“Sorry!”
Elton John sang ‘Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word’ (1976), but this is simply not applicable to the British! It is […]
Read MoreAuthor: Purple Brolly
My aim is to give a flavour of these precious islands we call 'the UK'. All research is based on a minimum of two publicly available sources, usually more.
Amy Johnson, aviatrix
In the early days of aviation, Amy Johnson CBE (1903-41) was a typist working in London and aeroplanes were a passion in […]
Read MoreIn the early days of aviation, Amy Johnson CBE (1903-41) was a typist working in London and aeroplanes were a passion in her spare time. By 1929 she had earned a pilot’s licence and bought a secondhand De Havilland Gipsey Moth fixed wing, open cockpit, single engine biplane, registration G-AAAH, named Jason I.
Until 5th May 1930 her longest solo flight had been from London to her hometown of Hull, but on that day she took off from Croydon, with just 75 hours’ flying experience under her belt, and started south-eastwards in a straight line, ‘as the crow flies’, heading for Darwin, Australia. This feat had been achieved two years earlier by a man, but she was the first woman to attempt it. She flew for eight hours at a time, with no radio communication and only rudimentary maps.
The journey covered 11,000 miles and she reached her destination on 24th May, to the excitement of the waiting crowd. She was fêted as a superstar and toured Australian high-spots for the next six weeks. In 1932 she married a Scottish aviator and together they set more flying records. Tragically, she died in WW2 after parachuting into freezing water near the propellors of a Royal Navy ship.
(Top image: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)
Leap Day
“Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have thirty-one, Excepting February alone, And that hath twenty-eight days clear, […]
Read More
“Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”
In the mid-1800s, central Africa held much mystery for Europeans, with most believing it to be desert like the north. Dr David […]
Read MoreIn the mid-1800s, central Africa held much mystery for Europeans, with most believing it to be desert like the north. Dr David Livingstone (1813-73) from Blantyre had travelled to southern Africa in 1841 as a Christian missionary and ten years later decided to venture forth to explore the unmapped African hinterland.
Slavery had been abolished in the British Empire in 1833 and Livingstone was appalled to see Arab Muslim slave traders marching hundreds of Africans yoked together. He determined to find a passage to the sea to allow trading ships to reform local commerce, thereby eliminating this evil. He mapped many lakes, rapids and rivers, including the Zambezi, and waterfalls, notably Victoria Falls which he named after the Queen, but came to realise there was no such navigable passage.
He ended up at Lake Tanganyika searching for the source of the Nile. Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), a journalist-adventurer from Denbigh, was sent by the New York Herald to find Livingstone, as he had not made contact for several years. On reaching Ujiji town in 1871, Stanley at last found the Doctor, who would become his close friend and father-figure, and the famous greeting was uttered. The now frail and poverty-stricken Livingstone replied with a thankful “Yes”.
(Image [cropped]: wellcomeimages.org / CC BY 4.0)
Queensberry Rules and boxing
Hand-to-hand fighting to settle disputes has developed into several types of sport, one of which is boxing. Bare-knuckle boxing for prize money […]
Read MoreHand-to-hand fighting to settle disputes has developed into several types of sport, one of which is boxing. Bare-knuckle boxing for prize money and gambling began in London in the 1700s and the first champion was Oxfordshire-born James Figg in 1719. In 1743, the first set of rules was drawn up by Figg’s protégé, John ‘Jack’ Broughton after his grief and guilt at punching an opponent to death.
The Broughton Rules banned the gripping of hair and hitting a man when he was down and introduced gloves for practice. The London Prize Ring Rules followed in 1838 and in 1867 the Queensberry Rules were published and became the basis for all boxing matches round the world. Of course, today’s rules are far more extensive and detailed, but the original twelve rules set the expectations of fair play. The expression “by Queensberry Rules” entered the language to mean that gentlemanly conduct was about to be observed.
The UK has had its fair share of boxing champions: Sir Henry Cooper, Ken Buchanan, Frank Bruno, Barry McGuigan, Chris Eubank, Joe Calzaghe, Lennox Lewis, Carl Froch and Anthony Joshua to name a few. The modern trend is for big matches to be hosted in stadiums, such is their popularity.
(Top image: WorldSeriesBoxing at Flickr.com / CC BY-ND 2.0)
Full English breakfast
The full English breakfast was first concocted centuries ago in the country houses, where it was considered proper to send the gentry […]
Read More
The Commonwealth of Nations
One-third of the world’s population live in a member state of The Commonwealth of Nations, previously known as the British Commonwealth. These […]
Read More
Touchscreens
The Royal Radar Establishment in Worcestershire, set up in 1953, was responsible for many innovations in computer science, one of which was […]
Read MoreThe Royal Radar Establishment in Worcestershire, set up in 1953, was responsible for many innovations in computer science, one of which was the touchscreen. In the early 1960s, one of their engineers, Eric Arthur Johnson, was investigating ways to assist Air Traffic Control to respond more quickly to the flight information displayed on their recently introduced computer screens. Bypassing the keyboard and interacting directly with the monitor was a solution which was adopted and is still in use in control towers today.
In 1965 Johnson registered a patent through Aviat UK and published an article on his idea, entitled ‘Touch display – a novel input/output device for computers’ in the journal Electronics Letters. By 1967 he had constructed a prototype and was able to include diagrams and photographs in his second article, ‘Touch displays: A Programmed Man-Machine Interface’ in the journal Ergonomics.
His design was for ‘capacitive touch’, which is the concept employed in smartphones, although Johnson’s screen could only cope with one touch at a time. A toughened glass panel is coated and layered with a grid of touch points and very thin copper wires. Pressure from the finger produces a local change in the electric charge which is communicated to the processor.
(Top image: NATS – UK Air Traffic Control at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Calvinistic Methodists
In 1735, two young men from mid-Wales, Howell Harris (1714-73) and Daniel Rowland (1713-90) joined the Church of England to become clergymen. […]
Read More
Hammer horrors
Hammer Film Productions Ltd was formed in 1946, taking ‘Hammer’ from one of the owners of its parent company, who had taken […]
Read More
“To be, or not to be”
Shakespeare‘s play, ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’ (c.1602) is one in which almost everyone is killed, including Hamlet himself. […]
Read More
Tolerance
It could be said that the principle of tolerance is bound to exist in a nation of so many people living in […]
Read More