The Saturday briefing
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Is there anything you’re yearning to know? Send your questions, on any subject, to the contacts given below, and we will do our best to answer them...
Q
I’ve just finished watching The Great on TV, about Russian empress Catherine the Great. Did she really give herself the first smallpox vaccine?
Susan Anderson, Ealing, Greater London
AChannel’s 4 The Great calls itself an “occasionally true story” based on the rise of Russian empress Catherine the Great. One scene showed Catherine, played by Elle Fanning, slicing her arm in front of the court and happily rubbing in pustules from a smallpox victim.
It is true that Catherine was the first to use a new method of inoculation, inspiring millions to protect themselves from this dreaded disease.
Catherine’s husband, Peter III, had been a constant reminder of the horrors of smallpox, as he was covered in scars after contracting it as a child. After overthrowing Peter in 1762, an epidemic swept Siberia, killing thousands, and inspiring Catherine to protect her people.
She invited British physician Thomas Dimsdale to her court. He had devised the cheap technique of rubbing pustules into an open wound, delivering a mild case and then protection.
The empress had herself and her son inoculated in 1768 and emerged nine days later, declaring the day a national holiday, saying anyone who did not believe in the science was a “blockhead”.
Clinics were set up across Russia. In the space of a year, 20,000 Russians had been inoculated.
Qregistered the name, saying it was popular in the Houses of Parliament. He sold his recipe for £150 to a vinegar company and HP soon dominated the market. The HP Sauce factory is also remembered for the Fruity Flag sauce was 1956 vinegar explosion.A produced by Farndons in 15,000-gallon vat erupted and Birmingham, which had been sent out a waist-high wave of brewing vinegar from the 1860s, vinegar, flowing like lava for a pumping out thousands of gallons quarter of a mile through homes. a year. Back then, the Midlands Children ran out with empty was taking on London as the jars to collect a free sample. malting and brewing capital, Compensation was paid out producing vinegars, pickles and to dozens of homes to replace sauces from giant factories. drenched carpets and furniture Farndons was bought out by and local reports said the smell Horlicks in the 1960s and Flag of vinegar lingered for weeks. vanished from our shelves.
Q
Unopened bottles from the I know the Cornish language is
1950s are sold on eBay, almost extinct but could I see
although 70-year-old an example of it?
sauce would not be Peter Jones, Coventry
fit for your bacon
A
sandwiches. The Cornish language, called Brown sauce Kernewek, is one of the was invented Brittonic group which include by Nottingham Welsh and it is also distantly grocer Fred related to Scottish and Irish Garton, in Gaelic. Up until the mid-16th the 1870s. He century it was the main language mixed vinegar, spoken in Cornwall. tomatoes, In the 14th century, the English tamarind, dates language spread across the South, and molasses and but it took hundreds of years for
During the war, my mother used to alternate buying brown sauce – Daddies, then HP and finally Flag. What became of Flag? Michael Greatrex, Nuneaton, Warwickshire
Ait to reach Penzance because Cornish people resisted it.
Fishwife Dolly Pentreath, who lived in Mousehole, near Land’s End and died in 1777, was said to be the last native Cornish speaker. Her gravestone says she was the last to converse in the ancient language of the county. Kernewek was classified by Unesco in 2010 as a critically endangered language but it is still spoken by around 3,000 people today.
“Dydh da” means hello, “fatal os ta” is how are you, “ny gonvedhav” means I don’t understand.
If you are feeling a bit “teasy” you are irritable and if you will do something “dreckly” you will do as asked at some point in the future.
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