Campaign for real fir!
QUESTION How effective was the campaign Plant A Tree In ’73?
PLANT A Tree In ’73 was instigated by Sir Sydney Chapman, Conservative MP for Birmingham Handsworth and, later, Chipping Barnet.
A chartered architect, Sir Sydney began his campaign after the outbreak of Dutch elm disease caused the loss of millions of trees in the Sixties.
The Forestry Commission donated 160,000 saplings to the campaign, which civic leaders and schoolchildren planted with gusto, and the Royal Mail even issued a 9p commemorative stamp.
The scheme succeeded far beyond expectations. Some of the planting was a little over-enthusiastic, so the government backed the formation later that year of the Tree Council — an umbrella body for organisations involved in tree planting, care and conservation.
It organised the first National Tree Week in 1975 and, since then, members of the Royal Family, including the Queen, every prime minister at Chequers and many public figures have planted trees as part of this annual event.
Sammy Bowen, Oxford.
THE most immediate effect of Plant A Tree In ’73 was the realisation, before the launch, that the Department of the Environment’s Marsham Street HQ in Westminster did not have any facilities for tree planting.
Beds were hurriedly dug and trees planted. The campaign Plant Some More In ’74 followed.
Geoff Holden, Twickenham, Middlesex.
SADLY, many of the trees planted in 1973 were the wrong type put in the wrong place. The follow-up campaign to Plant Some More In ’74 gave rise to the joke: Will they survive till ’75?
John Bennett, Matlock, Derbys.
MY TWO sons were at our village primary school in 1973, and the school provided trees for the children to buy. The scheme was repeated the following year.
All these years later, those trees have grown and are beautiful.
Jane Harvey, Chelmsford, Essex.
QUESTION Why do astronomers reverse East and West in the sky?
THIS refers to the way we look at the sky using star charts.
East is left of North on a star chart, not to the right, as on a map on the ground. The reason is simple: You look down at the ground, but up at the sky.
Think of a star chart as being held overhead, then the stars would line up to what you’re seeing. If you looked up through the bottom of a land map at Britain — as if you were at the centre of a transparent Earth — it, too, would have East left when North was up.
Charles Pratchett, Salford.
QUESTION Has any member of the Royal Family been called as a witness in a court case?
ALBERT EDWARD, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Queen Victoria and the future Edward VII, featured in two trials: the Mordaunt Case in 1870 and the Tranby Croft Affair in 1891.
Lady Mordaunt was sued for divorce by her husband after confessing she had taken several lovers, including the Prince of Wales. The royal heir was subpoenaed to appear as a witness and, in a brief appearance, denied any criminal acts or ‘improper familiarity’ with her.
When it was claimed Lady Mordaunt was mentally ill, the judge suspended the hearing until she regained her faculties. She ended up spending the remaining 35 years of her life in asylums.
The second case concerned a house party at Tranby Croft, near Hull, attended by the Prince, where Sir William GordonCumming, a lieutenant-colonel in the Scots Guards, was accused of cheating at the card game baccarat.
Despite denying the accusations, Gordon-Cumming was persuaded by the Prince’s advisers to sign a document that declared he would never play cards again in exchange for the other guests’ silence. However, it soon became public knowledge and Gordon-Cumming sued the other players for slander.
The Prince, called as a witness, stated that, as banker, he’d not personally observed anything untoward. Nevertheless, Gordon-Cumming lost his action and spent the rest of his days as an outcast after being dismissed from the Army.
The issue of whether a monarch could be summoned to appear in their own court arose soon after Edward VII’s son succeeded him as George V in 1910.
With the backing of Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, he took legal action against Belgium-born Republican Edward Mylius, who had distributed a magazine in which the King was accused of committing ‘shameless bigamy and foully deserting his true wife’.
It was alleged he had married the future Queen Mary despite the fact he had already contracted a secret marriage in Malta with the daughter of an admiral.
When Mylius stood trial for criminal libel at the Old Bailey, he demanded the presence of the King in the witness box on the grounds that every accused person has the right to confront his accuser in court. The judge replied: ‘You may take the law from me.’
This was taken as a precedent in 1937, when the prospect arose that Edward VIII might be called as a witness in the divorce proceedings of Wallis Simpson.
The precedent also enabled the Queen effectively to halt the 2002 trial of Paul Burrell, who was accused of stealing Princess Diana’s property.
The Queen’s sudden recollection that she had allowed Burrell to keep some of the Princess’s papers was deemed to have fatally undermined the prosecution case. The leading constitutional expert Lord St John of Fawsley was clear the Mylius case had established that the monarch couldn’t be called as a witness.
Tony Adler, Richmond, Surrey.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Scottish Daily Mail, 20 Waterloo Street, Glasgow, G2 6DB. You can also email them to charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published, but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.