Jack Hargreaves; new viewers start here

Jack Hargreaves died 20 years ago. The name is so plain English. It is the sort of name you see rolling up the credits of a black and white movie from the forties. Jack Hargreaves is the source material of history though. More about that later, but first a bit about a life well lived.… Continue reading Jack Hargreaves; new viewers start here

The Unmet Need

Oil is a risky business. It is not surprising to hear a geologist predict that ‘peak oil’ has past. Oil’s future will be inexorable decline. It would not shock you unduly to hear them say oil is now just “a temporary and vanishing phenomenon—one which young men will live to see come to its natural… Continue reading The Unmet Need

These boots are made for… limping

On one of those million and one BBC websites there is a report of this singular phenomenon from the 19th century. The website claimed for a brief time there was a fashion among women to feign a limp in public when there was nothing the matter with them. This was more than a daft fashion… Continue reading These boots are made for… limping

‘And you try and tell the young people of today that… they won’t believe you’

PriceWaterhouseCoopers the accounting firm with corporate offices in every major city in the world, has mercifully begun calling itself PwC. It has had a bit of a track record with name changes as it swallowed more rivals over the years than the greenery in Little Shop of Horrors.  But if you wanted to deal with… Continue reading ‘And you try and tell the young people of today that… they won’t believe you’

A tinker’s dam and history’s bunk

I guarantee that you have yet to read a history book which, no matter how well-researched, recorded and double-checked, does not contain error. That is the very nature of the sources of history and biography. The protagonists themselves get simple things like dates wrong, even when they record such details at the time. Reminiscence messes… Continue reading A tinker’s dam and history’s bunk

The Day They Hanged A Banker

How callous would you have to be to invent a country just to lure paying settlers there? Especially if you told them it was an idyllic paradise for Europeans when it was nothing more than an Equatorial mangrove swamp that actually already belonged to someone else? This con man devised a name for the country,… Continue reading The Day They Hanged A Banker

Another wartime anniversary; Oradour

After the rightfully diplomatic D Day commemoration, another event to remember is the war crime at Oradour. If you are reading this today, June 10, it is exactly 70 years ago that German troops heading north to repel the landings took time out to gather up all the villagers of innocent little French village of… Continue reading Another wartime anniversary; Oradour