Standing up for freedom

Patriotic: Thousands of soldiers pose as Lady Liberty in 1918. Inset: The statue itself

QUESTION A photograph from 1918 shows thousands of U.S. soldiers forming a human Statue of Liberty. Was there a purpose to this stunt?

Arthur S. Mole was a British-born commercial photographer based in Zion, Illinois. In 1918, with his business partner John D. thomas, he got thousands of soldiers to form gigantic patriotic symbols that they photographed from a tower.

Formations depicted images such as the Statue of liberty, the liberty Bell, the Marine Corps emblem and a portrait of President Woodrow Wilson. the images were used to promote u.S. war bonds.

Mole & thomas used an 11 x 14 in view camera, positioned on an 80 ft- high tower. First, they put the outlay (wireframe) of a desired image on a glass plate in Mole’s camera.

then the image trace that was seen from the camera was transferred to the ground by assistants beneath the tower using thousands of yards of white tape.

Preparations for the shoot stretched over several weeks and positioning people within the tape took several hours.

In July 1918, 18,000 officers and soldiers posed as lady liberty on the parade grounds at Camp Dodge, Des Moines, Iowa. Many men fainted during the shoot, as they wore woollen uniforms and the temperature neared 105f (40c).

to create the correct perspective, the torch took in 16,000 men, while the rest of the statue was formed using only 2,000 people. the men at the top of the picture are half a mile from those at the bottom.

other images were even larger: the portrait of President Wilson was formed using 21,000 officers and men at Camp Sherman in ohio and stretched more than 700 ft.

the human liberty Bell was composed from more than 25,000 soldiers, arranged with Mole’s characteristic attention to detail, even depicting the crack in the bell.

Sara Williams, Chesterfield, Derbys.

QUESTION What is considered the world’s oldest board game?

It’S thought to be senet, played in egypt around 3500- 3100 BC. the earliest fragments of game boards thought to be for senet have been found in burials from that time and art on a fresco resembling a senet board appears in the tomb of Merknera (3300–2700 BC).

the first unequivocal painting is from the tomb of hesy (c. 2686–2613 BC). People are depicted playing in a painting in the tomb of rashepes (c. 2500 BC).

Senet means passage/gateway. the game board is composed of 30 squares arranged in three rows of ten. the purpose is a race where five pawns have to make it off the board before the opponent’s. the original rules are unknown, but a number of reconstructions have been based on tomb drawings, fragments of inscriptions and hieroglyphic drawings on the board. Because the game relies heavily on luck, it was thought the winner was under the protection of the gods, and its name came to mean ‘the game of passing’. A depiction of the game is found in the theban Book of the Dead. Senet boards were often placed in the grave to help the deceased through the afterlife. the main rival to the title of oldest board game is the royal Game of ur, or the Game of twenty Squares, which is also thought to be a race game. Boards date from before 2600 BC. like senet, its rules are uncertain, but have been reconstructed from fragmentary evidence. Both may be predecessors of backgammon. Arthur Carlson, Twickenham, Middx.

QUESTION What is the second longest-running theatre production (after The Mousetrap) in Britain?

Further to the earlier answer, Andrew lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the opera may only be third on the list of longrunning shows in the West end, but this British export has the distinction of being the longest-running show on Broadway. there have been more than 12,000 performances since it opened in 1988.

Alison Birch, London SW9. n

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