Quote:
Originally Posted by Willi Von Klugerman
I mean how on earth did they obtain a strand of his hair?  |
As bizarre as it seems in modern times, that's not that hard to explain. It used to be quite a common thing to carry a lock of someone's hair, to the extent that you can actually find many examples of jewelery made from hair, such as braided bracelets and the like. In 1917, MVR was kind of the equivalent of a pop star in Germany, and it would not be surprising if the barbers who cut his hair realised what a lucrative commodity they had lying on the floor of their shops, and such things would not have been limited to barbers either, since we know MVR's hair was shaved a few times in relation to the head wound he received, so some medical orderly might also have thought to pick some up.
Seems weird to us of course, but actually would not have been that creepy at the time. It's also not beyond the realms of possibility that some Tommy might have done that too when he was found dead in his cockpit, or even a stretcher bearer carting MVR's dead body to the tent where it would have been taken (and I'm not talking about the hair on his head), which is kind of ghoulish, but when you are in a trench and used to death surrounding you, you'd probably not be too squeamish about doing such a thing.
The problem is of course that it is easy to fake, since we all have hair and many of us will have hair that is even the correct colour, so I'd be extremely dubious about such souvenirs, as even ones that might have some convincing tale of provenance might not be genuine. It wouldn't take much for some Tommy who was stationed near where MVR came down to be back home in Blighty and thus able to convince gullible people in pubs that he'd cropped some hair off MVR that he'd be prepared to sell, some people will believe anything if you whisper it too them. If that happened, you'd have someone who'd be absolutely convinced he had the real article, when it could really have been off a dog for all they knew. That's probably what happened with a lot of the canvas that is claimed to be from MVR's Triplane, since it would be easy to cut the red bit off an RAF roundel on a crashed Sopwith Camel and say you got it of his Dr1. Scamming was not invented when ebay came along.
Al