Hello and welcome to Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Crosswires Festival in

Sheffield!

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunton Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in a particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is, in the 19th century, some Hungarian cavalry officers got extra pay specifically because they

had to spend so much money on wax for their enormous moustaches.

So we have on screen here an enormous military moustache.

This was the age of the moustache, the 19th century. Basically, there was an officer called the Hussar.

Very impressive. The Hungarian hussars were like the pride of Europe, you know, amazing.

And there was a writer called John Padgett, who was touring Europe in the 1830s, and he was in Hungary.

He reported they were up to a foot long, these moustaches. They were just incredibly stiff and waxed, and there was supposedly a little extra stipend for buying your moustache wax. Do you think it's an advantage of someone's shooting at you because you're a bigger target? They might hit the moustache and it doesn't hurt so much? Yes. Yes, I do. Interesting theory.

You say yes, you do, but I'm not getting that bite from you.

I think it's an interesting thing because John Padgett was going around and he was interviewing

people over there and they were saying the idea of not having a mustache at all, let

alone a ginormous one that required wax, was an alien notion to some of them.

They were like, that is what men literally have. You are not a man unless you have a mustache.

How do you distinguish between men and women in the UK, is what they were asking?

There are other ways.

They never found them. And that's why the Hungarian population has died out since.

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