The Saturday briefing
Is there anything you’re yearning to know? Send your questions, on any subject, to the contacts given below, and we will do our best to answer them...
QIn the documentary, Queen Mary: How She Saved the Royals, there was a photo at Prince Charles’ christening. Who was the elderly lady sitting on the right side of Princess Elizabeth?
AIt is Victoria Mountbatten, Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven – Prince Philip’s maternal grandmother. She had been born a Princess of Hesse and the Rhine and was a favourite granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She was also a sister of the last Tsarina of Russia.
She played a major role in the Duke of Edinburgh’s upbringing when his parents separated and his mother, Princess Alice, was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
She was known for being blunt, smart and adventurous – she flew in a Zeppelin airship and enjoyed a perilous flight in an early biplane, sitting on a stool and gripping on to the pilot’s back.
She married her father’s first cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, in 1884 and they lived in England, Germany and Malta.
Due to rising anti-German sentiment, they renounced their German titles in 1917 and changed their name to Mountbatten, an anglicised version of Battenberg.
She died in 1950, aged 87, two years after Prince Charles’ christening. Prince Philip recalled: “I liked my grandmother very much... she was very good with children.
“She treated them in the right way – the right combination of
PROUD MOMENT: The then Princess Elizabeth holds Prince Charles in her arms at his christening in 1948
the rational and the emotional.”
QThe other day while sitting in a traffic jam, I wondered how many cars are registered to be on the roads now compared to in 1955, when I was a teenager. How much money does the Government now receive in road tax?
AAt the end of December 2019, there were 38.7 million licensed vehicles in Great Britain. Back in 1955, there were close to five million and it would have cost you £12 to tax your car for the year.
Car tax makes around £5 billion a year for the Government – this is a tax on cars, not roads, and goes straight into the general treasury fund. It is not ringfenced for maintaining our roads. That system ended in 1937, when road tax was abolished and replaced by vehicle excise duty. So what you pay today is more of a pollution tax, based on engine size and CO2 emissions, depending on when the vehicle was registered.
But most people still refer to it as road tax or car tax.
In 2013-14, the last full year paper tax discs were issued, there were 210,000 untaxed vehicles on our roads.
The Department for Transport says that last year, the figure had trebled to 634,000. It’s thought that £94 million of revenue was lost last year through non-payment.
QA few of us oldies were chatting about the coronavirus pandemic and the expression “kicking the bucket” came up, but nobody could think of where it came from. Can you help at all?
AIt has been around since the 16th century and you’d be forgiven for thinking the bucket in question was the type that swings happily next to a spade or mop.
Some people have theorised that it comes from the tragic final action of someone standing on an upturned bucket with a noose around their neck, kicking the bucket away to take their own lives. Others link it to an old Catholic custom, where the deceased’s body was laid out and a holy-water bucket was placed at their feet and loved ones would come to pray and sprinkle the body with water.
However the bucket in question refers to the name of a beam in a barn, which farmers would hang pigs off to be slaughtered.
In their final moments, the pig would thrash around and kick the beam – the bucket. “Bucket” comes from the old French word buquet, which also gave us the word trebuchet.
Euphemisms like this are used around the world for difficult subjects, to help soften uncomfortable truths.
In Dutch, one translation for dying is “they turned the little corner”.
PLEASE SEND US YOUR INTRIGUING QUESTIONS ON ANY SUBJECT: By email:
● put “questions” in the subject line and send to kay.harrison@reachplc.com
● to Any Questions, Daily Express, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5AP
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Unfortunately we cannot reply individually, but we will feature the best questions on this page. CHARLES Fortune from Bournemouth remembers a song at school in the 1940s called The Flight of the Earls and would like an extract.
Alfred Perceval Graves (1846-1931)
To other shores across the sea We speed with swelling sail; Yet still there lingers on our lee A phantom Innisfail. Oh fear not, fear not, gentle ghost,
Your sons shall turn untrue. Though fain to fly your lovely coast,They leave their hearts with you.
As slowly into distance dim Your shadow sinks and dies, So o’er the ocean’s utmost rim Another realm shall rise. New hills shall swell, new vales expand,
New rivers winding flow; But could we, for a foster land, Your mother love forego? Shall mighty Espan’s martial praise
Our patriot pulses still; And o’er your mem’ry’s fervent rays Forever cast a chill? Beside the camp fire’s fitful blaze,
Amid the forest drear, I picture, in the dying rays, The home to me so dear. The lowly cot, the leaping stream,
The spire upon the hill – I see them as I lie and dream; My heart is with them still. O haste ye, weary laggard years,
O speed me o’er the foam To greet again, ‘mid happy tears,
My native land - my home!
If you can’t remember the words to a favourite verse or song from yesteryear, send us a snippet and we’ll do our best to find all the wonderful words.