Word: wellington
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Forgotten Royalty. During the next 200 years, 37 members of the royal family were laid to rest there in hermetically sealed sarcophagi, and the tombs were untouched until the Napoleonic invasion of 1808, when French troops drove out the nuns and turned the cloister into a barracks. Later, when Wellington's troops in turn drove out the French, the nuns returned to their desecrated convent to find a ghastly spectacle: tombs torn open, their occupants (whose bodies the nuns regarded as sacred) sitting up or falling out haphazardly, valuables gone. The shocked nuns hastily replaced the bodies as best...
Wellesley Wellington Vandeveer, onetime member of the Petroleum Administration for War and present delegate to the U.N.'s Economic and Social Council, was a cofounder of Allied Oil Co. 24 years ago. He and Partner Floyd Roy Newman started with $30,000 capital, most of which was borrowed. They fought off slashing competition, plowed back their profits and finally built the company into a $50 million-a-year business. Last year they sold out to Ashland Oil & Refining Co. for $12 million worth of the larger company's stock...
Superstitions sometimes cancel each other out. The Duke of Wellington, who believed that putting a pair of shoes on a table meant that their owner would be hanged, once fired a servant for jeopardizing a young woman's life in this manner. But British jockeys like to find their shoes on a table, turn white with worry when they find them on the floor. Winston Churchill reversed custom with his wartime V-for-Victory sign. Italians and Spaniards, who used the same two fingers to represent the horns of the devil, pointed them downward when they wanted to keep...
Most spectators, including Princess Elizabeth, got their biggest chuckles from Rube Goldbergish efforts like W. Heath Robinson's Magnetic Method of Stretching Spaghetti (at the expense of Britain's face-lengthening austerity program) and H. M. Bateman's Tragedy at Wellington Barracks, a study in horror-struck faces as a butter-fingered guardsman on parade drops his rifle. It was dapper Australian-born Cartoonist Bateman who had started the whole thing in a speech to the Royal Society last February, declaring it was high time the British had a "National Academy of Humorous Art." Last week...
...Games. From such macabre work, one might imagine Rose to be a hollow-eyed ascetic; actually he is a gay little blade whose 39 years have been a brilliant whirligig of international fun and games with such friends as Stein, Berard, Cecil Beaton, Louis Bromfield and the Wellington Koos. Rose spent five years studying Chinese art and poetry in China, hurried home to join the R.A.F. in 1939. Married to British Novelist Dorothy Carrington, he now sticks reasonably close to his Chelsea studio...