The fairest of them all
QUESTION What are the origins of the beauty pageant?
BEAUTY contests have been a distinctive aspect of face and skincare promotion for centuries. Beautiful skin pageants first arose in ancient Greece where, according to legend, the human Paris had been summoned to settle a difference among the goddesses: who was the loveliest of them all — Hera, Athena or Aphrodite? Who deserved to receive the coveted Golden Apple marked ‘For the Fairest’?
As the legend goes, after accepting Helen of Troy as a bribe, he selected Aphrodite, and in the process he began not only the Trojan War but the ‘War of the Sexes’.
The Concours de Beaute, held at Spa in Belgium from September 19, 1888, is considered the first commercial beauty contest and the inspiration for Eric Morley’s ‘Miss World’ pageant, initiated by company Mecca in 1951.
In 1888, heats lasted a fortnight, during which female ‘lovelies’ had to publicly ‘bathe in soap’. The winner of the 5,000 francs prize was 18-year-old Bertha Soucaret, from Guadeloupe.
Early beauty contests were controversial. For decades, it was generally accepted that a woman’s place was ‘in the home’.
The bikini was first seen in competition at Miss World in London in 1951 — and raised such a firestorm, it was banned.
Nevertheless, nothing sells newspapers like pictures of pretty young girls, and the makers of toiletries knew it. In 1940, Max Factor Jr developed the prototype for the ‘All-American Face’. So began a series of beauty competitions encouraging young women to benefit from a perfumed soak and a Max Factor makeover.
In 1850s America, showman and businessman Phineas T. Barnum began promoting beauty contests for children and babies, and by 1915 the annual baby parade at Asbury Park, New Jersey, was established as one of the leading attractions of New England, a sponsored beauty contest accepted as a normal part of a little American girl’s summer fun.
Perhaps the best-known of all British beauty competitions was the Pears contest. Started in 1932, it sought the young girl with the softest and most radiant Pears soap skin.
In August 1957, this annual competition invited the nationwide entry of photos of girls aged between three and nine, the winner was named Miss Pears for a year. In 1997 the event was scrapped — judging young girls for their cute looks was out of line with a feminist outlook. Faith Hines, Laundry and Mangle Museum Archives, Long Melford, Suffolk.
QUESTION What is thought to be the busiest road in the world?
ONTARIO Highway 401, otherwise known as the King’s Highway or the Macdonald–Cartier Freeway, is a vast roadway in Canada that stretches across 514.5 miles from Windsor in the west to the Ontario–Quebec border in the east.
Since the highway’s completion in the late Sixties, Highway 401 has evolved from being a convenient bypass to a major economic corridor. Today, the stretch of Highway 401 that passes through the Greater Toronto Area ranges from six to 18 lanes and carries more than 500,000 cars a day, the largest throughput of automobiles in the world.
The 401 uses a collector-express system. The inside lanes are for express, while the outside lanes are collectors. The express lanes are meant to be the interstate used for traffic to bypass busy stretches. The collectors are for local traffic. Tourists find this system perplexing and often miss their exits. Scott Brick, Swansea.
QUESTION Why is beer mixed with lemonade called ‘shandy’?
THE origins of ‘shandy’ have mystified etymologists. The word ‘shandy’ by itself is recorded as early as 1691 as a piece of slang meaning ‘boisterous’ or ‘empty headed, half-crazy’.
Shandy the drink was first known by its full title shandygaff, a mix of beer and ginger ale. The earliest reference is in The Adventures Of Mr Verdant Green, an 1853 novel by Edward Bradley: ‘To make shandy-gaff and sherry-cobbler, and brewbishop and egg flip: oh, it’s capital!’
The earliest citation for shandy is from the London Daily News of June 4, 1888; ‘Sparkling hop, shandy, and other newfangled drinks.’
These drinks were somewhat more interesting than the beer and lemonade concoction we have today. An example taken from Drinking With Dickens, a book by Charles Dickens’s great-grandson Cedric about old English drinking culture, gives the following recipe: ‘1oz orange brandy liqueur, such as Grand Marnier, ¾ oz fresh lemon juice, 10 oz real ale, 10 oz ginger beer, twist of lemon to garnish.’
A hint as to the term’s origins might be found in ‘gaff’. This word has many meanings, the earliest being for a boat hook (c. 1300). It’s also a term for a cheap music hall (1812) and one’s home. It’s the third meaning, loud or rude talk, possibly Old English gafspraec (‘blasphemous or ribald speech’) that might be a clue. Maybe ‘shandy’ and ‘gaff’ had something to do with a boisterous drinking culture. Ewan Morrison, Jedburgh, Borders.
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