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Did You Know?........
Anyone who wears a bathing costume is probably unaware that the garment owes it's very existence of George
Stephenson, the pioneer of the Railway Age!
 Annual seaside holidays were made possible only by the coming of the railways which made coastal towns accessible to all, but at that
time men and women bathed naked, though on separate beaches.
A Dr. J. Henry Bennett
returned from a holiday in Biarritz in 1865 and wrote an article in the Lancet about a suitable bathing dress he had seen for ladies. It consisted of woollen drawers and black blouse, to below the knees, and fastened with a leather girdle! The
gentlemen wore a kind of stripped sailor's costume.
Now swimming became respectable!
Did You Know?........
A Dublin theatre manager called Daly is responsible for introducing the word QUIZ into the English language.
In
1780 Daly had a bet that within 24 hours he could invent a word that would be on everyone's lips the next day. He spent the entire night chalking QUIZ on every wall in the city. The next day the
strange word WAS on everyone's lips! What did it mean?
Thus QUIZ has become to mean a "puzzling question"!
Did You Know?........
 In
the early 18th century a
basketful of figs was sent from Turkey to Lady Suffolk in England.
Alexander Pope, the poet, happened to be present when the basket arrived and took one of the
' withies' from the basket and planted it in his garden in Twickenham, where it grew into a fine weeping willow tree.
Many years later a British officer who was about to leave
England for the American Colonies, took a twig from the tree and planted it in Abingdon, Virginia, America, where it became the ancestor of thousands, if not millions, of weeping willow trees in America!
©
E.P.C
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