Donkey that doomed Foot
QUESTION Labour leader Michael Foot was accused of wearing a donkey jacket at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, 1981. Was this the case? What’s the origin of the donkey jacket? Michael Foot (1913-2010) was often caricatured wearing a donkey jacket, following his infamous appearance at the cenotaph. Foot, then labour leader, laid his party’s wreath wearing a short dark coat, in contrast to the long black overcoats worn by other men in attendance.
according to Foot’s official biographer, lord Morgan, the coat wasn’t a donkey jacket but ‘a short, blue-green overcoat’ bought for Mr Foot by his wife, Jill, at considerable expense from harrods.
in a later interview, Michael Foot told how he went back to the Foreign office for drinks and the Queen Mother complimented him: ‘that’s a lovely warm coat you’ve got on,’ she said. he later added ‘i never dreamt it was going to cause such trouble,’ referring to the merciless lambasting he received in the Press.
the story was stoked up by labour MP Walter Johnson, who had little love for Foot and called chris Moncrieff of the Press association to complain: ‘i was watching this morning and was disgusted to see that the leader of her Majesty’s opposition looked more like an irish navvy than a party leader.’ Moncrieff put out the story, with quotes, on the Pa wire.
the name ‘donkey jacket’ is derived from the woollen sack coats which provided both warmth and a degree of protection to 19th- century manual workers. leather shoulder pads were added in 1929 to protect the coat from abrasion by heavy items such as building materials carried on the shoulders. the name is thought to have originated because its users carried out ‘donkey work’, hard manual labour.
in 2003, on his 90th birthday, Foot donated the coat to the People’s history Museum in Manchester, where it remains on display. Dave Black, Warrington, Cheshire. When it comes to highvisibility jackets, the railways use orange, the police have green and others wear blue. Which colour is visible for the farthest distance? Does the order change with weather conditions? the human eye can detect light in decreasing wavelengths ranging from red to orange, yellow, green, blue, lavender indigo and violet. Red waves, at 620–750 nano- metres (nm), are about twice as long as violet ones at 380–450nm.
the retina contains two types of photoreceptors, rods and cones. the 6 million to 7 million cones, concentrated in the central yellow spot known as the macula, provide the eye’s colour sensitivity. the eye has three types of cone; redsensitive cones contain erythropsin, mainly sensitive to wavelengths between 500nm and 760nm, including green, yellow, orange and red light.
chloropsin in the green-sensitive cones is sensitive to a range of wavelengths between 430nm and 670nm, including cyan, green, yellow and orange light.
cyanopsin in the blue-sensitive cones is sensitive to 380nm to 550nm, including violet, blue and cyan light.
according to their respective sensitivities to long (l), medium (M) and short (s) wavelengths, they’re referred to as ‘l’, ‘M’ and ‘s’ cones. collectively, the photoreceptors in the human eye are most sensitive to yellowish-green light of 530nm to 555nm because these wavelengths stimulate the two most common (M and l) of the three kinds of cones almost equally.
in full daylight, our eyes are most sensitive to green light, slightly less sensitive to yellow and blue light, only half as sensitive to orange and lavender light and only one tenth as sensitive to red and violet light.
Red is, therefore, the colour worst seen at a distance. You can observe this by looking at distant traffic lights where the yellow and green lights appear brighter while the red is quite dim.
Despite its visibility, green is a poor choice of colour for a hi-viz jacket because the world is full of grass, trees, etc, so the contrast is poor. Nature has relatively few red or orange colours so red stands out against the natural daylight background.
colour visibility varies with weather conditions. as it grows darker, sensitivity shifts towards the yellow part of the spectrum, which is why joggers and night workers wear yellow fluorescent jackets.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
QUESTION Why are there no piebald racehorses?
all horses which race on the Flat and most of those competing in National hunt races are thoroughbreds. the thoroughbred is a breed of horse developed in Britain specifically for racing.
its bloodlines can be traced back to a stock of arab horses introduced into england as early as the third century.
thoroughbreds have delicate heads, slim bodies, broad chests and short backs. they are sensitive and high-spirited. averaging 16 hands (64in or 163cm) high and weighing about 1,000lb (450 kg), thoroughbreds typically come in solid colours and the Jockey club recognises only black, bay, chestnut, brown, grey, roan and white — for registration purposes.
Because of their historical bloodline, thoroughbred horses aren’t genetically predisposed to having mixed colour, but it isn’t entirely unheard of.
they rarely exhibit overo (spanish for ‘egg-like’) patterning, with splashes of white on their coat, but two horses in recent times have been skewbald, brown and white, rather than piebald, black and white. trainer andrew Reid’s Modern society, which first ran at Kempton in March 2012, was a beautiful (though very unsuccessful) example.
angrove Rumbaba, trained by Micky hammond, was a National hunt horse which first raced at hexham on april 23, 2012, but has now retired following a tendon injury. Where such patterns occur, the Jockey club registers the horse with regard to its base colour.
James Douglas, Newcastle-upon-tyne.