The pivotal gate of God

QUESTION A 1945 church magazine refers to ‘the gate with no legs’ which prevented vehicle access. What sort of gate was this? FOLLOWING the publication of the Book Of Common Prayer in 1549, it became a requirement that priests ‘meeting the corpse at the church style’ said prayers for the dead before going to the funeral.

To protect the coffin from inclement weather, a roof was often built over the gate. This was known as a lych gate, the word lic being the Old English name for a corpse. To save the shoulders of pallbearers when prayers were said at the church gate, a block was often built inside the lych gate.

The county of Sussex, however, had a unique alternative called the tapsel gate. This is a wooden five-bar gate that, rather than being hinged, is balanced on a central pivot.

It was useful for pallbearers as they were able to rest the coffin on the top of the gate as they walked on either side. It was thought to have been invented by John Tapsel, from Mountfield, near Battle. He possibly fitted the first tapsel gate at St Pancras church in Kingston, near Lewes.

Church records show a carpenter was paid a shilling and sixpence to install the gate in 1729. It has been replaced a number of times since it was first constructed, the last time in October 2010.

The tapsel gate at the church of St Mary the Virgin in Friston is distinctive in having a wooden arch over it, the sides of which act as the stop posts for the gate. It is thought to be of original construction.

There are four other tapsel gates in existence: at the church of St Simon and St Jude in East Dean; at St Andrew’s church in Jevington — the only gate in Sussex set with an integral stile, though this was removed during renovation; at the Church of the Transfiguration in Pyecombe, near Brighton (a replica of the original); and at Coombes church, near Lancing, said to be of original construction.

Near Coombes, a tapsel gate links the churchyard of St Botolph’s church with the adjacent burial ground. It was installed in late 2003 and consecrated by the Bishop of Horsham in 2004.

Michael Worden, Polegate, E. Sussex. Rare: The tapsel gate at St Mary the Virgin in Friston, East Sussex QUESTION Is it true that in World War II, the Danes dissolved two Nobel Prize medals in acid to stop them falling into the hands of the Nazis? IN THE Thirties, Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen was a refuge for German Jewish physicists and those who spoke out against Hitler.

Nobel physics laureates Max von Laue and James Franck had deposited their medals there to keep them from being confiscated by the German authorities, but after the occupation of Denmark in April 1940, holding the medals became dangerous. The Nazis had attempted to lock down Germany’s gold supply, threatening to make exportation a capital offence.

Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy (of Jewish origin and a 1943 Nobel laureate), who worked at the institute, wrote: ‘I suggested we should bury the medal, but Bohr did not like this idea as the medal might be unearthed.

‘I decided to dissolve it. While the invading forces marched in the streets of Copenhagen, I was busy dissolving Laue’s and Franck’s medals. After the war, the

IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Scottish Daily Mail, 20 Waterloo Street, Glasgow G2 6DB; fax them to 0141 331 4739 or email them to charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence. gold was recovered and the Nobel Foundation generously presented Laue and Franck with new Nobel medals.’

De Hevesy wrote to von Laue after the war that the dissolving had not been easy, as gold is ‘exceedingly unreactive and difficult to dissolve’. He had used aqua regia, a mix of hydrochloric and nitric acids.

When German soldiers pounded on the lab’s door, all that remained was an inconspicuous bottle of reddish liquid.

J. E. Holne, Leeds. QUESTION What is the difference between a verse and a stanza? FURTHER to the previous answer, verse is a metrical composition — words in a form having regular or rhythmic metre.

Long ago, scribes would commit one line at a time to memory before transcribing it. Many texts from ancient times were for teaching or entertainment. Presenting such verse in lines enabled the orator to deliver it one breath at a time.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are written in long passages, one line after another with no breaks, which might be called continuous verse. The Bible is broken into chapters, and each line has a number for referencing. Each of these numbered lines is referred to as a verse.

As poetry evolved, it became customary to break the verse into sections, or verse paragraphs, followed by a blank line. The formal name is a stanza.

Poetry is not always written in verse; there are prose poems without line breaks, regular metre or rhyme.

Modern poets commonly write in free verse, which permits variations in the length of lines and stanzas.

Peter White, Leeds.