Praise for tin tabernacles
QUESTION What were the iron churches mentioned in Anthony Trollope’s novel The Claverings, which was set in the mid 1860s?
The social upheaval caused by the Industrial Revolution gave rise to extensive church building across Britain.
The population was rapidly expanding, from 10 million in 1801 to more than 32million by 1901. New churches were needed to bring the Gospel and moral values to the crowded cities.
Corrugated iron, which was first used in the 1830s, was a good, cheap solution to the problem. Up to 4,000 makeshift churches sprang up in the 19th century and became known as tin tabernacles or iron churches.
Quickly and easily erected, they were intended to be short-term while funds were raised for a permanent building.
The 1901 catalogue for joiners David Rowell & Co of Westminster advertised a tin tabernacle for 400 people, delivered to the nearest railway station and erected on a foundation, at a cost of £360.
More than 50 iron churches survive, including the aesthetically pleasing St Anne’s in Tenby, Pembrokeshire; St Mary’s in Cadgwith, Cornwall; and St Saviour’s in Dottery, Dorset.
St Barbara’s at Deepcut Barracks, Surrey, features in the 2015 film Kingsman: The Secret Service.
Tim Waller, Caterham, Surrey.
QUESTION Who designated the best seat in the house to be L’oeil du prince (the prince’s eye)?
ITALIAN operatic stage designer Nicola Sabbatini defined L’oeil du prince as the seat in the theatre with the best view of the stage. Therefore, it would be where royalty might sit.
his work On Making Scenes And Machines For Theatres contains all the information you might need to know about setting up a performance in the early 17th century.
The chapter how To Place The Prince’s Seat stresses that it must be at a particular elevation and distance from the stage where ‘all the objects in the scene appear better from that position than from any other place’. It also includes the useful advice ‘The more elderly ladies should be seated in the last rows on account of the proximity of the men, so that every shadow of a scandal may be avoided’ and ‘less cultivated people’ should be set ‘on the tiers or at the sides’.
The modern L’oeil du prince is centrally placed and at a distance equal to the stage’s width. In most theatres, this corresponds to the seventh rows.
Pamela Bradshaw, Woodbridge, Suffolk.
QUESTION Who comes up with the obscure code names for military operations?
The 2017 film Dunkirk depicts Winston Churchill seeking a name for the operation to evacuate the British expeditionary Force. Seeing an electric fan in the corner of his office, he uses its brand name, Dynamo. This is a fiction, as it’s not how such things are done.
The Ministry of Defence has alphabetical lists of names for operations. They used to be generated with the aid of dictionaries and encyclopaedias, though it is now done by computer.
Importantly, the names must not have any homonyms — words that have the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings. It is also critical that they provide no indication as to the objective of a mission.
The purpose of the name is to allow military commanders to use a form of shorthand to refer to the operation without revealing its detail.
So a commander can say ‘With regard to Operation Fred’ rather than ‘With regard to the operation we are going to mount in Afghanistan in November’.
An operation may be enduring, such as Operation herrick, which was the British military mission in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014, or it may refer to a few days or even hours. An operation may have several names associated with it. Operation Jubilee was the large-scale seaborne raid on the port of Dieppe on August 19, 1942. Operations Cauldron and Flodden were mounted by 3 and 4 Commando to silence artillery batteries to the east and west of the town that protected the landing beaches.
Operation names often have a lower security classification so they can be used in correspondence and conversation. When I was in the RAF, it was common to be told: ‘The name Operation XXXX is restricted, but its meaning is secret.’
During World War II, each branch of the Armed Forces had its own ministry that produced lists of operational names. HQ Combined Operations issued its own codenames for operations it oversaw, such as commando raids and seaborne landings. To prevent commanders continually having to refer to their ministry to get a name for an operation, lists of unique names were provided to different levels of command.
Many names of operations are never made public. They may be used for contingency plans that sit on the shelf unused for years or be assigned to an operation that was planned to deal with a crisis, but was never executed. Once assigned, the name is never used again.
In Britain, military training exercises are given two-word names to distinguish them from live operations.
The Americans use two-word names, such as Desert Storm, the operation to expel the occupying Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991.
Nato operations tend to follow the American naming convention. The Natoled peace-keeping force in Bosniaherzegovina in the 1990s was Operation Joint endeavour, while the British contribution was Operation Grapple. Bob Cubitt, Northampton.