A tux with a touch of lux
QUESTION Meghan Markle wore a black tuxedo to a charity performance of the stage musical Hamilton. Shouldn’t tuxedos be white?
TRADITIONALLY, tuxedos were dark blue, grey or black. The jacket has a satin facing on the lapels, buttons and pocket trim, while the trousers had a satin side stripe down the legs.
White jackets did not appear until the Thirties. Tuxedo is simply the American term for a dinner suit.
The garment dates back to 1865. Edward VII, then the prince of Wales, invited Savile Row tailor Henry Poole & Co to come up with an ensemble that was more formal than a lounge suit and had the trimmings of a tailcoat to be worn in the dining room.
The original was navy blue. Edwardian dandies followed suit, opting for blue or Oxford grey.
It has been claimed the suit was introduced to the US by James Brown Potter, a millionaire member of the Tuxedo Club of New York, who on a trip to London had seen the Prince of Wales wearing one.
A son of one of the Tuxedo Club’s founders, Griswold Lorillard, and his friends were reported in society columns after showing up at the club’s first Autumn Ball in October 1886 wearing ‘a tail-less dress coat’, which became known as a tuxedo.
Black wool tuxedos were common until the Thirties when there was a switch back to the original midnight blue and doublebreasted. In warmer climates, white tuxedo jackets were worn.
The name tuxedo has Native American roots. According to one line of etymological inquiry, it is from p’tuksit, an Algonquian word for ‘wolf,’, while other scholars say it comes from p’tuck-sepo, which means ‘crooked river’.
Christina Whitehead, by email.
QUESTION Does lighting director Thomas Markle’s name appear in the credits of any well-known movies?
THOMAS Wayne Markle Sr, who was born in Pennsylvania on July 18, 1944, is an award-winning television lighting director and father of Meghan Markle, who married Prince Harry in May.
He started out working for Chicago-based WTTW TV and in 1975 received a Chicago/Midwest Emmy for outstanding achievement for individual excellence: non-performers for lighting design.
In 1979, he became lighting director on ABC’s General Hospital, a popular daytime soap opera filmed in Los Angeles. Lighting direction is a skilled business. Markle’s partner Vincent Steib described how, at the time, they were shooting with Ikegami HL79A tube cameras.
The lighting director had to carefully control the position of the tubes so they did not point towards the sun and burn out.
Markle never worked on movies, but he was the lighting director on two other long-running TV shows, Married… With Children and The Facts Of Life.
In 2011, he shared a daytime Emmy with Steib for outstanding achievement in lighting direction for a drama series for General Hospital. It was on the set of General Hospital that Thomas Markle met his second wife, Doria Ragland, who was working as a temp in the ABC studio.
Their daughter, Rachel Meghan Markle, was born on August 4, 1981. Ian Moles, Gloucestershire.
QUESTION The Russian ice-breaking ferries Baikal and Angara were ‘knock down’ vessels. What does this mean?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, the British also used ‘knock down’ vessels. In 1835, Britain’s King William IV authorised an expedition to study the viability of building a canal from the headwaters of the rivers Euphrates or Tigris into the Mediterranean, thereby shortening the journey to India by more than 6,000km.
Two hundred sailors were sent to shipyards to learn shipbuilding. Two paddle steamers, the Tigris (50 horsepower) and Euphrates (25 horsepower), were shipped in pieces to the Persian Gulf.
These sections were taken by camel cart and camel train 225km across the desert to the banks of the Tigris, where they were reassembled by the sailors.
The paddle steamer Tigris survived, but Euphrates sank in a storm with the loss of 40 sailors.