Heavens to Betsy

The Stars and Stamps blog had a floral challenge this week...if you hurry hurry hurry you can still get in on being in the slideshow that will get posted tomorrow! And oooohhhh do I have flowers. Heavens to Betsy! (And who is this Betsy anyway?)

I'm not sure what it is about flowers that I can't seem to make myself use them in abundance. After just a couple, I feel like it's "too much" for a card. But I love when other people use a lot of flowers. So...I think it's me hoarding again! I think I've gotten past my ribbon hoarding; if you look at my last cards, I've had a lot more ribbon decorating them than I used to. I think maybe flowers are the next thing to go. I have too much stuff around here that needs to get used up! I also had a couple half-sheets of springy epoxy stickers sitting on my table, so I mixed them in the bouquet too.

Another surprise that happened while making this card was the stamped vase. That's a stamp that had never seen ink, and has been staring at me for a while. And it turns out to stamp really poorly! I used chalk ink, and tried again and again; but this one, even though not stamped right, had such an interesting accidental highlight that I kept it! 

PS I had to look up that phrase, Heavens to Betsy. Which also reminded me of Heavens to Murgatroyd. And dontcha know the internet has the story! Or lack thereof.

'Heavens to Murgatroyd' is American in origin and dates from the mid 20th century. The expression was popularized by the cartoon character Snagglepuss - a regular on the Yogi Bear Show in the 1960s, and is a variant of the earlier 'heavens to Betsy'.

The first use of the phrase wasn't by Snagglepuss but comes from the 1944 film Meet the People. It was spoken by Bert Lahr, best remembered for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. Snagglepuss's voice was patterned on Lahr's, along with the 'heavens to Murgatroyd' line. Daws Butler's vocal portrayal of the character was so accurate that when the cartoon was used to promote Kellogg Cereals, Lahr sued and made the company distance him from the campaign by giving a prominent credit to Butler.

As with Betsy, we have no idea who Murgatroyd was. The various spellings of the name - as Murgatroid, Mergatroyd or Mergatroid tend to suggest that it wasn't an actual surname. While it is doubtful that the writers of Meet The People (Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy) were referring to an actual person, they must have got the name from somewhere.

No fewer than ten of the characters in Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Ruddigore (1887) are baronets surnamed "Murgatroyd", eight of whom (or is that which?) are ghosts. Herzig and Saidy were well versed in the works of the musical theatre and that plethora of Murgatroyds would have been known to them.

Where then did the librettist Sir William Gilbert get the name? It seems that Murgatroyd has a long history as a family name in the English aristocracy. In his genealogy The Murgatroyds of Murgatroyd, Bill Murgatroyd states that, in 1371, a constable was appointed for the district of Warley in Yorkshire. He adopted the name of Johanus de Morgateroyde - literally John of Moor Gate Royde or 'the district leading to the moor'.

Whether the Murgatroyd name took that route from Yorkshire to Jellystone Park we can't be certain. Unless there's a Betsy Murgatroyd hiding in the archives, that's as close as we are likely to get to a derivation.