The Origins of Manners and Customs. - 2 June 2010

I am pleased to report on our Monthly Meeting on Wednesday 2nd June 2010.
Our President, Mrs. Jean Lewis opened the Meeting. She mentioned a lovely day spent at Savill Garden which was attended by a good number of our members, who enjoyed the wonderful rhododendrons which were in full bloom. They were captured so well by one of our very talented members, Mrs Ruth Daniel, who painted a beautiful apricot Rhododendron in water colour. We have a forthcoming visit to the gardens at “Old Thatch” Bourne End - planned for the 14th July.
Our Special Interest groups include Book Club, Bridge, Mah-Jong, Scrabble, T’ai Chi, Tennis and Walking, are enjoying their regular meetings.

Our Speaker at this meeting was Mr. H Granger, who before he retired was a Chief examiner in English Language. He is a very accomplished speaker with no less than 34 topics on which he speaks. Our Talk was entitled “Origins of Manners and Customs”. He opened by saying that there is no such thing as a ‘universal language’ of sayings and gestures. Take nodding for instance; in Turkey and much of the Middle East nodding means no. Raised eyebrows which denotes “surprise” in the West means “no” in Chinese. It is considered bad form for a Chinese lady to show any facial expression, so will cover her face with her hand.

There was so many customs Mr. Grainger mentioned, too numerous to record here !. But I have listed just one or two. The reason ladies coats etc. button on the opposite side to men, is because a valet laid out mens clothes and the man fastened his own buttons , whereas women had to be helped to dress by a maid to get into tight bodices, so for the convenience of the maid, who was invariably right handed, ladies clothes were buttoned from the right, viz opposite to men !

As the Pagan `churches` gave way to Christianity, many pagan customs were adopted by the new Church to placate the pagan tribes. They wanted to see if the new God could do any better than their own gods! In fact many of our Christian churches were built on the sites of Druid or Pagan sites, to give continuity. A number of the Christian dates also were taken from Pagan dates, to ease the `change over`.

Furthermore, our custom of making cakes in the Autumn when the berries and nuts were harvested came from even earlier days and in fact were probably introduced by the Vikings. These were made with Flour, Nuts, Mead etc. and buried in the garden to preserve them. Only to be eaten in the winter when food was in short supply -- hence our Christmas cake !

Mr Granger was thanked for his very informative Talk and many of our Members bought CD`s of his talks.

The next meeting of Dean Rise W.I. will be at 9.45 on Wednesday July 7th and the talk will be on Organ Transplant and will be given by Mrs. C. Nelson, Organ Transplant Co-Ordinator. Visitors are always welcome.