One of the few things I regret about those four crazy boiler-suit-and-head-torch days back in 2019 spent trying to save as many of Ellen Willmott’s papers as possible was the sheer speed of it all. There was no time to just stop and look around. The basement was full, the remit to save documents, yet five years after the effect, a tiny voice in my head sometimes whispers in depths of the night:

You missed something.

What if I did? What might it have been?

I mean, I found a feather boa that was almost certainly Ellen’s. It exploded in my face like a salmon pink flour bomb…

I even found that knuckle duster...

We found all sorts, but that little voice keeps nagging

You missed something.

Might it have been an insignificant-looking metal pole, probably rusted to invisibility, complete with two cracked rubber footrests and, a few broken bits of spring?

Alas, I am pretty sure I have now missed the tiny window of opportunity to find the pogo stick Miss Ellen Willmott bought in early January 1922, just a few short months after the pogo craze first took Europe – and America – by storm, proving that, once again, she had her finger on the cultural pulse.

Of course she bought it for her niece, not herself, though I really, really want to believe that Ellen at least had a go. 

Young Betty was 20 on 10th January 1922, and her aunt wanted her to have something fun, the craze that all the young folk were talking about.

It might have looked like this:

Not a whole lot different from the ones that drift in and out of vogue even now.

There are conflicting claims as to whether the invention was British or German. Peter Jensen Brown suggests that there may not have been a single inventor, rather a series of collective improvements that resulted in the ‘jumping stick’ or ‘hopping stilt’, a simple toy for bouncing around that grabbed the jazz age imagination.

Peter Jensen Brown has found a source that suggests the name ‘Pogo’ may have come from the German pogge, or frog, but frankly, who knows. There’s more about the craze at his site but the short story is that Pogo company of New York City patented it in June 1921 and the world went pogo-mad.

By September 1921, pogo sticks were all the rage in the best Manhattan parties, and it was making its way back to Britain…

Pogos were made for all shapes and sizes. Indeed larger people were encouraged to pogo for their health.

Pogoing was fair game for everyone:

I really hope that Ellen bought the pogo stick at Selfridges after seeing a demonstration like the one in the following film; she would have been particularly impressed by the guy lighting a cigarette while jumping, she enjoyed a good smoke herself.

It’s entirely possible she did; I’m working through bills, cheque books and vouchers at the moment, the receipt may turn up yet.

Wherever Ellen got the present, Betty was delighted.

There are very few pictures of Betty. Most of them show her as a small girl or much older woman, there are virtually none of her as a young woman. There is one delightful image of her at a fancy dress party given at Spetchley in 1919, which needs a whole post for itself. It was an 18th century bal poudre and I will get round to it, but here’s a preview with Betty dressed in Georgian costume:

The picture was taken four years before the pogo-birthday, but she was still young enough to love her gift. “My Dear Aunty”, she wrote, “Ever so many thanks for the Pogo, which arrived on Friday”. ’Arrived’ means that it went to Spetchley Park, Ellen’s sister Rose’s home. When stately houses are as grand as this it’s sometimes easy to forget that they are also family homes, to be used and enjoyed.

It was snowing heavily, no one could go outdoors, so Betty and her brother Rob (later Captain Berkeley, who would inherit Warley Place) were forced to jump up and down the flagstones of the main entrance hall. “Rob pogos beautifully,” says Betty, admitting “but I have not yet succeeded in doing it very well yet.”

Practice makes perfect, though, and we soon learn that both Betty and her brother are pogo-mad. In one of her daily letters to her sister, Betty’s mother Rose thanks Ellen too, telling us how “Betty and Rob have been jumping about on it”. Rob is getting on particularly well, we learn, but he has a head start, having already had a go on someone else’s stick.

Rose has had to imagine all this, however, because she hasn’t actually seen her children practising…

…And this is where the genius of Ellen’s gift kicks in. Spetchley Park in January 1922 was a dark, sad place. Rose, who had been battling cancer since 1914, was in the final, desperate throes of early radium therapy.

She hardly ever talks in her letters about what she’s going through, we have to follow most of her treatment through other people’s correspondence, hospital bills and diary entries but in this particular letter she cannot help herself.

“I have been so crumpled up and unwell,” she admits, telling Ellen “I have still this horrid Radium on Saturday”. She also has crippling pain in her legs. For Rose to admit she feels poorly, she must have been bad.

Rose’s illness was affecting the whole family, but Betty was finding it particularly hard.

By 1922 Ellen’s finances were in shreds. She was on her very last uppers, having only just cheated bankruptcy and escaped losing Warley to the bailiffs. She was getting final demands on a daily basis, even finding court summonses in her mail, yet she somehow managed to find the money to buy something as silly, light and optimistic as a bouncing toy, because that was what was needed in young Betty’s life.

By January 20th, the snow was still thick on the ground. Rose had received orchids from her sister, but after thanking her, she couldn’t help telling Ellen “Betty pogos every day when she crosses the hall and it amuses her very much.”

The 1921/22 pogo craze reached its apogee with a line of pogoing chorus girls in the Pogo Parade, part of the Peep Show revue at the Hippodrome:

…but I’m prepared to wager that it could have been nowhere near as joyful as those moments when Betty was able to get away from the distress of her mother’s illness.

A tiny piece of frivolity in differently desperate times for the two Willmott sisters, the pogo stick we know about only through incomplete, lacey letters wasn’t just a toy, it was a lifeline.

I like to imagine the laughter echoing round the entrance hall as Betty tries to jump like her big brother, her giggles wafting up the great staircase to her mother’s room, and perhaps bringing her a little comfort too. Even better, I like to imagine Ellen herself, one of her many visits, complete with geometric flapper dress and one of her ridiculous hats, bouncing up and down Spetchley’s corridors, jumping her blues away.

Oh, I wish I had spotted it in that basement…