How a ferret helped put Charles and Di’s wedding on TV
Love pointless but fascinating trivia? Then a new book on Britain’s 124 postcode areas will be right up your street
FOR his new book, Mail Obsession, MARK MASON travelled the length and breadth of Britain, collecting trivia from every one of the country’s 124 postcode areas. In these days of cheap international travel it’s easy to ignore the rich and often bizarre history of Britain. Here are some of his favourite facts from the book . . .
EC (LONDON EAST CENTRAL): The toothbrush was invented in London’s most notorious prison.
The site occupied by the Old Bailey once housed the legendary Newgate gaol. In the 1770s, William Addis was a prisoner there. Brushing his teeth the same way as everyone else (using a rag to rub them with soot and salt), he decided there had to be a better way.
Inspired by the sight of a broom, he took a small animal bone left over from his dinner and drilled some holes into it.
Persuading a guard to get him some bristles, Addis threaded them through the holes and glued them into place. On his release the invention made him a fortune. His company, known as Wisdom Toothbrushes, survives to this day. BS (BRISTOL): The village of Rodney Stoke is a ‘Thankful Village’, denoting that none of its residents was killed in World War I.
Such was the carnage that there are just 53 Thankful Villages in England and Wales, and none in Scotland or Ireland.
Of these, 14 are Doubly Thankful, meaning they lost no one in World War II either. It so happens that one of those 14 is the Gloucestershire village of Upper Slaughter. SW (LONDON SOUTH WEST): Some of the TV cables at Buckingham Palace for the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were installed by a ferret.
The cables had to be fed through a very narrow underground duct. Conventional methods had failed, so the trusty animal was f i tted with a harness connected to a very light but strong line.
Then, lured by a piece of bacon, it scuttled through the duct. When it emerged at the other end engineers were able to attach the TV cables to the line and pull them through. CW (CREWE): The ‘Winged B’ emblem on Bentley cars, which are made in Crewe, has a different number of feathers on each side to trick would-be forgers.
The logo has adorned the luxury vehicles since 1919, when designer F. Gordon Crosby had his cunning idea to place ten feathers to the left of the ‘B’ as you look at it from in front of the car — but 11 to the right. DN ( DONCASTER): Michael Jackson’s Thriller was written by a man from Cleethorpes called Rodney.
Record producer and musician Rod Temperton composed the title track of the best- selling album of all time, as well as two of its other songs — meaning he’s a man from Cleethorpes who owns houses in Los Angeles, the South of France, Switzerland and Kent, plus an island off Fiji. DG (DUMFRIES & GALLOWAY): Britt Ekland was furious at being replaced by a body double in the film The Wicker Man because the replacement’s bottom was too large.
The actress was happy to bare her breasts for the movie —filmed on the Isle of Whithorn in Dumfries& Galloway — but no more. ‘For me,’ she explained, ‘anything below the waist is private.’
A stripper from Glasgow performed the scene instead on a day Ekland was away from the set. The first the star knew about it was when the film came out. ‘Her bottom is much bigger than mine,’ she complained. ‘It’s ridiculous.’ TW (TWICKENHAM): Heathrow’s Terminal 4 was built with gates 12 and 14 at opposite ends of the building, so that superstitious travellers wouldn’t notice the absence of a gate 13. In the same way, lots of buildings omit a 13th floor — and the London Eye has no pod 13. SY (SHREWSBURY): A pub in the village of Llanymynech in the Shrewsbury postcode area allowed Sunday drinking in its two English bars, but not in the Welsh one. The Lion pub sat right on the national border, meaning different licensing laws applied to different parts of the building. While the pub has closed, the border still splits the village — different councils collect the bins. GL (GLOUCESTER): The shuttlecocks used in professional badminton are made using goose feathers, which are always taken from the bird’s left wing. These feathers apparently ensure a better flight, though no one seems to know why. The game is socalled because it was first played at a party given by the Duke of Beaufort at his Gloucestershire home, Badminton House. CO( COLCHESTER): After Captain Lawrence Oates died in 1912 on Scott’s ill-fated trip to the Antarctic, his mother polished his memorial plaque in the Essex village of Gestingthorpe every week for the rest of her life. As she didn’t die until 1937, that meant a quarter of a century. IG (ILFORD): Alan Sugar once signed a birthday card to his wife ‘Best wishes, Sir Alan Sugar’. He blamed a ‘busy day in the office’, but admitted that back home in Chigwell (which falls in the postcode area) his wife was ‘ not a happy bunny’. CV (COVENTRY): The sound effect for cannon during a 1963 performance at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (which f alls within the Coventry postcode) was a recording of cast members exploding inflated crisp packets.
For the f i ght scenes in Shakespeare’s time, the actors used sheep’s blood. WS (WALSALL): The Queen keeps a suction- operated plastic hook in her handbag so she always has something on which to hang it.
The bags in question are made by Launer of Walsall, a firm which also supplied Margaret Thatcher.
One guest at a dinner in Berkshire witnessed t he Queen remove the hook, then ‘discreetly spit’ into the suction pad and attach it to the underside of the table. RG (READING): The world’s first text message, sent in Reading by a software engineer to the director of Vodafone, read: ‘Merry Christmas.’
Neil Papworth was the 22 year-old whizzkid. He sent the message on December 3, 1992, from the Reading office of the telecoms firm employed by Vodafone. Richard Jarvis, the recipient, was at his work Christmas party at the time, so Papworth decided to make it seasonal. SA (SWANSEA): The Marquess of Queensberry rules for boxing weren’t written by the Marquess of Queensberry.
Queensberry only endorsed the rules, which were actually the work of John Graham Chambers, a member of the British Amateur Athletics Club from Llanelli near Swansea. Rule 4 introduced the ten-second count: within that time any boxer who’d been knocked down had to regain his feet and go to a mark scratched in the middle of the ring. This is where the phrase ‘ up to scratch’ originated. RM ( ROMFORD): The f i rst accurate estimate of the speed of sound was made by a vicar timing the gap between a shotgun being fired and the noise reaching him.
In 1709, William Derham was rector at Upminster, which is now in the Romford postcode area. From the top of the church tower he used a telescope to watch an assistant firing the weapon several miles away.
As soon as he saw the gunsmoke Derham started measuring time with his half- second pendulum. The experiment was repeated again and again to average out inaccuracies, and Derham arrived at the figure of 1,116 feet per second. The accepted answer today is 1,115.