Hancock’s last hurrah
QUESTION Why did Willie Rushton bring Tony Hancock’s ashes from Australia? Were the two men friends?
WILLIE’S wife was an Australian, and he met Tony down there. When Tony died, my agent, Roger Hancock, Tony’s brother, asked Willie to bring his ashes home.
When Willie was passing through ‘nothing to declare’, one Customs man, who knew Willie, jokingly demanded to know what was in his bag. Willie answered honestly: ‘ Tony Hancock’s ashes!’ and then produced them, to the men’s shock.
Barry Cryer, Hatch End, Middx. FROM 1954, the antics of ‘ Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock’, the lad from East Cheam, made him one of the nation’s most- loved characters. Sadly, Tony Hancock’s own life was dogged by chronic insecurity, depression and alcoholism.
In 1968, Hancock was in Sydney making a TV series about an English immigrant unimpressed by Australian ‘culture’. It was never completed: on June 24, 1968, 44- year- old Hancock died from a combination of vodka and barbiturates.
Willie Rushton was a cartoonist, comedian and actor who co-founded satirical magazine Private Eye. Ned Sherrin saw his impression of Harold Macmillan, and made him a regular on BBC’s That Was The Week That Was. He was a favourite on panel games, satire shows and as Jackanory’s voice for the tales of Winnie The Pooh.
In later years, he is best remembered by radio fans as a cricket lover on Trivia Test Match and for his razor- sharp puns in I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, appearing alongside Humphrey Lyttelton, Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Barry Cryer.
While presenting a Sixties show called Stars And Garters, Willie met his wife, the Australian actress Arlene Dorgan. It was in Australia that he struck up a friendship with Tony Hancock. Willie died in 1996.
Eric Moore, Middle Burnham, Somerset.
QUESTION The sentence ‘amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes’ contains all the alphabet’s letters. Are there any shorter ones?
THIS is a pangram. Others include ‘Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs’ and ‘Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz’.
A ‘perfect’ one uses each letter once. The Guinness Book of Records called this example the world’s most contrived sentence: ‘Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz’, meaning ‘ annoying question concerning letters carved into a glaciated hollow on the bank of a sea inlet’.
Pangrams can be found in many other languages, too.
John Ward, Bristol. THE best-known pangram in English is ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ (35 letters). Dating back to 1888, it is famous for its coherency and often used for touch-typing practice. Robert Baden-Powell’s book Scouting For Boys (1908) uses it as a practice for signalling.
The shortest in English without abbreviations are ‘Nymphs blitz quick vex dwarf jog’, ‘Big fjords vex quick waltz nymph’, and ‘Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymph’ (all 27 letters).
The question’s pangram is shortest in terms of words. An equivalent is ‘ Sympathizing would fix Quaker objectives’, but contains a proper noun and an American spelling. Other good pangrams include: ‘ Fox nymphs grab quick-jived waltz’, ‘My ex pub quiz crowd gave joyful thanks’, ‘ Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs’, ‘ Schwarzkopf vexed Iraq big- time in July’, ‘ Waxy and quivering, jocks fumble the pizza’ and ‘ Foxy diva Jennifer Lopez wasn’t baking my quiche’.
Ian Dean, Birmingham.
QUESTION Who invented the flamethrower that was used in World War II? Were they effective? Are they still used by any military forces today?
FURTHER to earlier answers, it is quite likely that I am the only surviving Vehicle Mech (AFV) First Class who worked on the Crocodile, the flamethrower the British Army took to France on D-Day.
Part of the 79th Armoured Division, under General Sir Percy Hobart, I was with the 1st Assault Troop Workshop, REME, and we were the ‘Ikea’ of the British Army. We affixed the flamethrowers to Churchill Tanks Mk VII.
They were transported to France as boxed kits with bent steel tube, a coupling and a ‘projector’ with a twowheeled armoured fuel trailer.
They were used by the 141 Royal Armoured Corps (The Buffs or the Royal East Kent regiment), the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry and the 7th Royal tanks (the Red Lanyard). Of the kits produced, 250 were reserved.
My Army book (AB64) records on May 4, 1945: ‘B Squadron of the 141 RAC who were instrumental in taking Brest and Nuland, of their 290 men from D-Day onward, 64 were killed, 136 wounded and four missing, quite a high price for the liberation of France.’
General Sir Brian Horrocks, Commander of the 43rd Wessex Division, said ‘had it not been for these men and tanks, casualties would have been higher and the war extended’.
For my wartime services in France, I was awarded the Legion of Honour. I hope to bequeath the medal to Bovington Tank Museum, to whom I have donated my copy of the History of the 79th division, annotated by Sir Brian Horrocks.
Dennis G. Lanham, Bath, Somerset.
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