YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
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...
In Dr No, the first Bond film, there’s a scene in which a tarantula is put into Sean Connery’s bed. Was it real as he looked absolutely terrified.
A Douglas, Wallasey, Wirral
Connery was afraid of spiders, and the tarantula, named Rosie, was indeed real, so it didn’t require much acting on his part. However, the scene in the 007 movie from 1962 was shot with a sheet of glass between Bond and his eight-legged assassin.A similar trick is used in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, when protective glass was placed between Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones and an asp.
For Dr No, to stop the spider sliding off the glass, the bed had to be pinned to the wall at an angle, and Connery strapped into it, so he didn’t fall on the floor. The close-ups saw Rosie crawling up stunt man Bob Simmons’s arm. Even Simmons admitted he was “petrified”. Simmons vowed he would never work with tarantulas again. In Ian Fleming’s book, it is actually a deadly centipede that is planted under his sheets in his hotel room in the Caribbean.
At the end of the war, was PLUTO hauled back into Britain out of the English Channel or are we still “tied” to France?
E Baldwin, Islesteps, Dumfries
PLUTO, the Pipe Line Under The Ocean, was a secret pipeline constructed during the Second World War, that saw around 20 pipes, and hundreds of miles of pipeline, connecting the
South East of England to France. It came out of the need to fuel advancing Allied forces, to keep their planes, tanks and trucks moving, when tankers made easy targets for the enemy. British scientists, oil companies and armed forces joined up for the operation, led by Lord Mountbatten.
The pipelines pumped fuel across two secret routes – the first, codenamed BAMBI, ran 70 miles from the Isle ofWight to Cherbourg.The second, DUMBO, was half that distance, connecting Dungeness and Greatstone on Romney Marsh in Kent to Boulogne. Fuel was also pumped using secret pipelines from Liverpool and Bristol to pumping stations in the south east, camouflaged as bungalows and ice cream parlours.
Between August 1944 and May 1945, Pluto is thought to have delivered more than 170 million gallons of fuel to France.
The lines under the Channel
were decommissioned after the war and 800 miles were salvaged by recovery ships for peacetime needs.
Pluto contained enough lead for the plumbing of 10,000 new houses, so it came full circle as Hitler’s raids had provided much of the lead needed to make the pipelines in the first place.
I used to live in Coventry and, like most boys, I had a paper round. One of my customers, Mrs Davis, ran a pub and one day I found her door open and later learned she had been found murdered. It was known as the Ring O’Bells Murder. Was anyone charged?
Albert Shepherd, Cowes, Isle of Wight
The brutal murder of Amy Davis is the oldest unsolved murder on the records ofWest Midlands Police.
You must have been delivering to the landlady of the Ring O’Bells pub in Yardley Street on October 25, 1945. It was on this date that the 68-year-old widow’s body was discovered in the bath by a cleaner. She had been beaten to death and detectives suspected the most likely motive was robbery. Officers from New
Scotland Yard were brought in to investigate and more than 1,500 people interviewed.
Searches proved problematic as the pub was surrounded by waste ground as many houses had been destroyed in the Blitz.
In 1988, 43 years after the murder, the Coventry Evening Telegraph received a letter from someone claiming the killer was a man called Charlie.
The newspaper received another letter later that year, this time stating the murderer’s name began with F, and he had died in 1973. Nothing came of it.
In 2013 a woman walked into Willenhall Police Station with information about a local man, and the case was reopened. But nobody has ever been charged or arrested over the killing and police apologised last year for failing to find the culprit.
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