Mind your language
'HOW HAVE you remained pertina- cious in ignorance about this for so long?' asked my husband, with a little pause expecting laughter.
He was remarking upon a pile of let- ters on the word kursaal, about which I had indeed been ignorant until men- tioning it here a couple of weeks ago. I had suggested that, as a word of Ger- man origin, it was unlikely to have been adopted after the first world war for use as the commercial title of a saloon for public resort, rather the reverse.
And now Mr Arthur Brack from Edin- burgh writes in with the curious family history of the Kursaal at Harrogate. It was the fondest wish of Mr Brack's grandfather-in-law, Alderman Charles Fortune, to build assembly rooms of suit- able splendour to match the new bathing place which the spa of Harrogate had constructed to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897.
Alderman Fortune's 'cure-hall', or kursaal, would trump anything in Ger- many or the Austrian Empire, with a central hall accommodating more than 3,000, in addition to promenades, smok- ing rooms, billiard rooms, restaurants and assembly rooms, all to be finished, Mr Brack tells me, in rich mahogany, polished stone, bronze and stained glass.
It was not to be. The Alderman was voted down by his council colleagues and a smaller project, a hall for 1,200, bereft of its outer rooms, was built, and opened in 1903. Parry, Elgar and Busoni brought music to the concert hall. Above the entrance a gas flambeau lit the night, and adorning the tympa- num was a cock, the bird sacred to Aes- culapius, the god of healing. The whole edifice was called the Kursaal.
Eleven years later this Germanic name was felt no longer to be appropri- ate, and it was renamed the Royal Hall. It only surprises me that the public rooms at Southend held out against the Hunnish smear and kept the name of Kursaal. I wonder if Mr Peter Mandel- son would consider it as the name for his Millennium Dome; it is a much bet- ter name than the one he prefers,'Expe- rience', which has all the connotations of a roll-neck besweatered 1970s disco.
In the meantime a reader from South Africa invites me to consider how the Victorians changed the language out of sexual prudery. Next week, unless something supervenes, I shall do that, in terms that may surprise him.
Dot Wordsworth
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