An M&S food hall trolley recovered yesterday afternoon from the middle of a nest of B&M trolleys in the Kokoro Passage. Returned to an empty stack in a reasonably busy shop.
In the margins of this post, I was moved to investigate one Weinrebe of the Dorset Foundation, recorded on a tablet hung up in the Wigmore Hall as one of their more generous donors. Was he some banker from the City who retired to some country mansion in the west country, in the way of the Robert Williams of what became Williams & Glynn, buying Bridehead House in Dorset?
He seems to have made his money in Hong Kong and to have had musical connections. He crops up quite a lot as a donor to various good causes in the UK. According to reference 2 he was married in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, which may account for the name of the foundation - which would make it nothing to do with our west country. But I can find out little about him and nothing about the foundation.
However, along the way, I did find that Denise Coates, the lady who had made a fortune out of online betting, has put her name to the Denise Coates Foundation, a charity which admits to a lot more income than expenditure. This thanks to a feature of charity search at the Charity Commission whereby you can rank your search results by income - with all kinds of odd outfits floating to the top of the heap. Where I did not notice Eton but I did notice my own secondary school. Along with Denise Coates.
Moving on from Weinrebe (aka Weinreb?), I moved onto wax tablets, which I now know often came in the form of a folded pair, a diptych, as snapped from Wikipedia above. Known to Greece from at least 500BC and to the near east for longer than that.
I was very struck by what a nifty contraption this was. Inter alia, it could be used for important or private documents and sealed shut with wax, using the signet ring (or seal ring) of the writer. And was, it seems, used for the famous suicide note written by Phaedra, the Cretan princess, the subject of plays by both Euripides and Racine, amongst others. For whom see reference 4.
[The Great Seal of England attached to the document allowing de Cleseby free warren over his land: Edward I 'in Majesty' with sceptre and orb. Edward II's Great Seal was identical to his father's. Warwickshire County Record Office reference CR341/2]
While for those too important to trouble with writing, they could simply entrust their oral message to a messenger, and authenticate the messenger by lending him their signet ring, known to the recipient. Or going further, entrusting the seal to a keeper, perhaps called the Keeper of the Seal or the Garde des sceaux.
This being another spin-off from reference 5.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/02/trolley-773.html.
Reference 2: https://jhshk.org/community/the-jewish-cemetery/burial-list/weinrebe-harry-morgan/.
Reference 3: https://www.asil.org/event/harry-weinrebe-memorial-event-2024-judge-joan-donoghue-challenges-and-future-international.
Group search key: trolleysk.
No comments:
Post a Comment