Clay Lane
Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘Clay Lane’
Seventeenth-century German craftsmen came seeking a land of opportunity, and found it in County Durham.
From the sixteenth century onwards, craftsmen and merchants from the European Continent began to settle in England, escaping the regulation, persecution and war that was a daily feature of our neighbours’ politics. By the reign of William and Mary (1688-1694), investors were lining up to help European craftsmen choose Britain as a place to do business.
Hardworking Kichijiro wins Ima’s heart and Kanshichi’s hatred without noticing a thing.
The following tale was told to Gordon Smith as a real-life story, set in seventeenth-century Maizuru. Since 1943, Maizuru has been a naval base in Japan’s Kyoto Prefecture; in 1626, when our tale begins, it was a modest provincial harbour where prosperous merchant Shiwoya Hachiyemon had his business.
The Founder of Singapore established his city on principles of free people and free trade.
Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is well-known to anyone who has visited Singapore, the city he founded in 1819. Still held in honour there, he is much less widely remembered back in his own country, but deserves better from us for his pioneering campaigns against slavery in the Far East and for being a champion of free trade in a world dominated by gunboat diplomacy.
The Russians had checked it in the East, but in the West the expansion of Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire was far from over.
In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte wrapped up the short-lived French Republic, crowned himself Emperor of the French, and set about conquering Europe. However, failure to invade Moscow in 1812 was the first sign of vulnerability, and on June 18, 1815, his dream was ended by allied forces commanded by the Duke of Wellington.
By 1915, the Allies were struggling to break through Germany’s Western Front, and so began looking for another line of attack.
In the Great War of 1914-1918, the German Empire’s bid for European domination was backed by the Ottoman Empire, now controlled by the infamous Ismail Enver and his ‘Young Turks’. The Allies desperately wanted to take the Turks out of the war, and open up a third front to release pressure on France and the Russian Empire.
George served in the Roman army and lies buried in Israel, yet he makes an ideal patron for England.
It is sometimes said that England’s patron saint, St George, is not very English. Yet Britain in his day was part of the Roman Empire, and George refused to help the Roman Emperor send troops against his own people, meddle with the Church or impose cruel and arbitrary punishments — all key provisions of The Great Charter of 1215. You can’t get more English than that.