Month: March 2023

Law

Smoking

The first concerns from the medical industry over the effects of long-term smoking were raised in 1957. By 2007, just 50 years […]

The first concerns from the medical industry over the effects of long-term smoking were raised in 1957. By 2007, just 50 years later, all but the actual personal choice to indulge in this habit had been bludgeoned in UK law, this being the year that smoking was banned in public places. Not everyone has welcomed this transformation (notably tobacco retailers) and although the lobbying and campaigning has cut the number of smokers by 40% overall, there are still parts of the country where almost half of adults smoke, the minimum legal age for smoking being 18.

The government collects tax (‘duty’) on sales of tobacco and this provides a hefty income (£10,277,000,000 in 2021-22, for example) which increases every year. Nevertheless, in 1965 it banned cigarette adverts on TV as a first blow against smoking’s sophisticated, convivial image. In 1971 the first of the compulsory health warnings on cigarette packs appeared and these have grown steadily larger up to the advent of ‘plain packaging’ in 2016.

Restrictions ratcheted up even further in 2014 with the all-encompassing Children and Families Act taking control of the marketing of tobacco products. Shops now have to keep cigarettes ‘under the counter’ hidden from children’s beady eyes and smoking is banned in private cars carrying children.

(Top image: pxfuel.com)

30/03/2023
3 min
2 years
207 words

Inventions

The Flying Shuttle

John Kay (1704-c.80) from Lancashire and one of his six sons, Robert (1728-1802), made vital contributions to the Industrial Revolution in the […]

John Kay (1704-c.80) from Lancashire and one of his six sons, Robert (1728-1802), made vital contributions to the Industrial Revolution in the textile industry. John first invented, manufactured and installed wire reeds for looms. He later developed a card-making machine and a cording and twisting machine for yarn. In 1733 he invented the flying shuttle, the first step from hand looms to power looms.

His mechanism comprised a wheeled, aerodynamic bobbin tray ferrying the weft to and fro inside the warp ‘shed’ and operated by pulling on a cord attached to the hammers that whacked the tray along a ‘race’. A weaver could do this with one hand while simultaneously operating the reeds. This was far quicker than doing the job manually and enabled the production of much wider cloth.

Some newly laid-off weavers expressed their resentful and some rival businesses ignored Kay’s patent, which he could not afford to continue defending in court, and copied the idea anyway (patents were not fairly regulated then). However, Robert improved the loom further in 1760 by the addition of a ‘drop box’ to hold extra bobbins so that multi-coloured designs could be woven. In spite of any difficulties, the Kays’ innovations were a turning point.

(Top images LtoR: flying shuttle trays by Linda Spashett at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0, John Kay [cropped] by Wellcome Collection by Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)

26/03/2023
3 min
2 years
227 words

History

The British Empire

“The British Empire was acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness.” ~ Sir John Seeley (1834-95) The enduring motivation behind the British Empire […]

“The British Empire was acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness.”

~ Sir John Seeley (1834-95)

The enduring motivation behind the British Empire and those of our European competitors, was trade. Spreading Christianity was somewhere in the mix but the costly annexation of territory was not the goal. Rather, with the British Navy ruling the waves after the Battle of Trafalgar, it was the establishment of free trade ports along particular sea-routes that was of paramount importance.

However in India, Britain’s East India Company reluctantly took over the remnant Mogul administration to help solve local disputes. North America attracted settlers and Australia received convicts. Britain’s pioneering of industrial methods engendered a desire to spread the advantages of roads, railways and telecommunications as well as education. Thereby the Empire gradually evolved.

Additions to the Empire were piecemeal and it was the settlers themselves who set out to expand their boundaries, not the government, which always preferred colonies to be self-governing. In the 1880s Germany scrapped free trade and spurred the ‘scramble for Africa’, especially after the Suez Canal was opened. This coincided with the emergence of the big bankers and loans to cash-strapped governments, a factor which rapidly dissolved all European empires after WW2.

(Image: Ramirez72, Andersmusician, Vadac at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.5)

25/03/2023
3 min
2 years
212 words

Geography & Environment

Motorway Signs

The UK’s first significant stretch of motorway comprised the M1’s junctions 5-18, opened in 1959, though the M6 in Preston had a […]

The UK’s first significant stretch of motorway comprised the M1’s junctions 5-18, opened in 1959, though the M6 in Preston had a small section opened the previous year. With no speed limit and unschooled drivers treating these straight, wide roads as race tracks even in fog, there were thousands of crashes in those early days. One issue was the clarity of signage, which obviously had to be read and understood at speed.

This led to several years of experimentation and debate before the optimal designs and standards were selected for motorway signs. The Road Research Laboratory tested different ideas in Hyde Park, Slough and part of the M1, among other places. The Anderson Report of 1962 was expanded on by the Worboys Report of 1963 and both of these Committees employed the services of graphic designers Richard ‘Jock’ Kinneir (1917-94) from Hampshire and S.African émigrée Margaret Calvert (1936-).

Their recommendations included having a blue background behind reflective white, mixed-case lettering, for which they designed a new typeface called ‘Transport’ (this is also now used on the government website). This aids word-shape recognition and best use of space. Kinneir and Calvert went on to design all other British road signs, using pictograms instead of text wherever possible.

(Image: Steve Daniels at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

22/03/2023
3 min
2 years
216 words

Entertainment

Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice

Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber (1948-) from London and Sir Tim Rice (1944-) from Buckinghamshire, who met in 1965, revived British musical theatre […]

Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber (1948-) from London and Sir Tim Rice (1944-) from Buckinghamshire, who met in 1965, revived British musical theatre with three remarkable hits in the 1970s; namely, ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat’, ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ and ‘Evita’. None went directly to a stage production in those early days ~ even ‘Evita’ was a concept album first. Apart from a specially commissioned show called ‘Cricket’ (1986) for the Queen’s 60th birthday celebration at Windsor Castle, the two then worked separately with equal, or even greater, success.

Rice, the lyricist and more inclined towards pop music, collaborated with Benny and Björn from ABBA to create ‘Chess’ (1984) and teamed up with Elton John for Disney’s ‘Lion King’ (1994). He had previously worked with American songwriter Alan Menken on Disney’s spell-binding ‘Aladdin’ (1992) and the awards were a-plenty for these and other projects.

Lloyd Webber, the world’s most commercially successful composer, proved his passion for musical theatre by buying six London theatres including the Palladium and ploughing all profits back into their upkeep. Among his weighty portfolio of award-winning shows, ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ (1986) has a top spot in musical theatre history. ‘Cats’ (1981), ‘Starlight Express’ (1984) and even the UK’s 2009 Eurovision song are also under his belt.

(Images LtoR: Andrew Lloyd Webber by qwertyytrewqqwerty at Wikimedia Commons / CC0, Tim Rice by Thecharmschool/W. at snl.no / CC BY SA 4.0)

17/03/2023
3 min
2 years
230 words

English language

Alan Bennett

Author, playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett (1934-), a Yorkshireman, began writing in 1960, when he was a member of the illustrious Oxford […]

Author, playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett (1934-), a Yorkshireman, began writing in 1960, when he was a member of the illustrious Oxford Revue ensemble that wrote and performed ‘Beyond the Fringe’ in Edinburgh, London and New York. Its success pushed him to resign as junior lecturer, though decades later he donated 15 bookshelf metres of his life’s work to Oxford’s Bodleian Library in gratitude for his education there.

His first play, ‘Forty Years On’ (1968) featured no less a star than Sir John Gielgud (1904-2000) and Bennett continued to enchant and amuse audiences with subsequent hits such as ‘Talking Heads’ (1988, 1999), ‘The Madness of George III’ (1991) and ‘The History Boys’ (2004). Bennett’s witty sharpness has won him many fans. ‘The Lady in the Van’ (1999) is an example of how Bennett recycles real-life episodes ~ he had allowed his homeless acquaintance to live in a van on his driveway for 15 years, providing a wealth of anecdotal material for later use.

His voice has a comfortable quality and he has recorded several classic children’s stories. Bennett declined a CBE in 1988 and a knighthood in 1996, saying “It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.” Here he imagines the Queen’s belated regret on not being well-read:

(Top image: Chris Beckett at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

11/03/2023
3 min
2 years
216 words

Discoveries

Secretin

At the time that secretin was discovered, post-Industrial Revolution, scientific materialists were encouraging the idea of a living body being just another […]

At the time that secretin was discovered, post-Industrial Revolution, scientific materialists were encouraging the idea of a living body being just another machine that could be explained by physics. Brothers-in-law Sir William Maddock Bayliss (1860-1924) from Staffordshire and Londoner Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927) were the medical researchers who, in 1902, made a breakthrough which conversely hinted that there is much more unfathomable ingenuity to it than that.

They set up a gruesome experiment at University College London whereby they observed and deduced that eating food stimulates the upper gastrointestinal tract to emit what they called secretin, a chemical messenger composed of strings of amino acids, into the bloodstream, which then travels only to the pancreas (and nowhere else), where it in turn stimulates the production of digestive juices, then disappears.

Bayliss and Starling published their findings under the heading ‘The Mechanism of Pancreatic Secretion’ (1902), thereby founding the study of hormones, of which secretin was the first to be identified, although it took until the 1960s for it to be isolated. In 1905 they coined the word ‘hormone’ from the Greek word meaning ‘that which sets in motion’ and shed light on how the blood and lymph are part of the body’s communication channels.

(Images: Internet Archive Book Images at Flickr.com / Public domain, Bayliss & Starling [cropped from family group] by Wellcome Images at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)

08/03/2023
3 min
2 years
226 words

Culture

‘New Musical Express’ and ‘Melody Maker’

The world’s first weekly newspaper entirely devoted to music, ‘Melody Maker‘ (MM), began in 1926 and ended in 2000, when it was […]

The world’s first weekly newspaper entirely devoted to music, ‘Melody Maker‘ (MM), began in 1926 and ended in 2000, when it was absorbed by its rival, the ‘New Musical Express‘ (NME), no slouch itself with its first publication in 1946 as the ‘Musical Express’. ‘New..’ was added after a re-vamp in 1952. It eventually ceased printing in 2018 and is now only online.

Although describing ‘Musical Express’, this quote can be applied to both MM and NME: “…[they] dealt with music like it was the most important thing in the world, and … the people who played it were an elect group, apart from everyday society” (Pat Long, 2012). In 1952 NME was the first to print a weekly Top 12 singles chart, compiled initially by phoning 20 record shops and asking for their sales figures. MM went a step further with a Top 20 in 1956, then an LP chart in 1958.

Bands would advertise for new members in the classified ads and careers were shaped by reviews and interviews gladly given to these music industry ‘influencers’ of the 1960s/70s. Both had their ups and downs but just when closure loomed, a new music genre or sub-genre would emerge and subject itself to the intellectual journalistic analysis that revitalised their teenage readership.

*Image of typical advert from 1972 NME: rchappo2002 at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0*

(Top images: 1980 and 1991 Melody Maker covers by badgreeb RECORDS at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0, 1961 NME cover by Bradford Timeline at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC 2.0 and 1993 NME cover by Adrian Brown at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

01/03/2023
4 min
2 years
249 words

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.