The flying Lancaster
QUESTION Did Burt Lancaster do his own trapeze work in the 1956 film Trapeze?
BURT Lancaster was an acrobat before becoming a film star.
He and his school friend Nick Cravat formed The Lang & Cravat Acrobatic team, touring in circuses and nightclubs, so when Lancaster made the film Trapeze in 1956 he did all of his own stunts on the high wire, with the exception of the triple somersault ,which was done by Eddie Ward of the Ringling Brothers Circus.
The film was mostly made in a French circus tent in the winter. Produced by Carol Reed, it costarred Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida.
The film tells the story of former trapeze star Mike Ribble (Lancaster) who had an accident and walked with a limp – which caused limitations on his circus work.
Ribble – only the sixth man to have completed the dangerous triple somersault – thinks his young, brash protégé Tino Orsini (Curtis) is capable of matching the same feat. However, Orsini is distracted by the new third member of their act, the manipulative Lola (Lollobrigida), causing a rift between teacher and pupil.
Lancaster and Cravat worked on two films together in which both did their own acrobatic stunts. These were The Flame And The Arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952). Lancaster did many of his own stunts in his early career. He died in 1994, aged 80. Clive Gill, Wimborne, Dorset.
QUESTION What was the Black Friday Scandal of 1869?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, a similar scandal to that faced by the Ulysses S Grant administration occurred in the Seventies.
Nelson Bunker Hunt and his brothers were Texan oil billionaires. The hoarding of gold had been illegal since 1933, so they started buying silver when it was $1.50 an ounce. By 1979, the word was that the Bunker Hunts were trying to corner the market in silver and the price rose rapidly.
By January 1980, the price peaked at $50 an ounce, causing panic buying and then the suspension of silver trading. Speculators tried to sell to realise their gains and the price plummeted as quickly as it had risen.
The Bunker Hunts had speculated by using borrowed money, with the oil business as security, and it seemed that due to the price collapse they would not be able to honour their commitments.
They were bailed out by a bank consortium to prevent a collapse of the banking system. After lawsuits on charges of attempting to fix the commodities market, the oil firm was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1988.
Phil Alexander, Farnborough, Hants. QUESTION What was the first fast food outlet in Ireland? THERE’S some evidence that as long ago as the 1850s, fish and chips were being hawked for sale in Dublin’s Liberties area.
The sales were made by street traders, not through shops.
The first fish-and-chip shop proper wasn’t set up in Ireland until the 1880s when Italian immigrants Giuseppe Cervi and his wife Palma started one in what was then Great Brunswick Street, now Pearse Street.
They prospered, despite the language difficulties. The phrase ‘one and one’ came from Palma apparently pointing to the produce on offer and saying to customers ‘Uno di questo, uno de quello?’ – which is Italian for ‘one of those and one of those?’ Within 20 years of that first shop, Dublin had 20 fish-andchip shops. Burdocks opened its first chipper, on Werburgh Street, near Christ Church Cathedral, in 1913, while Ivan Beshoff opened his first café, on Usher’s Island, in the early 1920s.
By the 1930s, the number of fishand-chip shops across Ireland had grown to 50, but the concept didn’t really take off until after the Second World War.
Many Irish-Italian families, such as the Fuscos and the Fusciardis, started fish-and-chip shops that became very popular. The first challenge to their dominance came in the late 1950s, when the first Chinese takeaways opened.
The first Chinese restaurant in Ireland opened in Lower Leeson Street, Dublin, in 1957. After the Chinese came many other varieties of Asian takeaways, including Indian and Thai, so today, people across the country get an good international menu choice.
Despite all this competition, these takeaways have flourished and so too have the modern fast food outlets seen in main streets up and down the country, all opened over the past 40 years.
The first modern first food chain to open a branch in Ireland was a McDonald’s in Dublin city centre, on May 1, 1977.
That McDonald’s was opened on Grafton Street. That same premises once housed an upmarket restaurant called Mitchell’s, run by the same family that operates the present-day Mitchells, a noted firm of wine retailers.
When McDonald’s came to town, it organised a procession of vintage cars down Grafton Street, and those cars were mobbed by crowds of young people keen to see an American fast-food restaurant open in Ireland for the first time. People had been very familiar for years with McDonald’s and other fast-food outlets in the US, through television 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 the controversial radio chat show host, George Hook, who was then a businessman. He turned down the offer, because he didn’t think that people in Ireland would ever discard the idea of eating food from plates, using cutlery, in favour of fast food.
After that first opening in Dublin, McDonald’s opened a second Dublin outlet in O’ Connell Street, in 1978, then opened up in Cork in 1984 and Galway in 1988.
Today, McDonald’s has around 90 outlets in this country; the only two counties without an outlet are Leitrim and Roscommon. McDonald’s now has over 4,000 employees here, but recently caused controversy by announcing that in future, its Irish operations will be managed from the UK.
Other multinationals have set up fast-food outlets in Ireland, including 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, while Eddie Rocket’s, an American-style diner chain that opened in 1989, has also proved popular.
Today, the fast food business in Ireland is a vast undertaking, with over a dozen chains operating. There’s a seemingly endless appetite for their quick food, so much so that the fast-food industry in this country is now worth well over €1.5billion a year. David Murray, Co. Kerry.
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