Falsoid

Last night I happened to be reading the book at reference 3, acquired in the course of the outing noticed at reference 4, learning that the Sullivan of Gilbert & Sullivan fame came from London Irish stock of the lower middling sort and as a young man was a very serious, very talented and highly trained classical musician, with a couple of years in a fancy music school in Leipzig where he was taught, inter alios, by people who had actually known Beethoven.

And then, in 1867 he happened to be travelling in a train near Salzburg, in a compartment largely occupied by two giants called Chang and Anak.

Having been recently been reminded of the famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, by a review of a new book about them (see snap left and references 1 and 2), the thought came to me that the two giants might be the twins, who did show themselves in Europe. Being joined together and perhaps a little awkward in a railway compartment, they may have seemed larger than they were. And with Anak not being that far from Eng. A mere slip of the transliteration.

So off to the Internet to see if the dates work, where the best that I could do was the sizeable Wikipedia entry, which told me that the twins were in England, with their two sons, in 1868-9, and in Germany in 1870. So, either the dates are wrong or they don't work, with, I suppose, this last being the more probable.

Which is a pity as it might otherwise have been a nice coincidence, a nice confluence of reading matter. Maybe I will do some more checking yet. Better than mowing the lawn.

Reference 1: Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History - Yunte Huang - 2018.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/literary-stuff.html.

Reference 3: Sir Arthur Sullivan: his life, letters and diaries - Herbert Sullivan and Norman Flower - 1927.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/puligny-montrachet-off.html.