How royal got off to a flyer
QUESTION What is the story of Peter Scott, the man who taught the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, to fly?
PETER SCOTT was a close friend of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and introduced him to gliding, but did not teach him to fly.
The duke began flying training on November 12, 1952, at White Waltham Airfield near Maidenhead. His instructor was Flt Lt Caryl Ramsay Gordon. The duke flew the De Havilland Chipmunk and later the North American Harvard.
He was awarded his ‘wings’ by Chief of the Air Staff William Dickson at Buckingham Palace on May 4, 1953.
Three years later, he obtained his helicopter wings and then gained his private pilot’s licence in 1959.
In 45 years as a qualified pilot, the duke amassed nearly 6,000 hours in 59 different types of aircraft, including Concorde.
Peter Markham Scott (1909-89) was the only child of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, and he had a passion for flight.
During World War II, he served in the British navy and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for bravery. He was a co-founder and first chairman of the World Wide Fund For Nature and was responsible for its famous panda logo.
He was one of the first people to recognise the power of TV in bringing the natural world into people’s living rooms and presented the BBC’s first natural history programme live from his home at Slimbridge in 1953. As a wildlife artist, he exhibited widely, including a number of works that were shown at the Royal Academy.
Scott was a yachting enthusiast from an early age. He was part of the UK team for the 1936 Summer Olympics and won a bronze in the sailing event. He took up gliding in 1956, and became a British champion in cross-country and competition flying in 1963.
He was chairman of the British Gliding Association (BGA) for two years from 1968 and had been vice president of Bristol Gliding Club since 1957, the year he gained publicity for the club by arranging a visit by Philip on May 15, with a flight in his Eagle glider, piloted by Peter Collier. The duke subsequently became patron of the British Gliding Association.
The prince would often stay with Scott to host WWT and WWF meetings, when Scott would scribble beautiful wildlife sketches.
QUESTION In Jailhouse Rock, Elvis sings about a ‘jelly roll’. What was this?
A JELLY roll was an American equivalent of the Swiss roll, a dessert made of sponge cake spread with jam (or jam mixed with cream) and rolled up into a log.
However, when used in the world of traditional blues music, the term usually refers to an intimate part of the female body. About a hundred years ago, the notable jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton adopted the name when working in a Louisiana brothel.
When Jerry Lee Lewis later sang, ‘I like coffee, I like tea, but jellyjelly-jelly is the thing for me’, it is unlikely he was referring to something with custard. Bessie Smith sang Nobody In Town Can Bake A Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine.
The same thing has happened with many blues lyrics which British bands have innocently sung.
Typically, most UK bands have played the blues classic I’m A Hoochie Coochie Man, without realising ‘hoochie coochie’ referred to the same part of the female anatomy, which accounts for the wildly enthusiastic female audience screams in Muddy Waters’s live recording of the song!
Ian Boughton, Dilham, Norfolk.
QUESTION What was the earliest known accusation of plagiarism?
PLAGIARISM, passing another’s work off as your own, has been with us since the dawn of the written language. Antiquity lacked copyright law, and no accused plagiarist ever faced legal charges, but they did risk social ostracisation. In ancient Greece, it was simply known as ‘theft’.
Empedocles of Akragas was said to have been expelled from the Pythagorean Order in about 460 BC for ‘stealing discourses’.
Athenian philosopher Aeschines Socraticus (425BC-350BC) was accused of appropriating many dialogues of Socrates as his own.
The astronomer Heraclides Ponticus (390 BC to 310 BC), best remembered for proposing that the Earth rotates on its axis, from west to east, once every 24 hours, is said to have published various authors’ plays and discourses under his own name.
The second-century Roman playwright Terence opens his play The Eunuch, first performed on the Palatine Hill in Rome in the year 161 BC, with a denial of accusations of plagiarism.
Pliny the Elder complained in his Natural History that while he faithfully cited his sources, others ‘of a perverted mind and bad disposition’ steal the works of others to pass off as their own.
The word plagiarism comes from plagiarius, the Latin for a kidnapper, and was coined by the Roman poet Martial (AD 40 to AD 104).
He had condemned another poet, Fidentinus, for passing off the poems as his own and, hence, had ‘stolen the servants of his imagination’.
The word plagiarism is thought to have made it into the English language in 1601 when author and satirist Ben Jonson used the word ‘plagiary’ to describe literary theft. In 1755, the word ‘plagiarism’ was included in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, defined as: ‘A thief in literature; one who steals the thoughts or writings of another.’
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