sandr020

Thank you for these  History Carnival nominations. Let me know which you enjoyed. BRITAIN & EUROPE The late Norman “Little Malvern Priory Church” was ready in 1171. In 1480 the Church & lodgings were ruined, so Bishop Alcock had the site re­paired. See  Cherie’s Place . "The Literal Bones of the World" is in  Myths 'n Monsters .  “Cold Sea Bathing in the Georgian Era” is in  Geri Walton . Its therapeutic properties were most helpful for those who indulged in idleness or debauchery. The salt was important. In  A Visitor's Guide to Victorian England , “Victorian Crime: Murder in the Suburbs” noted that crime was low. Yet in the early 1880s, there were two Manchester murders that had an uncanny link with shocking events c30 years later. “Meet the Man Who Saved Kenilworth Castle” is in  English Heritage Blog . Sir John Siddeley bought the castle in the 1930s and made it public. See his story and see the exhibition of Armstrong Siddeley’s cars and ...

Australia invented surf life saving, pavlova, rotary clothes hoists, plastic bank notes,  black box flight recorders and WiFi. But now I want to concentrate on cochlear implants . How did the deaf communicate? Before the French priest Michel de l’Epée devised sign language in the C18th, the deaf were written off as useless citizens. For the first time, the priest had demonstrated that deaf people were no less intelligent than their peers. The C19th saw the creation of the world’s first hearing aids, based on Alex­ander Bell’s tele­phone. They were clumsy, and although there have been enormous improve­ments with time, hearing aids could not reproduce high frequencies - they could only amplify residual hearing. The result was that many deaf people cont­inued to use sign language, combined with lip reading. This was the situation until the early 1980s when Dr William Gibson became aware of the cochlear experiments. Now we need to read Bill Gibson: Pioneering Bionic Ear Sur...

Thomas Guthrie was born in Arbroath Scotland in 1803, 12th child of his father David, a merchant and banker. The young Thomas went to Edinburgh University at 12 where he studied as a divinity student, then studied surgery and anatomy. In 1829 Guthrie was appointed to a parish where he intro­duced classes for young people every Sabbath. He also started a village library. In 1837, Guthrie became minister at the Old Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh where he saw at first hand the ragged children who lived by begging and stealing. Presumably he knew of Sheriff Watson in Aberdeen who had formed his Industrial Feeding School in 1841. Guthrie converted a room beneath the church as a kitchen and he soon had his first class going. Within a year he had started three Ragged Schools in Edinburgh! In his 1847 pamphlet Plea for Ragged Schools , Rev Guthrie described a unique curriculum - education, meals, clothes, industrial training and Christian instruction. Pupils learned cobbling, tailoring and c...

In 1968 I saw Daniel Cohn-Bendit on tv and decided straight away who I would marry. The man of my dreams would have to be a red-head , Jewish, European-born and educated, politically left wing and a great Bridge player. In 1969, I met my now-husband Joe who was a red-head, Jewish, European and great at Bridge. Only in politics could Joe have been more active – much more active! Now let us look at 1968, as described by David Del Testa* and Sean O’Hagan*. Paris was the place where political action and utopian fantasy came together in the most spectacular fashion. The 1968 protesters initially comprised a few student activists at the Nanterre University in Paris. Protests began against the lack of facilities on their bleak suburban campus. Extraordinarily, the auth­or­ities called the French riot police to quell the small demonstration, and suddenly politicised students joined the rebels. They had a leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (b1945). Born in Monat­uban in southern France, he was the...

Last Children of the Raj: British Childhoods in India was edited by Laurence Fleming and published by Radcliffe Press in 2004.  This book is a collection of retrospective reminiscences contributed by people late in their lives, the 120+ story tellers having all spent most of their childhood and adolescence in British India, the Princely States or Burma. The most evocative stories were the personal accounts of powerful em­otional experiences while growing up in India - the sights, smells and sounds of India, their homes, families, staff, schools and holidays. The book was presented in two volumes, perfect for history bloggers who tend to read only one chapter at a time. The first volume (1919-39) was org­anised by geog­raphic regions of India and grouped all of the stories of the child­ren by those areas. The second volume (1939-50) was arranged chronol­og­ically, covering WW2 and soon after. Most of the contributors’ stories were split up and were divided into a few sections. An ...

British historian Suzannah Lipscomb was interested in how film makers did, or did not analyse hist­orical evidence accurately in their films. A review of David Rieff ’s book In Praise of Forgetting was rightly scornful of the practicality of forgetting past atrocities, just for modern audiences’ comfort. Remembering, not forgetting, was im­por­tant in the pursuit of recog­nit­ion and restitution and, ultimately, reconciliation. Two recent films were designed to remember histor­ical atrocities. Both were love stories set against geo­political events. Viceroy’s House by Gurinder Chadha told of the Partition that accompanied the granting of independence to India in 1947, in which a million people died and c12 million were displaced. Bitter Harvest by George Mendeluk recalled one of the least-known tragedies of recent history; the Holod­omor, the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine in which 3-9 million people died. Both examples achieved one of the purposes of historical films: they left Dr Li...

Both the book and film A River Runs Through It were set in Missoula Montana. The Maclean brothers, Norman 1902-90 (Craig Sheffer) and Paul 1906–38  (Brad Pitt), lived a rural life in the fresh air of Montana, spending much of their childhood running wherever they liked. The sons of a stoic Scot­tish Presbyterian minister (Tom Skerritt) and stoic wife (Blenda Blethyn), the boys eventually separated when well behaved Norman moved east to attend college. When Norman finally returned after 6 years away, the siblings resumed family life again. Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the C20th. As a young man, he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. Jessie 1931–1968 (Emily Lloyd) eventually became Norman's pretty and energetic wife in 1931.   Norman and Paul Maclean, and their father Rev Maclean in the film A River Runs Through It. The book, 1976 According to Rev Maclean, fishing provided spiritual educa...

Born in South Africa in 1959, Deborah Levy’s family exiled themselves to London in 1968 as opponents of Apartheid. She started writing poems, plays and novels in the 1980s. Her 2011 novel, Swimming Home , a dark fable about a famous poet holidaying in the French Riviera, was eventually published after having been turned down by mainstream publishers. It went on to be nominated for the Man Booker prize . Last year she published a collection of short stories, Black Vodka . Now Penguin is reprinting her old novels. Swimming Home depicted a sun-bleached, Mediterranean setting; explor­ations of troubled familial bonds, of sexuality and an examination of exile. Hot Milk shared these themes and obsessions with Swimming Home. Levy’s Hot Milk 2016 (publisher Hamish Hamilton) sounded like an ironic title, given the connect­ion with cosy and bland toddler food. Yet Sofia    Papastergiadis was spending a night­mare holid­ay in a rented beach house with her mother Rose, in southern S...

In 1939 the German U-boat U47, under the command of Lt Gun­ther Prien, slipped undetected into Scapa Flow . Prien launched a tor­pedo attack on the battleship HMS Royal Oak which was lying at anchor in Scapa Bay and instantly the huge ship sank to the bottom of Scapa Flow with 833 crew deaths. U47 slipped away undet­ected. The tragic terrible loss of life and failures of the Scapa Flow defences prompted the call for a substantial eas­tern blockage. In March 1940 Winston Churchill approved the building of causeways, to link the south isles to Mainland Orkney and to seal off the eastern approaches to of the naval port. Work soon started but was painfully slow; a shortage of local labour was causing delays. So 550 Italian prisoners of war, captured in the North African camp­aign, came to Orkney in 1942. These Italian POWs were shipped in specifically to work on the huge causeway building project, known as the Churchill Barriers to the east of Scapa Flow. Map of Scotland with Orkney Isl...

Nancy Wake (1912-2011) was born in the New Zealand city of Well­ing­ton, last child of Charles Augustus Wake and Ella Rosieur. The fam­ily moved to Sydney when Nancy was a toddler. Shortly afterwards, her father abandoned the family, so she rebelled and ran away as soon as she could leave home. With financial help from an aunt in 1932, Nancy sailed for Europe and trained as a journal­ist in London. Two years later she settled in Paris, starting work for the Hearst group of newspapers as a journalist. I don’t think this New Zealand-Australian knew much about Fascism. In 1935 she was a tourist in Vienna and Berlin, having a pleasant time, when the violent anti-Semitism of Nazism became crystal clear to her for the first time. In November 1939 she married Henri Fiocca , a cute and weal­thy industrialist. It was a great life in Marseilles, filled with love, champagne, caviar and travel. Nancy Wake's autobiography, published in 1985. Six months later in 1940 Germany in­vaded France, so...