Fat people’s Princess . . .
QUESTION Does the title The People’s Princess predate Princess Diana?
PRINCESS Mary Adelaide of Cambridge (1833-1897) was popularly known as the People’s Princess.
She was the second daughter and the youngest of the three children of Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, who was a son of George III. She was a first cousin of Queen Victoria.
Princess Mary was a jovial, goodnatured and popular member of the British royal family. She was also known as ‘Fat Mary’.
Her expanding waistline led to quite some problems when trying to find a husband. Prince Oscar of Sweden was dispatched to England with a view to a match being made between the pair, but left having failed to propose.
‘Alas!’ stated an exasperated Lord Clarendon. ‘No German prince will venture on so vast an undertaking.’
Eventually a suitable candidate was found in Wurttemberg, Prince Francis of Teck. The prince was of lower rank than Mary Adelaide, was the product of a morganatic marriage and had no succession rights to the throne of Wurttemberg, but was at least of royal blood.
The couple were married on June 12, 1866, at St Anne’s Church, Kew, Surrey. Four children resulted from their union, the eldest, Princess May, or Victoria Mary, went on to become Queen Consort, wife of George V.
Queen Victoria had reservations about her cousin’s size, once writing of her: ‘Her size is fearful. It is really a misfortune.’ However, she was still fond of her cousin.
Victoria learned a great deal from her; on one occasion she saw how Mary ignored royal protocol and drove in an open carriage through London, which made her immensely popular.
The public were titillated by her extravagant lifestyle.
Mary had lived a life of parties, expensive food and clothes and holidays abroad. However, under a cloud of debt, the Tecks fled the country in 1883. They travelled around Europe staying with relatives in Germany and Austria.
Bailed out by the British royal gamily, the Tecks returned in 1885 and continued to live at Kensington Palace and White Lodge in Richmond Park. Mary then devoted her life to charity, becoming a patron of Barnardos and other children’s charities. Mary died aged 63 in 1897. Mrs Charlotte Worstall,
Somerset.
QUESTION What was the first fastfood outlet in Ireland?
THE first modern first food outlet to open in Ireland was a branch of McDonald’s in Dublin city centre, which began trading on May 1, 1977. That McDonald’s was opened in premises in Grafton Street opposite what was then Switzers department store, now Brown Thomas. Those same premises had once housed a very upmarket restaurant called Mitchell’s, run by the same family that today operates the noted wine retailers of the same name.
When McDonald’s came to town, it organised a procession of vintage cars down Grafton Street. Its arrival was met with public enthusiasm. People had been very familiar for years with fast food outlets in the US, through TV and films, but it took a long time for the idea to get established here.
The first person to be offered a McDonald’s franchise in Ireland was George Hook, who was then in the catering business. He turned it down because he didn’t think people in Ireland would give up eating on proper plates.
Today, 40 years later, McDonald’s has around 90 outlets in the Republic; the only two counties without a McDonald’s are Leitrim and Roscommon. McDonald’s now has more than 4,000 employees here. After that first opening in Dublin, McDonald’s opened a second Dublin outlet in O’Connell Street in 1978, before following up with branches in Cork (1984) and Galway (1988).
Other multinationals have come into the fast food market in Ireland, notably Burger King, but some locally owned and managed chains have also done well over the years. Supermac’s started in Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, in 1978.
Eddie Rocket’s, an Americanstyle diner chain that opened in 1989, has also proved popular.
Today, the fast food business is a vast operation, with over a dozen chains trading here; there’s a seemingly endless appetite for their quick food, so much so that the industry here is now worth well over €1.5billion a year. It makes it one of the biggest elements in the entire catering industry.
But long before fast food as we know it today came along, another kind of fast food was popular. There’s some evidence that as long ago as the 1850s, fish and chips were being sold in Dublin’s Liberties. The sales were made by street traders, not through shops.
The first fish and chip shop proper wasn’t set up here until the 1880s, when Italian immigrant Giuseppe Cervi and his wife, Palma, started one in what was then Great Brunswick Street, now Pearse Street, close to the back entrance of Trinity College. They prospered, despite the language difficulties. The phrase ‘one and one’ apparently came from Palma pointing to the produce on offer and saying to customers: ‘One of those and one of those.’
Within 20 years of that first shop, Dublin had 20 chippers. Burdocks opened its first outlet in Werburgh Street, near Christchurch Cathedral, in 1913, while Ivan Beshoff opened his first café on Usher’s Island in the early 1920s. By the 1930s, there were about 50 fish and chip shops across Ireland, but the concept didn’t really take off until after World War II.
Many Irish-Italian families, such as the Fuscos and the Fusciardis, started fish and chip shops, which all became very popular.
The first challenge came at the end of the 1950s, when the first Chinese takeaways opened. The first Chinese restaurant in Ireland had opened in Dublin’s Lower Leeson Street in 1957.
After the Chinese came many other varieties of Asian takeaways, including Indian and Thai.