Resolute in Oval Office
QUESTION What’s the history of the Resolute Desk in the White House Oval Office?
THIS desk was gifted to the American people by Queen Victoria in 1880. It was carved from the oak timbers of HMS Resolute, part of a doomed expedition to the Arctic in 1852.
Admiral Sir Edward Belcher commanded five ships to search for Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated Northwest Passage expedition of 1845.
On August 16, 1852, Resolute, captained by Henry Kellett, was struck by an enormous ice floe and became stuck fast. In the spring of 1854, the crew were forced to abandon ship.
Resolute found her own way out of the ice-pack and was discovered floating in Davis Strait by an American whaler. Ship’s captain James Buddington claimed the right to salvage.
Wealthy philanthropist Henry Grinnell, who had financed earlier expeditions to find Franklin’s lost party, suggested the Resolute be refitted and returned to England as a gesture of goodwill.
The U.S. government bought Resolute from Buddington for $40,000 (more than $1 million today) and returned her to Portsmouth after refurbishment.
Resolute served as a supply vessel until she was decommissioned in 1879 and broken up in Chatham Dockyard. Queen Victoria ordered that three desks be made from the timbers, the largest to be gifted to the U.S. President.
A partners’ desk — where two people can work facing each other — was designed and made by joiner William Evenden and presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes on November 23, 1880. President Hayes placed it in the Green Room, one of three state parlours on the first floor of the White House.
It has been used in various rooms, depending on the whim of the President.
Polio sufferer Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a modesty panel with an eagle motif for the desk to hide his leg braces. He died before the work was done, but President Truman retained the panel in his honour.
In 1948, Truman decided to turn the head of the eagle in the presidential seal to face the olive branch of peace. However, the Resolute Desk’s eagle still faces the arrows of war. After the Truman renovation of the White House, the desk was moved to the ground floor where it was used by President Dwight D. Eisenhower for radio and TV broadcasts.
It was first used in the Oval Office in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. His children were photographed playing under the desk while he worked.
Barack Obama was pictured reclining in his chair with his feet on the table and Joe Biden has decided to retain it.
A second smaller desk from Resolute is in the Royal Navy Museum. The third was a gift from Queen Victoria to Henry Grinnell’s widow for his financing of several Franklin rescue attempts.
Howard Wright, Hereford.
QUESTION Are any towns or cities named after literary place names?
SIR WAlTER SCOTT’S 1814 novel Waverley, set during the Jacobite rebellion in 1745, is the first historical novel.
Its cultural impact coincided with the Scottish diaspora leaving for the New World. There are towns called Waverley in New Zealand, Canada and in the U.S. states of Iowa, Ohio and Virginia. Waverley railway station is in Edinburgh.
Dan Smith, Jedburgh, Borders.
WESTWARD Ho! in Devon is the only town in England named after a book and to have an exclamation mark in its name. The town was built in 1865 as a seaside resort on the site of a submerged 10,000year-old Mesolithic forest. It was named in honour of the 1855 novel by Charles Kingsley, a native of Devon. The book’s popularity led to a boom in tourism.
‘Westward Ho!’ and ‘Eastward Ho!’ were shouts londoners would hear from sailors on Thames water taxis, indicating the direction in which they were heading. ‘Ho!’ was a call meaning ‘Hey there!’
Westward Ho! had already been used as the title of a 1604 play about the westward expansion of london. Kingsley used it to describe pirates moving west to a life of adventure in the Caribbean.
Ian MacDonald, Billericay, Essex.
QUESTION Where does the term balderdash come from?
DESPITE its anodyne dictionary definition of ‘stupid or illogical talk; senseless rubbish’, balderdash is far more potent than alternatives such as rubbish, claptrap and nonsense. It’s among the forlorn group of words that fall under the category ‘etymology unknown’.
Balderdash first appears in the pamphlet Haue With You To SaffronWalden by Elizabethan playwright and poet Thomas Nashe.
It seems to refer to froth: ‘Two blunderkins, hauing their braines stuft with nought but balder-dash.’
By 1611 it meant a mixture of drinks, such as milk and beer or beer and wine. George Chapman’s play May Day has: ‘S’fut winesucker, what have you fild vs heere? Baldre-dash?’
Some argue its origin is in the Welsh baldorddus, meaning idle, noisy talk or chatter. Others point to the Dutch balderen, meaning to roar or thunder; Norwegian baldra; and Icelandic baldrast or ballrast, to make a clatter.
The -dash could be derived from a dash of alcohol or to dash as in to strike.
Andrew Marvell’s 1674 political satire Rehearsal Transpros’d has the first use of the word in its modern sense: ‘Did ever Divine rattle out such prophane Balderdash!’
It has been used in this way ever since. T. B. Macaulay’s 1849 History Of England had ‘I am almost ashamed to quote such nauseous balderdash’; while Thomas Carlyle’s 1858 History Of Friedrich II Of Prussia states: ‘No end of florid inflated tautologic ornamental balderdash.’
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