Wood you believe it!
QUESTION Why is Grinling Gibbons School in South-East London so called?
Grinling Gibbons was britain’s greatest woodcarver. For most of his working life he lived in Deptford, South East london, and a local primary school is named in his honour.
Gibbons’s carvings, usually in limewood, can be found in palaces, churches and country houses throughout the country. They can be recognised by their cascading, lifelike flowers, fruit, foliage and birds.
Gibbons was born in rotterdam in 1648 to british parents. He completed his apprenticeship as a stonemason in the low Countries before emigrating to london in 1667.
He was discovered by accident in 1671 by the 17th-century courtier and diarist John Evelyn.
As Evelyn made his way home, he passed ‘near a poor solitary thatched house in a field near sayes Court’, where he heard the sound of a chisel on wood.
When he looked through the window, he was struck by a remarkable sight: ‘i saw the young man at his carving, by the light of a candle. i saw him to be engaged on a carved representation of Tintoretto’s Crucifixion, which he had in a frame of his own making.’
Evelyn introduced Gibbons to Charles ii, who gave him his first royal commission in 1675 — decorative carving in the dining room at Windsor Castle. These bore the hallmarks of his art: fruit, wheat and flowers around the doorways, with panels of fruit, fish and fowl.
During his career, Gibbons completed commissions for Whitehall Palace, Hampton Court Palace and the choir stalls and organ case at st Paul’s Cathedral.
His trademark was the pea pod: it is believed that if the pod is open, it meant his patron had paid for the work; if closed, he hadn’t.
Charles ii used Gibbons’s skills for diplomatic ends. For the Grand Duke of Tuscany, the king had him carve the Cosimo Panel, an exquisite piece full of delicate detail showing flowers, scrolls and walnuts bursting from their shells. This limewood marvel is on display at the Pitti Palace in Florence. His carved panels of cherubs and ripe fruit were symbolic of the wealth and prosperity that defined the restoration. William iii (William of orange) appointed Gibbons as master carver to the Crown.
He also produced fine stone sculptures. His most controversial piece was the equestrian statue of King billy, which stood on College Green in Dublin from 1701 outside ireland’s historic parliament.
The statue was the victim of many nationalist attacks: it was tarred and greased, daubed with paint and covered in mud, before being blown up in 1928.
Gibbons died on August 3, 1721, aged 73. He is buried at st Paul’s, the actors’ church, in london’s Covent Garden. Rachel Elliot, Oxford.
QUESTION What was Plan B if Apollo 11 was unable to return to Earth?
in Short, there wasn’t one. Though there was more than one Apollo mission, the complex rocket stacks for each were hand-built several months apart.
Even if another had been available and could have reached the Moon before the astronauts ran out of oxygen, the lunar lander could not be flown by remote control and barely held its two-man crew. President nixon’s speechwriter William safire had prepared for a tragedy, with a text that began: ‘Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon.’ space exploration remained hazardous well into this century. When the space shuttle Atlantis launched to fix the Hubble space telescope in 2009, fears over its safety led to another shuttle, Endeavour, standing ready in case a rescue was needed. Chris Rogers, Edgware, Middx. A Fly weighs less than a millionth of a person. if you run into a solid surface at 10mph, you may do yourself a mischief. A fly’s impact would be less than a millionth of this. The force of a fly hitting a window is the product of speed and weight (momentum). Hitting a windscreen of a car travelling at 70mph is the same as a fly doing 70mph more.
The body of a fly is covered by an exoskeleton whose chemical component is chitin, which is fibrous and closely related to cellulose. it is segmented in cylindrical shells that crunch like boxes when stepped on. Presumably evolution allowed for collisions.
The ability of a cat to fall without serious injury is explained by the same physics. When an animal stops abruptly, heavier parts keep going and tear it apart.
A bird is cushioned by feathers but may be killed by flying into a window. Presumably its neck is its Achilles’ heel. R. J. Andrews, Farnborough, Hants.
QUESTION Do the Dutch eat any foods in an unusual way?
Further to the earlier answer, the Dutch do not swallow herrings whole. Adverts may show a fisherman or diner holding a fish over their mouth but they then bite off a portion to eat.
The preferred way to eat herring is on slices of rogge brood, known in britain as pumpernickel, with diced raw onion.