Writers" Research Solves Many Unusual Posers

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29722, 16 January 1962, Page 13

Writers" Research Solves Many Unusual Posers

(Special Carre:.

LONDON, January 15. A small organisation. Writers’ arid Speakers’ Research. has been operating most successfully for seven yeans in Chelsea, helping authors with problems they have to solve to make novels authentic and plots plausible. Last year, for instance, the organisation was asked and answered how heroin couM be manufactured in the kitchen, whether a body could be dissolved in a cask of cider and who now owned a house in which a notorious murderer had lived. A reporter from the “Scotsman” who called on the organisation’s principal, Mrs Joan St. George Saunders, widow of the author, Hilary St. George Saunders, a former librarian of the House of Commons, discussed with her some of the brainiteasers she had been asked to tackle. German Corpses

“If you like to find out if the captain of an airliner can perform a marriage ceremony or to what extent the Royal Family has influenced British clothing or how many German corpses were washed up on the south coast during the war, Mrs Saunders is your speediest means,” says the "Scotsman”

“She will also help you to differentiate between any particular fact and any particular fiction. Take the case of dissolving a body in cider. A well-known thriller writer asked if this was possible. He had heard that as part of the process of eidermaking, meat was dissolved in

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the beverage and he therefore thought he had hit on a handy means of getting rid of an unwanted body. Writers’ and Speakers’ Research said it was impossible. Meat can vanish in cider but a dead body is protected by its skin, which does not dissolve in cider. To get rid of a corpse that way one would have to skin it first. “The German corpses washed up was another story which was disproved. It has no foundation in fact.” Waterloo Relic

Another awkward investigation concerned a leather case bearing the initials V.D.O.C. and the crest of a ship found on the battlefield at Waterloo. After unsuccessfully looking up the names of all those who fell at Waterloo, the Army list of 1815 and which British families use a ship as a crest, the researchers had another look at the crest and discerned the same semi-obliter-ated dots on it Could these be the seven pearls of a viscounts coronet? They could—further investigations proved th- case had belonged to Viscount Duncan, of Camperdown, though there was no evidence he had ever been to Waterloo.

The organisation has 10 to 20 such riddles to solve each month and some 250 clients, most of them famous authors, on its mailing list.