Modern History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Modern History’
Victorian England was agog at the prospect of Tom Sayers meeting a confident but unproven challenger from the USA.
Boxing’s first world title bout, on April 17th, 1860, featured England’s own Tom Sayers against a challenger from the USA, John Heenan, ‘the Benicia Boy’. It was the boxing event of a whole generation, and bare-knuckle fighting’s swansong.
Having brought hundreds of convicts to New South Wales, Arthur Phillip then had to conjure order out of their chaos.
The first British settlement in Australia was established at Sydney Cove on January 26th, 1788, and named after the Home Secretary. The policy of penal transportation was barbarity, but out of it Captain Phillips and his successors conjured civilisation — and began by disobeying orders.
The Maharaja of Jodhpur called on his subjects to do their bit and stop the Nazis.
On May 15th, 1942, Maharaja Sir Umaid Singh of Jodhpur spoke at the inauguration of the National War Front in Jodhpur. Already many thousands of Indians had volunteered to help stop Nazi Germany from taking Britain’s place as India’s Presiding Power, and now His Highness addressed himself to those left behind.
Self-confessed Scottish Nationalist John Buchan warned Scots that there was more to democratic prosperity than having a Parliament.
In November 1932, John Buchan MP told the House of Commons that he supported Home Rule for Scotland in principle, but warned that no Parliament has a magic wand, and that an over-mighty and bitterly anti-English Parliament might leave Scots as much a race without a country as no Parliament at all.
Richard Steele goes to Bath for his health, and is cured of more ailments than he had ever had in his life.
Eighteenth-century Bath was a fashionable spa city to which the Quality would retire for ‘the cure’. However, the health-giving waters were seemingly not enough by themselves, and doctors clustered round with all the medical treatments visitors could possibly want or need — plus a good many more.
Joseph Addison complains that the famous Cries of London are a lot of fuss about nothing.
‘The Cries of London’, the various musical and not-so-musical calls of street vendors in Queen Anne’s capital, were widely regarded with affection and pride. But the endless drumming of tins and kettles left Joseph Addison’s nerves raw, and the medley of slogans and doggerel verses was if anything worse.