The Saturday briefing
YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Is there anything you’re yearning to know? Send your questions, on any subject, to the contacts given below, and we will do our best to answer them...
Q
What is the history of that brilliant street artist Banksy? What was his first work?
R Birchall, Upholland, Lancs
A
The elusive street artist is currently exhibiting at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, showcasing his work from 1998 to 2023, which now sell for millions.
They first appeared on Bristol walls in the early 1990s, when he was part of a graffiti group called the DrybreadZ Crew. It’s said he started experimenting with stencils as a faster way to make his mark after being chased by police and hiding under a rubbish truck, where he noticed serial numbers stencilled underneath it.
His first large wall mural was The Mild Mild West, showing a teddy bear throwing a Molotov cocktail at riot police, painted in 1997 to cover advertising at a former solicitors’ office. He sometimes signed himself as Robin Banx, which he later shortened to Banksy.
After moving to London in the late 1990s, his first major exhibition was in an East End warehouse, and featured a reimagining of the Roaring Lion portrait of Winston Churchill, with Churchill sporting a green mohawk. His provocative work also includes fake bank notes featuring Princess Diana’s head instead of the Queen’s, and the words “Banksy of England”.
His painting of a young boy playing with a superhero nurse doll, which appeared during the pandemic in a foyer at Southampton Hospital, raised more than £16million for an NHS charity.
The stubbornly anonymous street artist is reported to be former Bristol
public schoolboy Robin Gunningham, although this has never been confirmed.
Q
Growing up in the 1950s, bread used to go stale, not mouldy. Why is bread so different now?
Alan Jelley, Earlsdon, Coventry
A
Bread has been constantly evolving since it was first baked in Egypt in 1,000BC.
During the Second World War the mushy National Loaf was introduced, made from wholemeal flour, due to shortages of sugar and white flour. After the war, families longed for a springier white loaf and, in 1961, scientists at the Chorleywood Flour Milling and Bakery Research Association in Hertfordshire, created a new process that made bread 40 per cent softer. The research team added hard fats, extra yeast and several chemicals, then mixed at high speed for a dough that was ready to bake far sooner than previous loaves. Breads made with just water, yeast and flour are more likely to go stale. Those made with more fats, such as oil or butter, tend to go stale more slowly.
Bread mould is a type of fungus, and it thrives in moisture. Presliced bread is also more exposed to moisture in the air, increasing its chances of going green.
If your bread does go mouldy, you should bin the whole lot. The roots of mould spores can quickly invade an entire loaf so by the time you see the green, what you’re seeing is the reproductive part called sporangium, which releases thousands of spores. So your whole loaf could be full of fungus, even if you can’t see it.
Q
Why are we on “tenterhooks” when we’re nervous about something? What are they?
Robert Potter, Horsforth, Leeds
A
We can thank the textile industry for this – wet woollen cloth used to be stretched and dried in fields over two long wooden frames called tenters, attached to nails sticking out of the wood, which were the hooks.
This process meant the finished cloth was not as crumpled, and didn’t shrink – but it meant the wet cloth was under great tension.
These tenters were often erected on the hillside near mills, and became a striking part of the landscape, with some frames nearly 100 metres long, covered in dyed and patterned cloth.
JMW Turner’s 1816 painting, Leeds From Beeston Hill, shows dyed cloth on tenters.
But the process could be abused by greedy manufacturers, who stretched the cloth too far to get more from it. Customers would suddenly develop holes in their overstretched clothes when caught out in the rain. It even led to court cases and gave English textiles a bad name globally.
Tenters were brought inside the mills after the First World War, and steam used to dry the cloth.
There is thought to be only one complete set of historical field tenters left in Europe, at Otterburn Mill in Northumberland.
PLEASE SEND US YOUR INTRIGUING QUESTIONS ON ANY SUBJECT:
● By email: put “questions” in the subject line and send to kay.harrison@reachplc.com
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● Unfortunately we cannot reply individually, but we will feature the best questions on this page.