Britain.
When I joined the News of the World in 1995, its weekly sale was well over four million copies. At the last – except for the surge by final-issue souvenir-hunters – that figure had fallen below 3m. Yet in that time, its share of the Sunday market had steadily risen.
Its sudden closure, even in an era of falling newspaper sales, seemed inconceivable. And then it happened.
I don’t wish to speculate here and now on exactly why it happened.
There are plenty of conspiracy theories about that. Theories alleging a conspiracy by the company owners, the Murdochs; others alleging a conspiracy against them.
There are plenty of people out there – too many of them, I’m afraid, among my friends – eager to celebrate the giant’s fall.
But of this I am sure: It shouldn’t have happened. It needn’t have happened. No one, really, will be better off for it.
Of course, there were times when I groaned inwardly at things the paper published. Times I disagreed with what it said, even what it appeared to stand for.
But that’s part of the point of a free press.
If it only published things I agreed with, it wouldn’t be free.
And, despite popular assumptions about control and influence, there is plenty of evidence that over the years all the Murdoch-owned papers have published much with which Murdoch himself disagreed.
The only diktat applying to all Murdoch titles which I’ve been aware of was one in support of ecological responsibility.
News International was the first – as far as I know, so far the only – major media group to declare itself carbon neutral. Which is surely a good thing.
The News of the World may have become, suddenly, a “toxic title”, but the company is not as toxic – literally – as many of those companies which catastrophically withdrew advertising support.
I might feel compelled to retaliate against that action by boycotting Sainsbury’s and Asda, but I can’t.
That’s because I haven’t set foot in either of those stores for many years. For ethical reasons.
Ethics? A News of the World journalist?
If that’s a contradiction, it’s no greater than the one made by any caring, thoughtful person who chooses to shop, to drive, to take foreign holidays or to use a bank – among other things we all do.
Certain assumptions have always been made about the News of the World. Assumptions based largely on snobbery. Assumptions which, before I went to work there, I largely shared.
When I first presented myself at the Wapping plant, I was at a low point in my life. To be blunt, I needed the money.
I expected the office to be populated by the hard-nosed and vulgar, to be bossed by bullies. I thought I’d be able to put up with it for a few months.
I certainly didn’t expect to walk into a sports department full of people I liked.
Dedicated, professional people whose company I enjoyed and whose opinions I very often shared.
Yet that, with only isolated, unimportant exceptions, is what I found, and what has continued to be the case ever since.
The News of the World’s last sports editor, Paul McCarthy, is one of the finest journalists I’ve had the privilege of working with.
The team of writers he assembled really did include the best in the business.
On the night of the rugby World Cup final in 2007, I had the task of sub-editing the match report sent in from Paris by Andy Dunn, the then new chief sportswriter.
What he submitted, seconds after the game ended, was a well-crafted masterpiece. I had nothing to do but fit it into the space.
I remember it only because it was my first close involvement with his work under pressure. I know now that he’s always that good.
His column-writing too, though I generally write on different subjects, has been an influence on mine.
Those are names you might know. Even if you’ve been a regular News of the World reader for years, you won’t have heard of Nick Jones. But he was just as vital a part of the sports operation, and for a lot longer.
Nick was chief of that unseen, unsung team vital to all newspapers, the sub-editors – the team of which I was a member.
The people who make the words fit the pages and the paper’s style, who check names, facts, spellings and grammar.
The people who – most vitally on the News of the World – write the headlines.
Those are the things I’ve been doing for most of my career. And I’ve never done it for a better, or a nicer, boss than Nick.
There are others on the team I shall miss too.
I looked around the sports room last Saturday night and I saw 50 people who had never hacked anybody’s phone, or asked anyone else to do so. Who had no share in whatever guilt there may have been elsewhere, at an earlier date.
Who were still, right up to the end and despite any bitterness and disbelief, working with care, decency and professionalism.
I have been involved in sports journalism for all but two of the last 33 years. For exactly half that time I have put in at least one weekly shift at the News of the World.
I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve been proud of it.
It will take a while really to believe it’s all over.

Which people is democracy for?

WE live, supposedly, in a democratic country. Which means, in Abraham Lincoln’s great phrase, “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.
Not for the rich. Not for those who happen to have been born wealthy. Not for those who move other people’s money around and end up with a lot of it themselves.
For the people. For you, me and all the folk down your street and mine.
For the people who get old and need pensions.
For the people who are young and need educating.
For the people who get sick and need treatment.
For the people who get unlucky and need welfare.
With this in mind, and with thanks to my friend Alan Baker who dug out the figures – all from reliable public sources – I’d like to share with you a few interesting facts.
• In 2010, state pension payments in the UK added up to £117.2billion. That’s a lot of money. Not so much, though, when you divide it out among more than 10million people.
• The personal wealth of the 1,000 richest people in Britain totals £395bn – of which £124bn is owned by just 20 people.
• In 2008 the UK government spent a total of £581bn on pensions, health, education, defence, welfare and transport. Pretty much everything, in fact, that a government is there to provide.
• That same year it shelled out £850bn on rescuing private sector banks from collapse.
• This year the UK National Debt stands at around 80 per cent of GDP (that’s the total market value of all goods and services produced in the country).
• In 1947 the UK National Debt stood at around 238 per cent of GDP. Yet that was the year the Welfare State was formed. For the people.
Now take another, closer look at those figures and remind me who and what democracy is for?

Stand by while your pocket is picked?

IT’S not an original comment – it’s been around quite a bit lately on the net – but it’s worth repeating:
“Remember when teachers, nurses, doctors and lollipop ladies crashed the stock market, wiped out banks, took billions in bonuses and paid no tax? No, me neither.”
Of course you can add quite a few other important people to that list too. All of them people whose jobs are about providing necessary services to society, not merely selling stuff that may or may not be needed (and in most cases probably isn’t).
All of whom have been told by the government that they must pay more in to their pension funds, take less out, and wait a few years longer to get it.
It is, of course, impossible to put a general figure on how much is being filched off each person. Cases vary from individual to individual.
But I have seen one calculation that put the figure for one teacher at around £350,000.
Not, of course, that that particular teacher has ever seen, or ever will see, such a sum at one time. Unlike, say, a Premier League footballer, a merchant banker or a member of Her Majesty’s government.
But reckoning total losses over an expected lifetime, that is about the size of the hole which current Tory policies will make in her hard-earned finances.
And you were wondering what yesterday’s strike – and all the coming strikes over what is sure to be a summer (and autumn) of strife – was all about?
Politicians on both sides of the House have been saying (as they always will) that the strikes are wrong.
As if the government itself hadn’t quite deliberately picked the fight in the first place.
And as if anyone should be expected to stand aside politely and without protest while their pockets are picked on such a grand scale.

____


GREECE is in turmoil, Portugal and Ireland could be next, Spain is said to be teetering. The Euro itself, they say, is in peril.
Over the pond, the world’s largest economy is in crisis, brought to its knees by decades of militaristic mania that began with the insanity known as the Cold War.
We’re all in debt to someone, it seems. But who?
The answer, in big, broad-brush terms, seems to be China.
So maybe the Communists didn’t lose the Cold War after all.
Of course China wisely stayed out. America and the Soviet Union were both big losers in the long run.

____


WHEN I hear scaremongering talk about the imminent collapse of the international banking system, a bit of me thinks “bring it on”.
If only the process wouldn’t mean so much trouble and pain for so many. Mainly the innocent.
The last time international finance collapsed – I mean really collapsed, not just wobbled a bit – it resulted in world war.
A war which slew many millions, and the aftershocks of which are still being painfully felt in several parts of the world.
In the final analysis, that is the loaded gun which the world’s bankers are holding to all our heads.

____


IT’S a very long time since I enjoyed Wimbledon as much as I’ve been enjoying this year’s tournament.
Especially in the women’s draw, it’s a long time since there were so many good matches right from the early rounds. Since outcomes were so unpredictable and the quality of entertainment so high.
I have heard moans that the quality of the tennis isn’t that great. But I can’t recall a time when people (mostly men) didn’t say that about women’s tennis.
They moaned when the game was dominated by just one or two players – King, Navratilova, Evert, Graf, the Williams sisters. And now they moan that the world no.1 (the admittedly rather dull Caroline Wozniacki) has no Grand Slam title under her belt.
As if that wasn’t evidence that the era of individual domination is over (for now).
It was suggested by some cynics that the Williamses would stroll in after sitting out most of the year’s other action and claim the top prizes as if by right. Well, that theory - like Wozniacki’s participation – barely lasted into week two.
The hyperactive performance of Marion Bartoli in defeating Serena Williams was thrilling and enthralling. As, until a disappointing semi-final, were the achievements of Bartoli’s conqueror, the unseeded Sabine Lisicki.
Between them, those relatively unsung players have provided some of the best sporting entertainment of the year.


____


AS a footnote to my two recent columns about domestic violence, I’ve been asked to draw attention to the Men’s Advice Line, www.mensadviceline.org.uk
It offers advice and support for men in abusive relationships, both those experiencing violence and abuse from partners, and those concerned about their own violence.
And is, I am told, very good and very useful.

Torn between the love and the abuse

“THEY were on honeymoon the first time he hit her.
“It went on for years after that. In the end, he broke three of her ribs – not in one attack, but three separate occasions.
“You know the old cliché, ‘I walked into a door, mum’ – or, ‘I fell down stairs, mum’.
“It wasn’t until he started turning on the kids that she left. Even then the courts awarded him access and told him where she was living.
“So don’t say it’s easy for a woman to leave, or to speak up, or to get the help she needs. Just ask my Julia.”
Her name’s not Julia, of course. And her mum stays anonymous too after contacting me about my Evening Star column two weeks ago.
But to set the record straight, I didn’t say there was anything easy about domestic violence for a woman victim. I would never say, or mean to suggest, any such thing.
What I did mean was to point out that men can be victims too.
In trying to open up a murky subject, I seem to have touched a few raw nerves.
One male reader commented: “Back in the 90s, when I was on the receiving end of an abusive relationship, I felt like I was the only one. That this didn’t happen to men.
“I was isolated and felt no one would have believed me – to the extent I couldn’t even bring it up in a Relate session. Mind you, having her in the room at the time didn’t help.”
Another reader sees the matter from another angle.
He said: “In 14 years with the Alcohol Advisory Service and then the Samaritans I listened to many, many abused women but only about two abused men.
“My estimate is that abused women outnumber abused men by about four to one, that abused women who suffer in silence outnumber the ones who get listened to, but abused women who get listened to outnumber abused men who get listened to by about 40 to one.
“Every one of them is a real person in real distress.”
That informed view underlines the reason I wrote my original article.
The good Samaritan also adds a chilling note: “Children, of course, are often hostages.”
One of my oldest friends, Carolyn, lives now in Australia, where she has worked for several years as a counsellor in a women’s refuge.
She said: “I think domestic violence is under-reported in both males and females.
“In my experience working with women, many don’t even recognise that they are in an abusive relationship. They minimise what they are experiencing because we only tend to hear about high-end abuse in the media.
“Sometimes they are reluctant to involve the police for the same reasons mentioned in the article, sometimes because they are too afraid.
“As to women being prosecuted, this will be appropriate in some cases, but I have talked to many who are goaded into physical violence so that the man can appear to be the victim and use the legal system as yet another instrument of abuse.
“Many women retaliate after years of abuse, or are acting in self-defence.”
I don’t doubt the truth of that. But that very fact can work against men too.
Such as Dan, whose story I told, who left a long-term abusive relationship after retaliating for the first and only time.
If Irene had accused him then, who would have believed that for years it was she who had been assaulting him?
Carolyn, understandably, is most enraged by male violence. But she concludes: “Abuse is never OK, no matter who perpetrates it.
“I’ve heard one or two horror stories about men walking into a police station and being treated with contempt.
“People are rarely prosecuted unless physical violence is involved, but emotional and psychological abuse is highly damaging, and the effects can last years, if not a lifetime.
“Bruises, cuts, burns, broken limbs etc can be seen whereas emotional abuse is invisible and often not believed because the abuser is typically so charming to everyone else.
“It crushes who you are as a person and makes it very difficult to be a functioning human being.”
A disturbing conclusion with which I know Dan and Steve, my original interviewees, would wholeheartedly agree.
Cheryl, another friend from my school days, replied to my article with a tragedy.
She said: “ I lost a friend in Paris who was regularly beaten up by her partner.
“She refused to give evidence to the police while she was in hospital, where she died of her injuries.
“I also have a close family member who was abused by his wife and has now left her because the level of violence from her reached a point of no return.
“The stats mean nothing if we are unable to discuss the problem clearly and offer support to all those who find themselves in such a terrible situation, torn between the love and the abuse.”

Do you buy it? Drugs on sale at the politics show

IS Andrew Lansley a dead politician walking? Or has the health secretary managed to wriggle out of a humiliation with face somehow intact?
Or, as his boss David Cameron cunningly spun it, is a series of apparent climbdowns a sign not of weakness but of strength?
I say “apparent” climbdowns because we haven’t actually seen the detail yet. All we’ve had so far is speeches – from Cameron, from his sidekick Nick Clegg, and from Lansley.
They want us to think things have changed for the better. That they’ve been listening to all our concerns.
That we can trust them with our lives. Maybe literally.
And you know what? All I’ve named so far is people. Three blokes in suits and ties.
Two or three inches in and I still haven’t identified my subject as the butchery – sorry, “reform” – of our National Health Service.
And isn’t that the root trouble with politics?
In a democracy, it’s supposed to be “the people” who decide what happens about crucially important things such as the NHS.
But there a couple of problems with this. Well, quite a lot of problems actually, but just a couple I want to mention now.
One is that there isn’t really any such thing as “the people”.
I’m one person with one set of thoughts and opinions. You’re another person with another set.
Are we likely to agree?
On some things, maybe. On everything… not a chance.
And that’s just two of us among millions.
Anyone who tries to tell you what “the people” thinks is trying to put over a particular view – probably their own.
The other big problem is information, or the lack of it.
For democracy to have a chance of working well, even in a perfect world (which this is far from being), “the people” needs to be well informed.
That, in theory, is what the press – papers, magazines, TV, radio, and now the internet – is supposed to provide.
And do we? Er, no, not very well.
After all, you don’t really know how the NHS (for example) works in all its detail, do you? Or the banking system. Or education. Or all the things the government is supposed to be in charge of on our behalf.
There’s more there than you or I could keep tabs on even if it was all we did.
And I don’t know about you, but I sometimes have difficulty deciding whether I fancy Marmite or marmalade on my toast in the morning.
In fact, when you stop to consider all the reasons why “the press” fails to keep “the people” fully informed on important matters all the time, the real surprise is that we do it as well as we do.
After all, there’s Ryan Giggs’s sex life, Wayne Rooney’s hair and the off-screen lives of every soap star or talent-show wannabe to keep on top of too.
After which politics can look a bit dry to many people. And difficult – not just for “the people” but for journalists too.
Which is why we usually end up treating it like another soap.
As if it was the cast – Lansley, Cameron and Clegg this week, with walk-on parts for the brothers Miliband – that mattered.
Rather than the really important stuff of policy.
Does the question of Andrew Lansley’s political future, with which I began this column, actually matter?
Not a jot, except to the Lansley family. And probably not a great deal to them either – I’m sure he’ll never go short of wonga.
Does the future of the NHS matter? Very much indeed.
Which is why the most interesting thing about Lansley’s big speech on Wednesday wasn’t anything he said. That was just another speech, another political platform.
It wasn’t even the reaction of his audience, made up of hundreds of GPs.
No, the interesting thing was where it took place – the 2011 Commissioning Show at the Kensington Olympia conference centre in West London.
And that right outside the main hall was a sea of stalls with all the big names represented – AstraZeneca, Bayer, Boots, Bosch, Capita, GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Specsavers, UnitedHealth and dozens of others you might or might not have heard of. Banks and lawyers as well as drug companies.
Proof, if any more were needed, that our national health is already about business as much as service.
It would take a far bigger politician than Lansley to put that genie back in the bottle.
Even if he wanted to. Which of course he doesn’t, being just another snake-oil medicine-seller himself.


****


OH the joy of getting a bit of real rain on the garden at last.
It’ll take a lot more before we shrug off all talk of drought, of course. Everywhere is still looking pretty parched.
But there are surprises and delights out there too.
Right now in Fen Meadow in Woodbridge, in a patch the council has deliberately and properly left unmown, is the finest crop of wild marsh orchids I’ve ever seen in Britain.

I knew the end had come the day I hit her back

The number of women convicted of domestic violence in England and Wales has more than doubled in the past five years. Figures obtained from the Crown Prosecution Service by the BBC this week showed that almost 4,000 women were successfully prosecuted in the past year, compared with 1,500 in 2005. Here I speak to two male victims of domestic violence about their experiences, and the difficulty of coming forward. Names have been changed.

--

DAN, a professional man, lived with Irene for 16 years. She began drinking heavily before they were married but it was some years before her often erratic behaviour turned violent.
After that there were a few more bad years before he finally left, moving on his own to a job in Suffolk.
“The drink was always the problem,” he said.
“It started as a social thing, a way of getting out and meeting people while I was out at work. I’d come home and find her passed out on the sofa or the floor.
“She did get a couple of jobs over the years, but she never managed to keep them for long.
“I’d join her in the pub most evenings for a pint or two, but she took to staying when I went home.
“She got in a few fights, and got barred from a few pubs, before she ever got violent with me. But once she did, it became a sort of habit.
“I knew the end had come when I hit her back.
“Actually she was coming for me with a bottle and I just pushed her away. But she fell against the wall and hit her head, and I realised with a shock that people might think it was me who was the violent one.
“That was the only time I tried to defend myself in years of being regularly hit, scratched, kicked or having things thrown at me – mostly glasses.
“The funniest time was when she tipped a plate of spaghetti bolognaise over me in the bath.
“After that there was a period when she regularly used to throw food at me, or tip it on the floor, after I’d cooked it for her. It was always me who did the cooking.
“She’d stay in the pub until well after closing-time. When she got home she’d often wake me up, sometimes by pulling the bedclothes off and hitting me with a hairbrush.
“Once on holiday in Greece she woke me up by pushing an electric fan in my face. When I tipped away the last of the whisky she was drinking she went mad.
“She broke the bottle against the wall and filled my bed with the bits of broken glass.
“Even though it was the middle of the night I got out and went to find another hotel to sleep in.”
At one point Dan started going to meetings of Al-Anon, a group which provides support to anyone whose life is affected by someone else’s drinking.
“In lots of ways Al-Anon was great,” he said. “It’s such a relief to be able to talk to people who understand what you’re going through.
“On the other hand, all the others there were women, which made me feel a bit of a freak.
“You start wondering whether you’re the only man in the world who regularly gets assaulted by a drunken woman. Or whether you’re just the only one prepared to admit it.”

--


STEVE, now happily married, lived for several years with an abusive partner.
He suspects the rise in prosecutions for female domestic violence is mostly to do with an increase in reporting. But he thinks the official figures still show only the tip of the iceberg.
He said: “When you love someone, you don’t want to think badly of them.
“If their behaviour’s bad, you go on thinking they’ll get better and that you can help them to change.
“In the end it’s you that changes. You start seeing yourself as one of life’s victims. And it affects everything – friends, social life, work.
“You develop a habit of secrecy, of pretending everything’s OK. And that doesn’t just make it harder to seek help – you don’t see ‘help’ as something you can possibly ask for.
“I know it’s bad for a lot of women. But there’s a culture that allows women to admit there’s a problem and to seek help – maybe from the police, or Women’s Aid, or just friends.
“For men it’s a lot harder. That culture of help isn’t there.
“You might see it as weak to admit there’s a problem – even to yourself. You certainly don’t expect understanding or sympathy from colleagues or the police.
“Not that you’d necessarily even think of going to the police. Because apart from anything else, that would mean you were branding your wife or girlfriend as a criminal.
“And if there’s any love still there, that’s something you can’t do – any more than you can brand yourself openly as a victim.”