The colloquial phrase about the temperature being cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey is supposed to allude to the brass tray which held canon balls and which when very cold would contract so the cannon balls would roll off it… is apparently just an urban myth! No!!! Just this weekend we went to the Ypres Tower at Rye and saw a metal tray beside a cannon, bearing ninety-one cannon balls and we mentioned to each other the story of the origin of the phrase. Don’t say we were wrong!!! don’t say that originally it could have been freeze the tail or nose or other extremities off a monkey brass or otherwise! Please don’t let it be that the phrase originate in the 1850’and not the 1550’s!
Apparently the word ‘monkey’ has not been found connected to anything to do with trays or items on broad a ship or in association with canons and canon balls… and anyway, brass or any other metal could not contract quickly enough to displace canon balls or anything else!
By the way the Ypres Tower was named after John de Ypres, who lived there from 1430; the tower was built two hundred years before then and has nothing to do with Ypres which became so famous or infamous as a place of dreadful slaughter in World War 1
Lois Elsden 
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