Tag Archives: UK Related Questions and Answers

Cigarette smoking is injurious to health – everyone knows that. Well, till a few decades ago, people were unaware that smoking could cause lung and heart diseases and cigarette packs never had a warning on them, like they do now. In recent years, research has shown that smoking is dangerous and it has now been made compulsory for all cigarette …

In the “Iron Curtain speech” Winston Churchill drew attention to the fundamental split in Europe between the Eastern Bloc and the West, though at that stage (March 1946) there were no formal alliances. He had a fear of another world war that involves fighting against the communist regime and that the so called iron curtain is blocking some of the …

The custom of sending Christmas cards started in the United Kingdom in 1843 by Sir Henry Cole. He was a civil servant (Government worker) who was very interested in the new ‘Public Post Office’ and wondered how it could be used more by ordinary people.Sir Henry had the idea of Christmas Cards and with his friend John Horsley, who was …

There are many different reasons why candles are associated with Christmas, although no one knows when they first became connected!They were used during ancient winter solstice celebrations a way of remembering that spring would soon come.One of the earliest records of candles being used at Christmas is from the middle ages where a large candle was used to represent the …

No one knows the real birthday of Jesus! No date is given in the Bible, so why do we celebrate it on the 25th December? The early Christians certainly had many arguments as to when it should be celebrated! Also, the birth of Jesus probably didn’t happen in the year 1AD but slightly earlier, somewhere between 2BC and 7BC (there …

‘The Elephant Man’ was cruel name given to a man called Joseph Merrick, who was very severely deformed. Although he died before he was thirty years old, Joseph Merrick became a celebrity in Victorian England because, despite his deformities, he was gentle, intelligent and brave man. When he was young, unscrupulous men exhibited him as a freak in fairs and …

The pawnbrokers’ symbol is three spheres suspended from a bar. The three sphere symbol is attributed to the Medici family of Florence, Italy, owing to its symbolic meaning of Lombard. This refers to the Italian province of Lombardy, where pawn shop banking originated under the name of Lombard banking. The three golden spheres were originally the symbol which medieval Lombard …