Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
Germany felt she had a right to an empire like Britain’s, and she was willing to get it at the expense of her neighbours.
In 1871, Otto von Bismarck hammered Prussia and other small princedoms of the region into a new united Germany. The new Union greedily coveted British industrial progress and colonial expansion, but as John Buchan wrote, ‘she began too late in the day, and could succeed only at the expense of her neighbours’.
A young monk was rewarded for taking his duties as guest-master seriously.
In about 658, Abbot Eata sent Cuthbert from Melrose Abbey away south to Ripon, to be the guest-master in a new monastery there. It was while he was at Ripon that Cuthbert had a remarkable experience which left him trembling with excitement and fear.
The Church, mother Nature and free markets had almost done for slavery at home when colonies in the New World brought it back.
Landmark anti-slavery legislation in 1807 and 1833, said Russian writer Aleksey Khomiakov, had earned England the gratitude of the whole human race. But it had not always been like this. True, by Elizabethan times the Church (with a little help from Mother Nature and the free market) had all but plucked the weed of slavery from our soil; but in our New World colonies, it was soon starting to run riot.
Fatherless teenage tearaway Fowell Buxton was not a promising boy, but the Gurney family changed all that.
William Wilberforce’s retirement in 1825 left a vacancy for the Commons’ leading anti-slavery campaigner. The man who stepped into his shoes, decrying slavery as ‘repugnant to the principles of the British constitution and of the Christian religion’, was Fowell Buxton (1786-1845), and few who knew him as a child could have believed it.
Preventing the German fleet from breaking out into the Atlantic in 1916 should have felt like victory, but it felt like defeat.
The Battle of Jutland in 1916 was the only major engagement between the German and British fleets during the Great War. That was partly a consequence of the damage inflicted on the German fleet, effectively neutralising it; but British losses were actually higher, and the victory felt like defeat.
In 1910, Constantine Zervakos, a young monk from the Greek island of Paros, found himself charged with espionage.
Until 1912, the city and port of Thessalonica was in the hands of the Muslim Turks, and any Greek, especially a Christian, took his life in his hands passing through. In 1910, a newly-minted monk of the Longovarda monastery on Paros got himself into very hot water.