Month: February 2020

Culture

Battersea Dogs Home

Mrs. Mary Tealby (1801-65, née Bates) was born in Cambridgeshire but on moving to her mother’s Holloway home in 1860, she was […]

Mrs. Mary Tealby (1801-65, née Bates) was born in Cambridgeshire but on moving to her mother’s Holloway home in 1860, she was so upset at seeing emaciated dogs roaming the London streets that she began to take them in. She found some local stables and named her project ‘The Temporary Home for Lost and Starving Dogs’. This was the founding of what became known as ‘Battersea Dogs Home‘, or ‘Battersea Dogs and Cats Home‘ since 2002.

Mary did not live to see it relocate to Battersea in south-west London, adjacent to Battersea Power Station, in 1871 but she would doubtless have been thrilled to know that well over three million dogs and cats would benefit from her efforts. Battersea Dogs Home is so famous it has entered everyday language as the go-to place for stray dogs. Its fame has been increased by the TV programme ‘For the Love of Dogs’, which shows the progress of particular dogs.

Although the Home has taken cats since 1883, this is not so well-known. However, cats are re-homed in an average of twenty-two days, as opposed to thirty days for dogs. The Home has its own veterinarians, groomers and behaviour specialists, so each animal receives professional care.

(Image: Jim O’Donnell at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

08/02/2020
3 min
5 years
210 words

Discoveries

The development of insulin

It is only in the last hundred years that scientists have discovered a way to treat diabetes, a condition which must have […]

It is only in the last hundred years that scientists have discovered a way to treat diabetes, a condition which must have urgent attention if the patient is to be prevented from wasting away. Three Britons are among those involved in the important development of insulin for injection into the body when the pancreas fails to produce its own.

The first was John Macleod (1876-1935), who was born in Perthshire and was a world-renowned physiologist working at the University of Toronto in the early 1920s. He and a colleague were the joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923 for their discovery of insulin.

*Image of Frederick Sanger: nobelprize.org*

The second was Frederick Sanger (1918-2013), born in Gloucestershire and engaged as a biochemist at the University of Cambridge when he sequenced the primary structure of insulin, discovering its two chains of fifty-one amino-acids in total. This groundbreaking work earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1958.

*Image of Dorothy Hodgkin: nobelprize.org*

The third was Cairo-born Professor Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-94), who spent thirty-five years solving the three-dimensional molecular structure of insulin, also determining the structures of penicillin and vitamin B12 along the way. For this she pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.

(Top image: Marco Verch at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

07/02/2020
3 min
5 years
230 words

Basic principles

Donating to charity

Charities are big business in the UK today, with over 186,500 of them registered with the three national charity regulators and around […]

Charities are big business in the UK today, with over 186,500 of them registered with the three national charity regulators and around two-thirds of all adults making regular and/or one-off donations of money and goods. This makes the UK one of the most generous countries in the world in terms of donating to charity.

The concept of giving aid to the poor and needy is one that can be seen in centuries-old documents, literature and institutional constitutions. The oldest charity still surviving is King’s School, Canterbury, established in 597. Indeed, many schools and universities are able to claim ‘exempt’ charitable status because they provide a public service. Cardiff University is in the top ten of funds raised. There are tax reliefs that apply to charities, making registration a vital method of adding revenue.

Some of the most popular charities are those that deal with health, such as the British Heart Foundation. Animal welfare charities also attract many donors, as do those caring for our heritage and environment, such as the National Trust. Foreign aid attracts around a quarter of UK fund-raising. Awareness is engendered by subsidised media and print advertising, using carefully selected images and straplines designed to pull at the heart-strings.

(Image [cropped]: Howard Lake at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0)

06/02/2020
3 min
5 years
211 words

Entertainment

Genesis

Four teenage boys at a public school in Godalming formed a rock band in 1965 that would go on to have over […]

Four teenage boys at a public school in Godalming formed a rock band in 1965 that would go on to have over 100 million album sales worldwide. Known then as ‘New Anon’, they changed their name to ‘Genesis‘ and boldly decided to pursue a musical career on the back of selling just six hundred copies of their first album, ‘From Genesis to Revelation’, in 1969.

After a couple of personnel changes, the line-up settled down to guitarists Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett, singer Peter Gabriel, keyboard-player Tony Banks, all born in 1950, with Phil Collins (1951-) on drums. The second album, ‘Trespass’ (1970) began to put the prog-rock Genesis sound together. Fans of this line-up rate the next four albums as the best, e.g. ‘Foxtrot’ (1972), with Gabriel’s unusual theatricality creating a niche style that drew the crowds. He left, however, in 1976 to pursue a solo career.

Phil Collins took over the vocals after the band auditioned four hundred other singers! His songwriting talent also came to the fore and Genesis began to appeal to a wider audience with soft-rock hit singles such as ‘Follow You Follow Me’ (1978). Collins and Rutherford have both had successful projects outside of Genesis and the final Genesis tour was in 2007.

(Image of 1991 line-up of Banks, Collins & Rutherford: David Scheinmann at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)

04/02/2020
3 min
5 years
216 words

History

Alfred the Great

Alfred the Great (848/9-99) was the grandfather of the first King of England and did much himself to unite the people at […]

Alfred the Great (848/9-99) was the grandfather of the first King of England and did much himself to unite the people at a time when the Danes were threatening to invade the whole country. His leadership, along with his reforms to education, law and tax, laid the foundation for English culture and earned him the accolade ‘the Great’.

Alfred (or Aelfred) was born in Wantage and had four older brothers. His father, who was King Aethelwulf of Wessex, a Saxon kingdom, died in 858. The first three brothers then reigned and died in quick succession. By 870, Alfred was fighting alongside his fourth brother, Aethelred, in a series of battles against the Danes. Some were won, others were lost and Aethelred died shortly after the Battle of Marton in 871, leaving two infant sons who were too young to rule, so Alfred stepped up.

After losing a few more skirmishes, Alfred decided to pay the Danes to retreat back to London, but in 877 they made a surprise attack on him at Chippenham. He escaped to the marshes of Somerset, where he built a fort at Athelney. He amassed more men for his army and finally defeated the Danes at the Battle of Edington in 878.

(Image [cropped]: Philip Halling at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

03/02/2020
3 min
5 years
211 words

Discoveries

Cave diving

British cave divers are among the top practitioners and rescuers in the world ~ famously leading the team, for instance, which found […]

British cave divers are among the top practitioners and rescuers in the world ~ famously leading the team, for instance, which found and brought to safety the boys trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand in 2018. It may be hard to understand the impetus to explore subterranean caves with murky, underwater stretches. As one cave diver recently said, there are no accidents in cave diving, only fatalities.

However, the exhileration of being the first to see what is around the corner and the beauty of the caverns are what motivate these brave souls. In the UK, one of the first pioneers was Graham Balcombe (1907-2000), who helped set up the Cave Diving Group of Great Britain & N.Ireland in 1946. Another was Bob Leakey (1914-2013), who conquered his claustrophobia and aquaphobia with extraordinary courage. It was said of him that no-one wanted to be his diving ‘buddy’, but they would definitely want him in their rescue team!

Expert cave divers such as Martyn Farr (1951-) and Rick Stanton, MBE,GM (1961-) have propelled advancements in cave diving equipment. From barely being able to stand up in early rigs, it is now possible to explore deeper and further than ever before in modern wetsuits, with rebreathers and underwater scooters.

(Top image: pxhere.com / Public domain)

01/02/2020
3 min
5 years
212 words

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Quoting Neil Oliver...

I love Britain more than anywhere else in the world. With all my heart I declare that those of us born here, or who have made a home here by choice, are the luckiest, most blessed of all people. I am British. I will always be British.