Early in 1907, the London Opinion magazine spiced up its usual readers’ competition - which gave the beginning of a story and asked entrants to finish it - by offering a prize of one guinea for the best conclusion to the first four lines of a limerick:
There was a young man of Portslade
Who many New Year resolves made,
He would lie less and drink less,
Of evil things think less,
After consideration, the judges chose the winning line as: ”I’ve heard that before,” Satan said.
The competition was such a success that it sparked a national craze for limericks that lasted the full year. The scale of the limerick mania has been almost entirely forgotten, but at its peak millions of people were entering these competitions, as a kind of national madness took hold.
The growing passion for limericks can be charted through the changes to the London Opinion’s competition rules. On February 9, the magazine records: ”Our last-line-of-a-limerick has proved so vast a success, and the number of entries each week have grown so amazingly, that we have decided to increase the number of prizes to a proportionate ratio.” As this meant the magazine would lose money on the competition, it’s not surprising that on February 23 the entry requirements progressed from cutting out and sticking the original four lines on to a postcard, to sending, in addition, a sixpenny postal order.
The more money that came in, the bigger the prizes would be. The magazine proclaimed that every penny invested would be returned in prizes. The money distributed rose from ₤12 10s at the beginning of March, to ₤52 at the beginning of April, to ₤121 18s at the beginning of May. At the start of June, it was ₤214 11s 6d, and by the end of June, ₤844. The London Opinion smugly remarked: ”[We have] set a new fashion, throughout the United Kingdom - ’Limerick-last-lining’! In the Literary Competition we had the pleasure of inventing, and respecting which our contemporaries are exhibiting the sincerest form of flattery.”
Other newspapers and magazines had begun to set up their own competitions, but usually skimmed off 5 per cent of the takings for expenses - they had to, for example, pay well-known personalities such as the cricketer Gilbert L. Jessop to act as judges - allowing them to run their competitions for free, while basking in the glory of massive prizes.
The number of people involved in such competitions can be judged by the sales of the sixpenny postal orders needed for entry. In a statement in the House of Commons, the postmaster-general remarked that in the last six months of 1907 the public had purchased 1,140,000 sixpenny postal orders. In the normal course of events, they would have purchased between 700,000 and 800,000.
Two shilling and half-crown postal orders also showed a large increase in sales because of the large number of multiple entries to the competitions. The postmaster-general made an interesting economic point: although an increase in revenue came from the sales of the postal orders, more came from the postage needed to submit the entries.
Manufacturers and retailers started to offer big-prize competitions for limerick completion, often asking for a proof of purchase along with each entry. Prizes of up to ₤500 were commonplace, but the biggest-ever was put up by J. Samuda & Co., a cigarette company, which offered the freehold of a furnished country house, a horse and trap and ₤2 a week for life. In addition to this epic prize, three others of mouth-watering splendour were offered at other times by the company. But Langford Reed, author of The Complete Limerick Book (1924), poured cold water on the largesse of Samuda & Co. Somewhat sniffily, he wondered why the prize winners all lived so far from London that he could not reasonably be expected to call upon them to ask the secrets of their success. Reed wrote to J. Samuda asking for more details about the prize winners. Unfortunately, not only did he not receive a hoped-for box of cigars, he didn’t even get a reply.
Such vast prizes meant there was plenty of scope for enterprising ”professors” to set up in business. They offered advice to entrants by selling pamphlets containing a few obvious comments plus a few pages taken from a rhyming dictionary or, for a small extra payment, would send out a line guaranteed to be original.
Langford Reed described a young civil servant clerk who ran such a business; in fewer than six months it cleared a profit of more than ₤200, which was nearly three times his salary for the period. Much of this history has been forgotten: Eric Parrott, editor of The Penguin Book of Limericks (1983), doubted if anyone had ever earned a living from limericks.
One other activity inevitably followed the craze - lawsuits. The occasional disgruntled punter went as far as the courts, claiming they had submitted an identical last line to a winning entry, and claiming half the prize. Frederick W. Jones sued the News of the World for ₤72 16s 11d for a competition in the paper of November 24 1907. The competition in question attracted 180,000 entries. Jones apparently got the money before the case came to court.
Arthur Blyth claimed ₤300 from E. Hulton and Co. He lost, because the judge ruled that the conditions of the competition precluded him (and any of the other 60,000 entrants) from claiming. Gertrude F.J. Jenkins came off worst against the publishers of Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday, a weekly comic, for a similar reason. In court it was stated that the competition, held on September 7 1907, had attracted 17,621 entrants and a total prize of ₤418 10s.
Percy Hind, a clerk for the Great Northern Railway Company, claimed ₤79 7s from the proprietors of Pearson’s Weekly. This competition had attracted 94,000 entries. Hind also lost. The judge said that he should have got the money, because he had sent in the line that had been judged best, but because of legal precedent he could not have it.
Moral campaigners were up in arms about the whole affair. The Anti-Gambling League fumed and tried to persuade the courts that limerick competitions were actually lotteries and therefore illegal. Although several judges had said as much, a legal challenge in 1908 against Pearson’s, for running a lottery not authorised by parliament, namely a ”Pearson’s Weekly Limerick Competition”, failed.
Like all fads, the limerick competition eventually died out, around mid-1908, having lasted a lot longer than most. And not all persons of a goodly mind were against limerick competitions while they lasted. In late 1907, a correspondent of the Christian World stated that ”with a view of providing the funds required to secure a heating apparatus of a parish church in Devonshire, competitors paying an entrance fee of threepence are invited to supply a fifth line to the following:
That our church is decidedly cold
Is a fact that is plain, so we’re told;
But when ladies combine
There comes a warm time - ”
The winning line remains a mystery. My own suggestion would probably have been banned on several grounds, lateness being just one of them.
Bob Turvey, who retired after 30 years in the pulp and paper industry, has been involved in a lifetime study of the limerick.
THERE WAS A YOUNG MAN... FAVOURITE LIMERICKS
The Complete Limerick Book by Langford Reed (published in 1924 and no longer in print) contains about 350 examples of the limerick. Here are six traditional favourites.
There was a young man so benighted,
He never knew when he was slighted;
He went to a party,
And ate just as hearty
As if he’d been really invited!
Unknown
There was a young man at the War Office,
Whose brain was an absolute store office.
Each warning severe
Went in at one ear,
And out at the opposite orifice.
J.W. Churton
There was an old party of Lyme,
Who married three wives at one time.
When they asked, ”Why the third?”
He replied, ”One’s absurd,
And bigamy, sir, is a crime!”
Cosmo Monkhouse
A young lady from far Samarkand
Attempted to dance in the Strand.
The policeman on duty
Said, ”No, me proud beauty;
Them foreign contortions is banned.”
Unknown
There was a young lady of Lynn,
Who was so uncommonly thin
That when she essayed
To drink lemonade,
She slipped through the straw and fell in.
Unknown
There was a young curate of Kew,
Who kept a large cat in a pew,
He taught it each week
Alphabetical Greek,
But it never got further than mu.
Unknown
