The Saturday briefing
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
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…
The shops are filling up with Halloween stuff once again but why have we got into this habit of giving out sweets? Is this another tradition we can thank the Americans for?
Jemma Woolley, Cockermouth, Cumbria
Trick or treating can actually be traced way back to Celtic Britain. October 31 was called Samhain, and was a celebration of the harvest and welcoming in the dark half of the year. It was also a festival for honouring the dead and it is thought you could appease the spirits that walked the earth by leaving food and drink on your doorstep.
When Christianity spread, the practice evolved into something called souling, when poor people would knock on the doors of wealthier families in their town and promise to pray for dead relatives in exchange for sweet treats known as soul pastries.
In Ireland and Scotland, they would sing on the doorstep and receive nuts and fruit, or money.
Trick or treating took off in earnest in the 1920s in America, with sweets eventually replacing home-baked goodies due to the ease factor.
My wife Susan seems to remember seeing Gene Autry in the late 1940s or early 1950s at her local church. Did this occur?
Mike Saxby, Yeovil, Somerset
“Singing Cowboy” Gene Autry made his first ever trip outside of America in the summer of 1939, when he arrived in London with Champion the Wonder Horse, riding him up the steps and into The Savoy hotel.
Gene, who made close to 100 Western films, toured the UK and Ireland in 1939, playing to tens of thousands of fans.
His tour kicked off on August 1 in Cork and took in 14 cities including Cardiff, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester. When he visited Dublin, 75,000 people gathered for a parade in his honour.
But his Hollywood film studio was getting twitchy with the rumblings across Europe, and made him get the next available ship back to America after performing in Birkenhead,
Merseyside, on August 25, a week before war was declared.
He returned to the UK in 1953, which will have been when your wife spotted him. He performed at the Empress Hall in London for a month-long stint, with Champion, and took part in a number of personal appearances, including visiting the children’s ward ofWest Middlesex hospital.
Gene is the only entertainer to have five stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one each for records, radio, film, television and live theatrical performance, including rodeo.
Why in some words and names, such as my surname, is the “ch” pronounced as a “k” but in other words, like Finchley, it has a “ch” sound?
John Nicholls, Sedgefield, County Durham
The “k” sound from ch is widespread among words with a Greek origin, as can be seen with Christ, chaos, charisma and chronic.
Your surname is derived from Nicholas, from the Greek name Nikolaos.
Most words with a “ch” sound come from Old English and are Germanic in origin, such as
church and each, but a few, such as challenge and chase, come from Old French. Others, such as Champagne and chef, are pronounced with a “sh” sound as they are relatively new, borrowed from French.
After the Norman Conquest, French spelling habits were inserted into Anglo-Saxon words that had the same sound but had previously been spelled with a simple c in Old English. So, for example, words like cild became child.
And not to forget there is also the fabulously throaty sound from Scottish Gaelic, heard with words such as loch, pronounced with a more “ach” sound, also found in the Scottish word dreich, meaning dull or gloomy and Scottish weather at its most miserable.
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