Brave battle of the blues
QUESTION What is a so-called
‘university blue?’
SPORTING colours in the form of a tie or blazer are awarded to members of a university or school who have excelled in a sport. Most, but not all, university colours are blue. However, Bristol University awards red and Trinity College Dublin uses pink.
The awarding of blues dates from the Boat Race, first held at Henley-upon-Thames on June 10, 1829. Jackson’s Oxford Journal for June 13, 1829, describes: ‘The Oxford crew appeared in their blue check dress, the Cambridge in white with pink wristbands.’
It is thought the dark blue of Oxford was adopted from the coats of the Royal Horse Guards, nicknamed The Oxford Blues, now better known as The Blues.
In the first Boat Race, hot favourites Cambridge were roundly beaten by Oxford. The London Review reported: ‘Before the race, Henley swarmed with pink and blue favours, after it pink was scarcely seen. The Cambridge men, I might say, entirely withdrew their colours and appeared unmarked.’
Cambridge dropped the unfortunate colour and at the second boat race, held in London in 1836, attached a pale blue ribbon to their shirts. Cambridge won, thus establishing the two shades of blue for the universities.
The custom of wearing and awarding blues spread from rowing to other sports contested by the two universities and then to other institutions.
Loren Shepherd, Stratford-upon-Avon.
QUESTION What’s the oldest shop in the country?
ALTHOUGH it’s rare to find an individual shop in Ireland that’s more than 100 years old, the honour of having the longest antecedents in the retailing business belongs to the Avoca group. Its origins go back almost 300 years.
Avoca was started in 1723, to grind corn and make clothing for the workers at the nearby Avoca copper mines in Co. Wicklow. Nearly 200 years later, the mill was sold to the Wynne sisters, Emily, Veronica and Winifred, and it stayed in their family until 1974.
It was sold that year to a developer called Charlie Houlihan, whose solicitor for the transaction was Donald Pratt. The latter saw great opportunities in the hidden value of Avoca and in fact took on the firm himself. Subsequently, his daughter, Amanda, developed Avoca as a very successful fashion brand, while his son Simon did the same with the food side.
Today, there are more than a dozen Avoca outlets. The firm was sold to a US catering group, Aramark, in 2015, for €60million.
A building in Parliament Street, Dublin, dates back to the same time as the Avoca group, Number 4, which for long housed Read’s Cutlers. The building is the only intact 18th-century merchant’s shop and house in Dublin and one of the few in Ireland. In recent years, the building has been meticulously restored, including the retail area at ground floor level on Parliament Street, but the entire building is shuttered, as it still remains up for sale.
What was for long the oldest shop in Ireland is currently closed, according to the tourism office in Enniscorthy Castle, Co. Wexford. Carley’s Bridge Pottery was started in 1659 but its shop is currently shuttered, as is its horticultural supply business.
In Cork, the English Market has very long longevity, going continuously since 1788.
However, some department stores have considerable longevity. Arnotts department stores were founded in Cork in 1843, while Clerys started in Dublin in 1853, named after one of its initial investors, a man called Clery, from Limerick.
Arnotts and Clerys were among the first department stores in the world. Arnotts is still going strong, but while Clerys closed down in 2015, there are now plans to reopen it.
Traditionally, pubs in Ireland doubled as grocery stores, although they haven’t performed that dual function since the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The oldest pub in Ireland is Sean’s Bar in Athlone, Co. Westmeath, dating from AD900, while the next oldest is Kilkenny’s Kyteler’s Inn, founded in 1324. Other old pubs in Ireland date from the 17th and 18th century.
But just as pubs have abandoned the sale of groceries, traditional-style grocery shops have been almost entirely wiped out by supermarkets. So in the absence of any contenders, the Avoca group can lay claim to being the oldest retailer in the country.
D. Power, Dublin 7.
QUESTION Did Lou Reed borrow the refrain ‘Goodnight ladies, ladies goodnight’ from a T. S. Eliot poem?
T.S. ELIOT’S 1922 poem The Waste Land was a cultural phenomenon. It wrenched poetry into the modern world and its impact was equivalent to James Joyce’s Ulysses on the novel and Picasso’s on the art world.
Lou Reed majored in English at Syracuse University in New York.
The key figure at Syracuse for Reed was his English professor, Delmore Schwartz, who was profoundly influenced by Eliot and wrote the essay T. S. Eliot As The International Hero. Reed was well versed in the works of Eliot. He borrowed from the 1925 poem The Hollow Men, which ends: ‘This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.’
Likewise, Reed’s Goodnight Ladies borrows from the ending to A Game Of Chess, the second act of The Waste Land. A barman plaintively says: ‘Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.’
This comes directly from Shakespeare’s Hamlet when Ophelia, imagining herself queen, calls for her coach and says farewell:
‘Come my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.’
Lou Reed’s song Goodnight Ladies clearly borrows from Eliot and Shakespeare.
John Ross, Ullapool, Scotland.
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