If blackboards just had to become ‘chalk boards’ in case someone took offence, how come Black Friday? Just asking…
E Pur si Muove
There is something disarmingly strengthening when you hear that innocent piping voice of history whispering from the unencumbered past, ‘excuse me, but I think you are perhaps mistaken…” I am not a climatologist, but… I am certain that the congregation of the pro-warmist faith is probably 99 per cent made up of people just as… Continue reading E Pur si Muove
The Kindness of Strangers
There appear to have been ‘4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire’ for some long time before the fab two of the fab four discovered that story in the Daily Mail while searching for lyrics for A Day in the Life in January 1967…
The other side of Frederick Furnivall: Tiny Teena
Maybe I painted old man Furnivall as too benign and saintly an old chap. He was not without what they might call ‘personal issues’ earlier in life. Firstly, as George Bernard Shaw wrote “He was a good sort, but his quarrels were outrageous…” When he fell out with poet Algernon Swinburne, he used his lexicographical… Continue reading The other side of Frederick Furnivall: Tiny Teena
A little exercise
Why does history sometimes abandon the memory of a great and colourful character? It’s midday on a chilly February Sunday in the year 1910. At Hammersmith, a western suburb of London still countrified, 1,000 people have gathered on the bridge over the Thames. A ripple of applause and cheering breaks out for a thin row… Continue reading A little exercise
Milk
Add these glimpses of forgotten social history to your ‘to do’ list when you’re next in London, courtesy of Dave Walker’s superb Kensington library website. Give him an award someone!
(I do not) Want Ad
You did not want to mess with this lady, Mrs Nancy Turtle. She surely believed in the power of advertising, though her forgiveable spluttering volcano of anger could have been phrased better, this stream of consciousness rant paints a perfect picture of her lantern-jawed, one-eyed philanderer excuse for a husband
Forever blowing bubbles
It was the BIBA of its age. As one commentator put it “All the world and his wife is visiting Dr Dresser’s shop”.
Mr Herbert Railton, illustrator
Something more to Mr Railton than the usual denatured Victorian book illustrator. Thank-you Dave Walker and the inestimable library at the RBKC.
Bad Education
Slightly off any topic at all to do with history, I wonder how long before some benighted college student is accepted onto a PhD programme somewhere to produce their thesis “Inherent racism, oppressive hierarchies and social divisiveness in the Harry Potter Series.” Think about it: Dobby the house elf was a slave. The Gringotts bank… Continue reading Bad Education