Day Of Anonymous Affection

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30984, 14 February 1966, Page 2

Day Of Anonymous Affection

“Will you be my Valentine?” That request is the subject of a flood of anonymous affection, the international bill for which will again run into millions of pounds this year. The girl who fails to receive a Valentine card on February 14 wants to know the reason why, Peter Carver writes from London. Valentine’s Day, which has been celebrated for hundreds of years, is a highly lucrative business for the people who turn out the millions of items of “love stationery” each year. Yet astonishingly, no one is quite sure how it all began. The only point on which historians and sociologists agree is that it has little or no connexion with any Saint Valentine. A popular theory among some researchers is that it is a hangover from the old Roman Spring festival of Lupercalia. Organised by the pagan priests, the celebrations would have delighted any Hollywood producer of epics. They included drinking and feasting, animal sacrifices, fertility rites. Unattached girls used to toss their

names into an urn—and the eligible Roman lads then lined up to play “lucky dip.” The festival, said to have been inaugurated by Romulus, was stopped by Pope Gelasius 1 in A.D. 494. It was only much later, say supporters of this theory, that the somewhat less erotic festival of Valentine’s Day was revived, held in spring and attributed to a “Saint Valentine.” There are several saints of this name. The one most frequently named is a Roman Christian priest, who was stoned to death in A.D. 296 on February 14. The night before his execution, he wrote a farewell note to his gaoler’s blind daughter, whom he had befriended. And he ended it—very conveniently, as it was to turn out—- “ From your Valentine.” Another theory concerns the old Norman term Galantin, which means:) “A lover of women.” The Normans, apparently, would often interchange V and G—so Galantin often appeared as “Valantin.” Drew Lots Britain in the Middle Ages used to hold a sort of Valentine’s—or Galantin’s—Day celebration, bachelors and village maidens drawing lots for their partners for the coming year. One of the first reliable

mentions of Valentine Cards is made by the seventeenth century English diarist, Samuel Pepys. In those days, the cards were made by the senders. And the first person of the opposite sex you saw crossing the threshold of your house on the morning of February 14 was your “Valentine.” The first organised production of Valentine cards for other people’s use was probably arranged by Miss Esther Howland, in Worcester, Pennsylvania, about 1850. She worked it up into a 100,000-dollars-a-year industry. Ironically, she died a spinster—but a very rich one. Some of her cards may have found their way into the hands of Britain’s Jonathan King, who had a collection of Valentine cards which weighed a total of 12 tons. He left them to the British Museum, which refused them for lack of space. They were divided between his 15 children—one of them called Valentine. Most of them were later bought by an American, and they are now kept in a museum In Connecticut. The popularity of Valentine cards has been affected from time to time —notably at the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—by a tendency to produce cynical or smutty cards. The phase seems to be recurring. The man who thinks he has a “funny Valentine” will send her the message, “Baby, you’ve got everything . . . but brains, looks and money!” It was not, however, the message that made Post Office officials at Liverpool, England, once refuse to handle a Valentine card. The card presented by 23-year-old Frances Friel was sft 4in by 4ft 6in—far too large, they said, for them to handle.

Another shock, this time for young lovers the world over, came from America in 1964. The Post Office at Darling, Pennsylvania, which for years had stamped cards sent in from all over the world with its unique heart-shaped postmark, closed. Valentine’s Day is largely an English-speaking festival nowadays, with America and Britain taking a leading interest. France celebrates it on a large scale, but in Italy—where it is likely the whole idea had its roots—you would have a job buying a Valentine card. Africa has no time for the tradition, nor does Russia. But some Japanese—mostly those who have travelled outside the country—are catching on to the idea. Ardent—and affluent—lovers have been known to spend small fortunes on “tokens” of their love for current Valentines. But perhaps the most ghastly Valentine’s Day sur-

prise was provided by Chicago hoodlum, Al Capone. February 14 was the day he chose to have seven members of a rival gang machinegunned to death.