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Vulcan did its share of magazine covers, and this is Billy Connors from Trim. The fur factor
and the flattop remind me of one of my Dad's friends who made me swoon as a teen.
I wonder if he was related to Dennis Connors who appears later in today's series.
Now that you mention it, there is definitely a similarity - but it may just be the Connors gene. Surnames in Celtic countries were originally clan names and clans would have had quite a shallow gene pool. This is a very good example of how male body hair was once not taboo.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought about the Celtic naming system. There's a popular model who worked under his real name who looks just like one of my cousins.
DeleteI discovered by looks alone an entire branch to my family that had been separated because of the war. I was on the top deck of a bus when a younger version of myself clambered up the stairs and walked passed me. We both clocked the look. Years later, the same young man, ten years my junior, was on the front page of the Jewish Chronicle, with the story of how he had discovered his Jewish status when two cousins he did not know existed knocked on his door, having traced him. It turned out that we were second cousins once removed as we shared a great-grandmother. The cousins from Israel were her sister's great-grandchildren, one of whom had been named after her: Sarah Rosina. They had been living in Greece, escaped to safety in Turkey and in 1948, returned to the land.
DeleteMy point is that consanguinity is a relative concept in groups where small numbers are the cultural norm. After the Black Death, Tudor England had a population of about two million, meaning that everyone was up to fifth cousin. (Henry VIII was related to two of his wives.) That was also the case with both Sephardi (Spanish) and Ashkenazi (German) Jews in Europe. In what was an equally spooky experience, I was on a train from Barcelona to Paris and travelling alone, was asked in the dining car if I would share a table with three others. It turned out that they were from Israel, one of them, Avi, was clearly a Mizrachi (Eastern) Jew it turned out from a family originally from Baghdad. It was remarked upon how much we resembled each other, other than skin colour - I was the whiter shade of pale in comparison - and yet the Mizrachi and Sephardi Jews split over two millennia ago - albeit with later mixing. When you have a total world population that has never exceeded 15 million, it is easy to see how the genes work. The Scots and the Irish, in situ, have equally small populations. I can see a marked resemblance between Gordon Brown (former Labour prime minister) and Alex Salmond (former Scottish Nationalist first minister). To an English eye, they look as if they could be brothers or cousins. To the Scots, they are just Scots.
There's the old saying about everyone having a doppelganger somewhere on the planet.
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