Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
Businessmen in Liverpool engaged George Stephenson to build one of his new-fangled railways.
The first purpose-built freight and passenger railway line linking two cities was opened in 1830, joining the port of Liverpool with the mills around Manchester. The social and economic impact was instant, bringing more real and tangible benefit to Britain’s common man than he had ever known before.
Conspiracies and dynastic expectations swirled around James I’s daughter from the age of nine.
When King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England in 1603, he brought his family to London, including a seven-year-old daughter named Elizabeth. Just two years later, she was the unwitting focus of a traitorous plot to assassinate her father and put England back under the dominion of Continental Europe.
It started as an honest mistake, became a diplomatic standoff, and brought down an Empire.
In 680, English bishops gathered at Hatfield sent Pope Agatho a signed copy the Creed in which they declared their belief that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father ‘and the Son’. They would have been horrified to learn that this little phrase was not in the original. Unfortunately, some at Rome had invested so much of their credibility in it that they were prepared to go to any lengths to save face — even if it meant bringing down the Empire.
The only truly global conflict in history began when German troops crossed into Poland in September 1939.
The Second World War began twice, once in September 1939 for the countries of western Europe, and then again in February 1941 with the entrance of Japan and the United States of America. For those early months, long and bruising, Great Britain stood alone against almost every government from Norway to Spain.
To the poor of England, the Worcestershire man gave affordable pots and pans, and to all the world he gave the industrial revolution.
Seventeenth-century England’s industrial productivity had stalled. Her forests could no longer supply charcoal for smelting; iron was mostly imported from Russia and Sweden; fine metal kitchenware was a luxury of the rich. Government funded various barren initiatives, but Worcestershire entrepreneur Abraham Darby (1678-1717) made the breakthrough.