Jerry’s very own station!
QUESTION Was talk show host Jerry Springer born in a London Tube station?
JERRY Springer is a US chat show host famous for The Jerry Springer Show, a tabloid talk show tackling the underbelly of life.
His parents Margot and Richard Springer (a shoe shop owner) were German-Jewish refugees who escaped from Prussia in 1939. They settled in North London. On February 13, 1944, the couple were taking refuge from a German air raid on the platform at Highgate Tube station when Margot gave birth to Gerald Norman Springer.
Springer spent the first five years of his life in Belvedere Court, East Finchley. He and his parents emigrated to New York in 1949. Springer has recalled how he still remembers looking out of his bedroom window, onto Lyttelton Road, to watch the London buses drive past.
Springer’s parents had been rescued by the Central British Fund for German Jewry, the organisation that rescued over 40,000 people in the 1930s and 1940s and established the Kindertransport.
Some 27 members of Springer’s family died in the Holocaust. His maternal grandmother, Marie Kallmann, was murdered in the gas trucks of an extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. His paternal grandmother, Selma (nee Elkeles), died at Theresienstadt concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia..
Max Wilson, Bristol.
QUESTION How can brassica rapa, a single species, have so many edible forms, including turnips, bok choi and napa cabbage?
THE wide array of crop types developed within the brassica family, in particular brassica rapa and B. oleracea, is probably unique within botany. It has led to the wider acceptance of the terms subspecies and cultivar (variety) based around the specialised morphology (shape, structure) of the edible parts.
In On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin drew parallels between natural selection in the wild and the plant and selective breeding orchestrated by farmers: ‘If man can by patience select variations useful to him, why...should not variations useful to nature’s living products often arise, and be preserved and selected?’
We now call this process artificial selection. Early man took the wild parents, refined them by selection and further combination, and produced over biblical time crops that are, together with the cereals, the mainstay of world food supplies.
The precise origin of B. rapa is unknown. It is postulated as first appearing in the Mediterranean from where it spread northwards to Scandinavia and eastwards to Germany and into Central Europe, and eventually towards Asia.
Early human hunter-gatherers and farmers discovered that the leaves and roots of its wild relative provided nutrition or possessed medicinal properties when consumed.
Farmers then took the wild species and amplified certain characteristics based on environmental conditions, producing a variety of different vegetables from the same wild progenitor. Some focused on the root, producing turnips, others on the stems (rape and mustard) and the leaves (bok choi and Chinese cabbage).
B. oleracea, in uncultivated form, is called wild cabbage, and native to coastal southern and western Europe. It has also seen an intense artificial selection and includes many common foods as cultivars, including cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, Savoy cabbage and kohlrabi.
Dr Ken Warren, Glasgow.
QUESTION After the Falklands War; what happened to all the vehicles left behind by the Argentines?
MOST serviceable vehicles were requisitioned by the British military. I was allocated one in 1984 as officer in charge of the minefield fences. The bulk were Mercedes cross-country 4WD and were very robust and reliable.
There was an issue apparently about getting spare parts for them – Mercedes would not sell them directly to the British military because the Argentines had not finished paying for the consignment. For a while, spares were obtained by buying them privately from suppliers in the UK.
At least one vehicle was hidden away by one of the local Falkland Islanders, and resurfaced and repainted a couple of years later. The ruse didn’t work, and it was confiscated for military use.
Name and address supplied. IT is considered normal practice for any military equipment captured from an enemy to become the property of the victors, to dispose of as they wish. In the short term, equipment may be pressed into service to make up for losses in battle or local shortages.
During the Battle of the Bulge (December 16, 1944 to January 25, 1945) the Germans used thousands of captured US vehicles. Likewise, the Allies did the same with captured German vehicles.
This included using captured tanks and artillery until they ran out of ammunition, although some ammunition from both sides was compatible and allowed the weapons to continue in use until spare parts were needed.
During World War II it was common practice for victorious generals to use the captured staff cars of their defeated opponents. It could be seen as a form of rubbing salt into the wound.
The Volkswagen plant at Wolfsburg was taken under British military control at the end of WW II and used to make vehicles for the British and US armies, before being put back into private ownership. Major Ivan Hirst, who’d managed the plant for the British army, was also its first post-war civilian managing director.
Following the Falklands War (April 2 to June 15, 1982) weapons would have had to be decommissioned before being scrapped. Ammunition was disposed of by blowing it up or dumping it at sea.
Any vehicles that could be used by the British armed forces would have been used by the RAF at Mount Pleasant (Stanley Airport) and by the Royal Navy for its shore parties. That freed up space on supply ships for more urgently needed equipment.
Once the vehicles broke down, however, they would have been disposed of as scrap because of a lack of spare parts. Some nonlethal equipment was passed on to the local population.
Other bits and pieces would have been shipped back to the UK as souvenirs or museum pieces.
While serving as a technical instructor at No. 1 Radio School, RAF Locking, in 1982, I saw the arrival of a complete mobile radar system, captured from the Argentines, which had been sent to the station to evaluate its capabilities. Bob Cubitt, Northampton.
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