Iglesias the age-gap dad
QUESTION The late nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow’s youngest child is 52 years younger than his oldest. Is this a record?
CROONER Julio Iglesias has a halfbrother who is 60 years younger and a half-sister 63 years his junior.
His father Julio Iglesias-Puga was a Spanish gynaecologist born in Ourense on July 25, 1915. During the Spanish Civil War, he fought for the Nationalists led by General Franco.
In 1943, he married Maria del Rosario de la Cueva y Perignat and the couple had two sons, Julio and Carlos. They divorced in 1983.
In December 1981, Julio Sr was kidnapped by the Basque separatist organisation ETA and held for two weeks. He later became a fixture in Spanish gossip magazines due to his openness about his famous grandsons, the singers Enrique and Julio Jr.
On May 18, 2004, his 40-year-old second wife Ronna Keith gave birth to a boy, Jaime, when Julio Sr was 88.
He rejected suggestions Ronna was the driving force behind their decision to start a family.
‘At my age, a child is marvellous . . . I felt just like Abraham,’ he declared.
In the Bible, the Hebrew patriarch Abraham had a son in his 90s.
‘If people say I just did it for my wife, I don’t take it as an insult, but the truth is I wanted to do it just as much as she did.
‘My wife wanted to do it and we did it . . . It was an act of generosity towards her. I leave her part of my blood, of my life.
‘I need her so much that I said to her, “Here, this is what you wanted for when I am gone”.’
Iglesias died in Madrid on December 19, 2005, at the age of 90. His daughter Ruth was born on July 26, 2006, seven months later. Liz Coleman, Birmingham.
QUESTION Is the longbow the most powerful such weapon?
THE English longbow changed medieval warfare and was instrumental in victories at the famous battles of Agincourt, Crecy and Poitiers.
Yet for years its dimensions, material, arrow size and power were mysteries hotly debated by scholars.
Many of these questions were answered with the raising in 1982 of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s flagship. In 1545, while leading the attack on the galleys of a French invasion fleet, she sank in the Solent, north of the Isle of Wight.
A stash of longbows and arrows were found in the ship, so we now know the bows were made from yew and around 80 per cent of the arrows were poplar.
The find allowed replicas to be made and their tolerances tested. It was found that a longbow the height of a man was able to shoot an arrow 360 yards.
It has been estimated that an arrow loosed by a highly skilled archer of Edward III’s time would reach 400 yards. However, longbows are not the most powerful bows. The Turkish recurve bows of the 14th and 15th century are thought to rival the longbow for distance.
Modern carbon composite bows can fire upwards of 400 yards.
The world record for a conventional bow was set by extreme distance archer Don Brown in 1987, who shot a featherweight arrow a whopping 1,336 yards using a specialist bow designed to shoot for a long distance rather than at a target. Jim Stewart, Dundee.
QUESTION What is the biggest ransom ever paid?
FuRTHER to the earlier answer about the 100,000 pounds of silver paid for Richard the Lionheart the ransom paid to the Nazis for the release of Baron Louis de Rothschild, a member of the famed Jewish banking family, might be the highest when adjusted for inflation.
When the Nazis took over Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, the baron, then head of the Austrian banking operations of the family, was arrested and held prisoner.
He was released only after lengthy negotiations with the Nazis, including the SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who visited him, and upon payment of $ 21 million, adjusted for inflation to $400 million today.
After his release, the baron went to South America and then to the u.S., where he became an American citizen.
Besides his commercial activities, he was known as an amateur archaeologist and as a sponsor of research projects in physics and chemistry.
John Cowan, Margate, Kent.
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