The Grampound Times

Summer 2006 (Edition 42 - Carnival Edition)
Our community in Cornwall

The Grampound Times

 

Did You Know?

I find pleasure in occasionally printing for your information the often incredible but always amusing “DID YOU KNOW” items researched and provided by the Secretary of “The Grampound Times” Management Committee Betty Murdoch. Here is her latest offering:

  • Penzance was the birthplace of Marie Bronte, Mother of the Bronte sisters - the house where she was born is still there in Chapel Street.

  • Ripon is Briton’s oldest city, granted a Charter by Alfred the Great in 886.

  • The first ‘Keep Fit’ class for English housewives was held in Sunderland in 1929.

  • The smallest warm-blooded animal in the world is the bee-hummingbird of Cuba - two and a quarter inches long from bill tip to tail tip.

  • The word ‘Pommie’ comes from the first convicts sent to Australia where they had the legend P.O.M.E marked on their foreheads. It stood for ‘Prisoner of Mother England’.

  • The oldest recorded competition in England, the Dunmow Flitch, dates from 1244 and is mentioned in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

  • The first Bramley Apple tree grew from pips planted by Mary Ann Brailsford at Southwell in 1809 and this tree still bears fruit today.

  • Cheddar cheese has been made at Cheddar for over 800 years.

  • Poodles originated in Germany 500 years ago as hunting dogs.

  • St. Gabriel is the Patron Saint of T.V. workers.

  • Alderney is the only place where you can find blond hedgehogs

  • Hock docky was a Georgian word used for shoes and a Squeezer meant a hangman’s noose.

  • The world’s first advertising agency was founded by William Taylor in London in 1786.

  • Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed on screen more often than any other fictional character, the detective having been played by 75 actors in 211 films.

  • The thumb is so important to human dexterity that a larger proportion of the brain is devoted to controlling it than controlling the whole of the chest and abdomen.

  • Emeralds were mined in upper Egypt as early as 1300 BC

  • A bear’s sense of smell is 7 times more acute than that of a bloodhound.

  • Reuters, the news agency, began in 1850 using pigeons.

  • The world’s largest invertebrates are squids. Occasionally a large specimen may surface - one measured over 57 feet long in New Zealand and another washed up in New Zealand was 70 feet long. The traditional enemy of squids is the sperm whale.

  • The dark Dozmary Pool in the middle of Bodmin Moor is where, it is said, King Arthur’s sword Excalibur was cast and lies there still.

 

 


© 2006 Grampound with Creed Parish Council