The armed armadillo
QUESTION What is the strangest thing found by Customs at a UK airport or port?
In 2016, a man was arrested for carrying an iPhone case shaped like a gun. Essex police tweeted a picture of the device and suggested he may have put his life at risk as he could have been suspected of being a terrorist and shot by armed officers.
In the same year, a German professor was arrested at Rome’s Fiumicino airport after security officers found a human skull in his luggage. The professor was said to have been shocked when police told him he was being arrested for the illegal possession of human remains.
In 2013, tens of thousands of insects, shrink-wrapped in plastic and stuffed into four hessian bags, were found in the luggage of a 22- year- old man from Burkina Faso, West Africa.
He claimed the 94kg of caterpillars were for ‘personal consumption’. But they breached controls on importation of ‘products of animal origin’ and were destroyed. They were mopane worms, the larvae of emperor moths, which are commonly eaten in Africa.
In 2004, a stuffed armadillo wearing a cowboy hat and two six-shooters breached Australia’s strict laws on wildlife importation. A Customs officer said: ‘Bad taste should have been enough of a reason not to attempt to bring it into the country.’
At Melbourne airport in June 2005, Customs staff were alerted to ‘flipping noises’ coming from beneath a woman’s skirt and found an apron of water-filled bags containing 51 live tropical fish.
In 2005, a woman tried to get through Stockholm Customs with 75 live snakes in her bra. At Gatwick in 2003, a woman put a bag of hashish in her sex toy’s battery compartment, thinking officials would be too embarrassed to examine it.
Ed Broad, Birmingham. I WORKED for Customs for 39 years and spent three years at the London Overseas Mail Office (LOMO) in West Ham. In my first week, I saw more strange sights than in the previous 20 years.
Every parcel was handled by an officer, who had to make a quick assessment of whether we needed to charge any duty or examine it.
Once an officer was examining a parcel from Africa when he was alerted by suspicious staining on the paper wrapping — blood, perhaps? On opening it, we found the severed leg of an animal — probably a deer or an antelope. But the stranger thing was that the Customs declaration on the outside of the parcel said the contents were ‘used footwear’!
On another occasion we opened a small, but unusually heavy parcel, posted from Gibraltar, only to find a rusty old cannonball. Considering that the cost of postage was determined by the weight of the parcel, we wondered how much had been spent to send this piece of junk. Or perhaps we had missed something.
Alan Jarrett, Rochester, Kent.
QUESTION Where does the term ‘honky-tonk’ come from?
THE origin is hotly debated in country music circles. The earliest source was an article published in 1900 by the new York Sun. It stated that the term (spelled ‘honkatonk’) came from the sounds made by a flock of geese.
‘Tonk’ may have been derived from the William Tonk & Brothers Piano Company, which was established in new York in 1889. It made a piano with the sticker ‘ Ernest A. Tonk’ ( after a favourite nephew). These upright grand pianos were dubbed ‘Tonks’.
Other suggestions include the derogatory terms ‘bohunk’, ‘hunky’ and ‘honky’, used to identify Bohemian, Hungarian and Polish immigrants, and appropriated by African-Americans to identify all white people. Author Larry Willoughby suggests it came from African-Americans, who called beer joints ‘Tonks’.
The true definition of a honky-tonk emerged in the Thirties. The Texas oilboom created frontier-like areas where tax rates were low, police supervision was lax and where workers gathered to relax.
Country music changed in this context. Lyrics became more realistic to address the problems of rural society, including adultery, alcoholism and loss, and reflect the experience of the honky-tonk’s patrons. The music got louder and Hawaiian steel guitar became prominent, to overcome the sounds of the rowdy clientele.
Jesse Wilmot, London E13.
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