Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
The grand-daughter of Queen Victoria was as close to the poor of Moscow’s slums as she was to the Russian Tsar.
Elizabeth (1864-1918) was the grand-daughter of Queen Victoria. Her husband Sergei was Tsar Nicholas II’s uncle and the Governor-General of Moscow; her younger sister Alix was the Tsar’s wife. Steadfastly opposed to violence and the abuse of power, she dedicated her life to peace-making and charity.
King Philip V of Spain sent a second Spanish Armada against Britain, but it suffered much the same fate as the first.
The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 forbade Philip V of Spain, grandson of Louis XIV of France, to claim the French throne. But his chief minister, Italian cardinal Giulio Alberoni, egged him on, triggering the ‘War of the Quadruple Alliance’.
British sympathy for Roman imperial progress evaporated when officials began asset-stripping the country.
In AD 60, corrupt Roman officialdom pushed the dowager queen of the Iceni, in what is now Norfolk, too far. But Britain’s military Governor, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, was far away in Anglesey (dealing, as he supposed, with the last British resistance) when he learnt of it.
The Scottish missionary and medic believed that slavery could better be eradicated by trade than by force.
By the 1840s Britain had so repented of her involvement in slavery that she was the leading force in worldwide abolition. One of the most beloved anti-slavery campaigners was Scottish missionary, Dr David Livingstone.
A young George Stephenson takes responsibility for the team spirit at Black Callerton mine.
In 1801, the job of brakesman at Black Callerton pit was given to a young George Stephenson. It was a very responsible job, as it involved lowering and raising miners in the deep and dangerous mineshaft, but Stephenson felt he had a wider duty to the whole mine.
Howard gave his life to saving the ‘great gifts and strange inconsistencies’ of Britain’s unique democracy.
Leslie Howard Steiner (1893-1943) was born in London, to an English mother and a Jewish father who had emigrated from Hungary. Howard became the quintessential British matinee-idol, languid, slightly detached, but with a sense of something more beneath: a curious case of art imitating life.