The glories of gargoyles
QUESTION Must a grotesque on a church act as a water spout to be a gargoyle?
To BE a true gargoyle, a carved figure must convey water from a roof and spew it on to the pavement, clear of the wall, avoiding the need for downpipes and drains. ‘Gargoyle’ and ‘gargle’ are from the same root, referring to the throat.
Carvings of faces and monsters which decorate edges or corners of roofs but don’t convey water are, strictly speaking, not gargoyles but grotesques.
These stone bits of humour, whimsy and monsters — which I call ‘cartoons of the sky’ because they’re often satirical or bawdy — can be found all over Britain, but oxford’s a great place to see them.
If you climb the tower of St Mary The Virgin, you can look down on the backs of the genuine gargoyles to see the channel in their backs which leads the water to their mouths. And contrary to popular belief, they are not all medieval: new ones are going up all the time.
In oxford, the Sixties restoration of St Edmund Hall has modern grotesques depicting college characters of the day: the dean and his favourite labrador; the bursar and his moneybags; the principal with squash racket.
Three other colleges — Brasenose, Magdalen and New — plus the Bodleian Library offer some of the best ribaldry in stonemasonry. The Duke Humfrey Library at the Bodleian near the Sheldonian (itself ringed with giant heads) has a choir of angels facing a choir of demons.
New College has the Seven Virtues on the sunny south side of the Bell Tower and the Seven Deadly Sins on the dark north side.
The vulgar and bawdy is permissible at gargoyle level. At Magdalen College, which features a busty wench modelled cheekily on one of the college serving maids, a monkey squats defecating into a drainhead. This is despite a pious bishop overlooking the bridge and blessing travellers.
Many carvings serve to mock mankind, as with the grotesque pulling a face behind a soldier on the Bodleian Library.
Gargoyles can even settle 450-year-old scores. When Magdalene College, Cambridge, redeveloped a disused wharf into the Quayside Centre in the Eighties, an unusual detail was specified — a particularly ugly gargoyle of a banker who had cheated the college of its endowment in 1542. It is now dribbling like a simpleton into the river. Long memories.
I’d like most public buildings bigger than a bus shelter to feature the odd gargoyle. It would cheer up our towns no end.
Benedict le Vay, author Eccentric Britain, Eccentric Oxford, London SW19.
QUESTION In this day of strict food labelling, how do companies with ‘secret’ formulae (e.g. Irn Bru and Coca-Cola) avoid putting their ingredients on packaging?
IT’S difficult for chefs and food producers to protect their recipes and practices using intellectual property law. Patents and copyrights only protect recipes in highly specific circumstances. The ‘secret ingredient’, however, is easier to protect.
This requires information holders to ensure their information is, and remains, confidential and is only given to another party where that party is under an obligation to keep it confidential.
Famous examples of trade secrets include the Coca-Cola recipe, KFC’s blend of herbs and spices and McDonald’s Big Mac special sauce.
Making sure a recipe is kept as a trade secret requires careful vetting of any potential recipients of the recipe, and you should include specific obligations of confidentiality in your contracts.
The ingredients used are listed on the product label. However, a trade secret will protect the quantities and/or the method of combination of each ingredient used in the products, so trade secret status is not lost by the disclosure of the names of the individual ingredients.
Numerous attempts have been made to crack the Coca-Cola code, without success, as the company proudly states.
Louise Westwood, Birmingham.
QUESTION Why was John Trundell’s early printing of Shakespeare’s Hamlet called the ‘bad’ quarto?
FurTHEr to the earlier answer, the poor quality of the bad quartos can be found by comparing Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy:
‘To be, or not to be, that is the question, Whether tis nobler in the minde to suffer/ The slings and arrowes of outragious fortune’ is rendered: ‘To be, or not to be, I there’s the point, To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all: No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes.’ Jennifer Foles, Warwick.