Le white van man is born!
QUESTION What was the first motorised van?
THE word van, used for a mediumsized road goods vehicle, arose as a contraction of the word caravan. The earliest records of van as a vehicle in the English language are in the 19th century, meaning a covered wagon for transporting goods – the earliest reported record was 1829.
Motorised vans date back to the earliest days of the automobile. In 1896, the two German pioneers Carl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler were in direct competition, developing trucks with diesel engines. It wasn’t until 1926 the companies merged.
The world’s first flat-bed motorised truck was produced by Daimler and delivered to a customer in London in 1896.
Carl Benz was simultaneously working towards a different type of commercial vehicle at his Gasmotoren Fabrik Mannheim factory. His focus was on buses and trucks, which he called combination delivery vehicles.
The first Benz van was delivered to Paris department store Le Bon Marché.
It was a small box van, based on Benz Velo, one of the world’s first passenger cars. It featured a rear-mounted 1.8 kW engine, had a top speed of 30kph and created a sensation on Paris’s boulevards.
By the end of the century, Benz was offering an increasing range of vans sold as a coach with closed body.
From 1898, he was producing vehicles with three-speed transmission, a 400kg payload rolling on solid rubber tyres and small coaches with a detachable box body. Eric Moles, Dudley, W. Mids.
QUESTION Why is there a stuffed hedgehog in the Dickens museum in London?
HEDGEHOGS were sometimes kept as pets in Victorian kitchens to eat insects.
While there is no evidence that one graced the Dickens household, there is a stuffed one in the museum kitchen to represent the practice. Some wag nicknamed it Bill Spikes, after Bill Sikes, the villain in Oliver Twist. Judith Flanders, in her wonderful book The Victorian House, recounts how Beatrix Potter’s grandmother kept a kitchen hedgehog – though it wasn’t very effective.
The amount a hedgehog ate could not even begin to tackle the living carpet Potter’s servants found at her grandmother’s house when they visited in 1886.
The first night they were there, the maids had to sit on the kitchen table, ‘the floor being in possession of inconceivable quantities of cockroaches’, according to an account from Beatrix Potter’s own journal. Beatrice Pegg, Bourton-on-theWater, Glos.
QUESTION Has there ever been an instance when a camogie team was penalised for fielding a male player in a game?
AS far as anyone knows, a camogie team has never been penalised for including a male player in a team.
But having said that, the game of camogie was brought into existence by a largely male cohort.
In 1903, experimental rules were drawn up for the female equivalent of hurling. Out of the four people responsible for drawing up those rules, only one was a woman, Máire Ní Chinnéide, although Cáit Ní Dhonnchadhba, an Irish language enthusiast, helped her brother, Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, who was one of the group of four. The first camogie match took place at a feis in Navan on July 17, 1903. The new game caught on quickly and two years later, the Camogie Association or An Cumann Camógaíochta was formed; it was reconstituted three times, in 1911, 1923 and 1939. Until 2010, it was known was Cumann Camógaíochta na Gael. Today, there are 537 camogie clubs, of which 95.5% are based in Ireland, with Leinster and Munster being the most prolific producers of camogie clubs. It is estimated that in total, the game has more than 100,000 players. A whole range of competitions start with schools’ games and go right up to the All-Ireland finals where, at senior level, the women play for the O’Duffy Cup.
The current All-Ireland senior champions are Cork, with Aoife Murray, a player with the Cloughduv club, lifting the cup back on September 9 before a crowd of some 21,500 spectators at Croke Park.
Camogie teams field 15 players, making the game similar in at least one respect to hurling. Substitutes are permitted. Games are played with hurleys (camán) and balls (sliotar).
The players have to wear skirts or skorts, rather than shorts, and it’s been argued that this element of the dress code makes it even more unlikely that a male would try to get away with playing in an all-female team.
As in hurling over the past decade or so, camogie has seen a steep increase in physical demands being placed on the players. Today’s camogie players regularly display amazing levels of skill and fitness. Collectively, camogie players have brought the standard of play to new heights.
Over the years, the women of Cork, Dublin, Kilkenny, Tipperary and Wexford have shown outstanding prowess in the game and together, have moved the game ever forward.
So while the game may have got its start thanks to a small band of mostly male officials, it seems that its progress in recent years has been largely due to the dedication and drive of its top sports women. D Murray, by email.
QUESTION The five BaldockApps brothers were killed in action in World War I. Was this loss a record for one family?
FURTHER to the previous answer, during World War I, the five uncles of my great friend John Warder, 87, of Great Dunmow, Essex, went to war aged from 20 to 30, and all returned home.
Their names were Samuel, Thomas-Edwin, Leonard, Jack and Albert Wheeler, and their parents were Sarah and Frederick.
They were farming people based in Good Easter, Essex. Only one was badly injured by gas, the other four returned in reasonably good order and all went on to found a glove factory in London. Jacqueline Russell, by email.
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