Modern History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Modern History’
The Bluebell line in Sussex was the first failing British Railways line to be taken over by volunteers.
There are over a hundred and eighty ‘heritage’ railways and tramways in the United Kingdom, privately owned and run largely by volunteers. Many are routes closed by State-owned British Railways, which enthusiasts have turned into profitable companies in defiance of Authority. The first of these inspirational and quintessentially British adventures was the Bluebell Line in Sussex.
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.
The Gallipoli landings in 1915 did not achieve the Admiralty’s goals, but for John Masefield they remained one of the proudest moments of the Great War.
The Dardanelles Campaign of April-December 1915, during the Great War, is remembered especially for the Anzac and Indian troops who gave their lives on the Gallipoli Peninsula in western Turkey. Then as now it was regarded as a failure by many, but John Masefield took quite another view — of the campaign, and of failure itself.
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.
Sir Charles Lucas argued that the Industrial Revolution happened at just the right time for everyone in the British Empire.
From the 1850s, railways, steamships and the electric telegraph allowed Britain and the scattered nations of her Empire to increase cooperation. Even better, said colonial administrator and historian Sir Charles Lucas, such innovations came too late for politicians in London to use them to tighten their control.
Sir Charles Lucas looked back at the role of the Government, the military and private enterprise during three centuries of British adventure overseas.
To end the six-volume ‘Oxford Survey of the British Empire’, Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas looked back over the history of England’s overseas adventures from time of Queen Elizabeth I to the end of the Victorian Age. He concluded that there had been three quite distinct eras, and began by looking at the character of our enterprise during the upheavals of the seventeenth century.