Glastonbury Festival
Sir A.J. Michael Eavis (1935-) was born and brought up in Pilton, Somerset, and inherited Worthy Farm, the family’s dairy farm there, […]
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 public domain sources, usually more.
The versatile ‘ou’
A phoneme is the smallest unit of spoken sounds that together make up words (there are 44 in English) and a grapheme […]
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Helium (He)
The founder of the prestigious magazine ‘Nature’ was Warwickshire-born Sir Norman Lockyer (1836-1920) and its first edition in 1869 includes his description […]
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Tea on the lawn
The British tend to make the most of the limited number of dry, tranquil summer days and, bearing in mind the many […]
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William Wilson and Water Polo
Water polo was a sport just waiting to burst onto the scene, considering its rapid spread, not only in Britain but also […]
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Water polo was a sport just waiting to burst onto the scene, considering its rapid spread, not only in Britain but also abroad, although the International Swimming Hall of Fame took until 2003 to honour the inventor, William Wilson (1844-1912). Born in London and raised in Glasgow, Wilson was a keen advocate of daily open-air swimming, even in icy conditions, and as well as teaching swimming he was involved in the administration of swimming clubs in the Glasgow area.
A bizarre forerunner called ‘aquatic football’ was apparently attempted in the early 1870s, whereby swimmers had to use their feet to kick the ball, but when asked to think of a crowd-pleasing event for an annual swimming gala at River Dee in 1877, ‘aquatic hand-ball’ was Wilson’s solution.
Water polo, as it later became known, is said to be the sport requiring the most strength, but even Wilson realised that it was too difficult to control the ball in river currents so he moved it to indoor pools in the following years. As well as formulating the rules of water polo, Wilson was a pioneer of techniques for swim races, such as starts and turns at the end of a length, and for life-saving.
(Top image: David Sanborn at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The Oxford Movement
Amidst the inclination for reform prevalent in the 1830s, some Oxford scholars of theology reacted strongly to the government taking steps to […]
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The Liberal Democrat Party
The Liberal Democrat Party (‘LibDems’) was formed in 1988 as an amalgamation of the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party. Today, […]
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Burials and cremations
In the Christian era, churchyards became the place to bury the dead, with proceedings conducted by the vicar and expectations being that […]
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Photographic negatives
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) from Dorset was a polymath but lacked one skill, namely draughtmanship, and he was even frustrated with […]
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The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp
Camping out year-round in British weather is not recommended, but the women who decided to do just that outside RAF Greenham Common […]
Read MoreCamping out year-round in British weather is not recommended, but the women who decided to do just that outside RAF Greenham Common in 1981-2000 were utterly committed to their cause. They were alarmed at the threat of nuclear war and particularly the USA’s siting of cruise missiles at two UK locations. Consequently, what began as a 40-strong march from Cardiff to the airbase in Berkshire became the country’s longest-running women’s protest.
Greenham Common’s airfield was utilised in the Battle of Britain and by the late 1970s the Americans had installed state-of-the-art equipment and built the longest runway in Europe there. Now a country park measuring 4.5 x 0.5 miles, in 1982 30,000 women staged ‘Embrace the Base’ by holding hands all around its fence. In 1983 it was ‘Reflect the Base’ with 50,000 women holding up mirrors.
The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp also gained publicity when they resisted police trying to remove them on several occasions and some were arrested. Critics also accused them of abandoning their families; nevertheless, even after the missiles were removed in 1991 after the dissolution of the USSR, the women continued their vigil in protest against the Trident programme. Today there is a commemorative garden acknowledging their efforts where the camp once stood.
(Top image from ‘Embrace the Base’ in December 1982: Alan Stanton at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0)
Bodnant Garden
To call the 80 acres of terraces, woodland glades, ponds and special plant collections on the Bodnant estate below Snowdonia in Denbighshire […]
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TV sitcoms
The British ‘sitcom‘ (situation comedy) began life on radio after WW2 but it quickly moved to television due to the benefits of […]
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