QUESTION: Who was the overall mocked in Gilbert and Sullivan’s track I Am The Very Mannequin Of A Trendy Main-Common?
Dramatist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan usually used real-life inspiration for his or her characters. As an illustration, Sir Joseph Porter, the pompous naval commander with no seafaring expertise in H.M.S. Pinafore, was based mostly on the newsagent and politician W. H. Smith. Smith rose to the place of First Lord of the Admiralty regardless of having no naval expertise.
Main-Common Stanley, the previous duffer with a twirly moustache who sings the track in The Pirates Of Penzance (1879), was modelled, with some irony, on a up to date English determine, Sir Garnet Wolseley (1833-1913). I Am The Very Mannequin Of A Trendy Main-Common is Gilbert and Sullivan’s most well-known ‘patter’ track, a quick tongue-twister and a positive signal of their genius.
Nevertheless, Sir Garnet was no duffer. He efficiently led the British forces in the course of the Anglo-Ashanti Wars in 1873-74, on the Gold Coast in what’s now Ghana. And in 1885, he was answerable for the efforts to alleviate Common Gordon in Khartoum.
Andrew Shore (pictured) as Main-Common Stanley in English Nationwide Opera’s manufacturing of Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert’s The Pirates of Penzance
Andrew Shore as Main-Common Stanley and Joshua Bloom as The Pirate King in the Gilbert and Sullivan comedian opera ‘The Pirates of Penzance’
Regardless of the same moustache to Main-Common Stanley, Sir Garnet was a mannequin fashionable navy commander. In 1869 his Soldier’s Pocket E-book was printed, a handbook of navy organisation and techniques that was a forerunner of the trendy subject service laws. His popularity for effectivity led to the phrase ‘every thing’s all Sir Garnet’, which means all is so as.
There was no unwell will. Sir Garnet was so happy to be considered the mannequin for the Main-Common that it’s mentioned he memorised the track and loved performing it at dwelling.
Andrew Shore (pictured) as Main-Common Stanley ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ Opera carried out by English Nationwide Opera on the London Coliseum
The character of the Main-Common could additional have been impressed by one other determine. Navy historian Trevor Hearl contends that Sir Edward Hamley, commandant of the Workers School at Camberley within the 1870s, performed a task. Hamley believed that navy historical past was extra worthwhile to troopers than navy science; certainly in step with Gilbert and Sullivan’s character.
Francis Gascoigne, Woodbridge, Suffolk.
QUESTION: Was there a landmark courtroom case regarding the Seventies movie The Three Musketeers?
Richard Lester’s basic The Three Musketeers (1973), starring Michael York and Oliver Reed, was initially meant to be a single movie. There was a lot footage that the producers determined to separate it and create two movies, with The 4 Musketeers launched the next 12 months.
Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan and Michael York in The Three Musketeers 1973
Some actors had been incensed that their work was getting used to make a second movie whereas they had been being paid just for one. This led to a authorized battle and the Display Actors Guild launched the ‘Salkind clause’ (named after Musketeers’ producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind) into contracts, which stipulated that single productions can’t be break up into movie instalments with out a prior contractual settlement.
Stuart Wells, York.
QUESTION: How did Ole Romer handle to measure the velocity of sunshine again within the seventeenth century?
In 1676, Danish astronomer Ole Romer (1644-1710) turned the primary individual to show that mild travels at a finite velocity, not an infinite one as most scientists believed on the time. Romer achieved this by observing the eclipses of Jupiter’s moon Io.
From 1672 Romer labored on the Royal Observatory in Paris. He used the just lately invented telescope to look at Io, which was identified to endure common eclipses by Jupiter. These eclipses supplied a predictable ‘clock’ that Romer might use to check the timing of Io’s orbit.
Romer observed that when the Earth was shifting away from Jupiter, the eclipses of Io appeared to happen later than anticipated, and when the Earth was shifting in direction of Jupiter, the eclipses occurred earlier.
Romer deduced that these variations had been as a result of finite velocity of sunshine. When Earth was shifting away from Jupiter to the other aspect of the solar, the sunshine from Io needed to journey a better distance, inflicting a delay within the noticed eclipse time. Conversely, when Earth was approaching Jupiter, the space the sunshine needed to journey was shorter, leading to an earlier statement of the eclipse.
By fastidiously measuring these timing discrepancies, Romer decided that mild wanted about 22 minutes to journey the diameter of Earth’s orbit. Utilizing Romer’s determine, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens discovered a worth for the velocity of sunshine equal to 131,000 miles per second.
The proper worth is 186,000 miles per second. The discrepancy was as a consequence of errors in Romer’s calculations for the time it takes for mild to cross the diameter of Earth’s orbit – it’s truly 16.7 minutes, not 22.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
