History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
After one of the worst outrages in modern British history, Winston Churchill stood up in the House of Commons to label the Amritsar Massacre an act of terrorism.
On 13th April 1919, thousands of Sikhs crowded into the Jallianwala Bagh at Amritsar in the Punjab for a religious festival. Led by intelligence reports to believe that Bolshevik (communist) agitators were among them, General Reginald Dyer quietly shut the gates and gave the order to fire on the crowd. A year later, Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill rose in the Commons to deliver his verdict.
The British Tommy’s fondness for ‘Tipperary’ exasperated some of his countrymen, but ‘Alpha of the Plough’ thought it showed proper English spirit.
‘There are some among us’ sighed Gardiner at the height of the Great War ‘who never will understand the English spirit.’ He was thinking of those who scolded the British Tommy for jostling to his fate with It’s a long way to Tipperary on his lips, while the Kaiser’s men marched in time to a noble Lutheran hymn — didn’t that just say it all? In a way, mused Gardiner, it did.
The mournful owl in her Sussex garden so troubled A. G. Gardiner’s friend that she rarely visited her house in the country.
Journalist A. G. Gardiner, better known by the pen-name of ‘Alpha of the Plough’, lived in the countryside, where he enjoyed the companionship of two familiar voices. One was the merry piping of the robin by day; the other was the hopeless sigh of the owl by night. ‘Where are the songs of spring’ the little fellow seemed to say ‘and the leaves of summer?’ But Gardiner refused to be borne along by Wol’s pessimism.
In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh’s first attempt to found an English colony in the New World failed, but two years later he was keen to try again.
In 1584, an exploration party of two ships organised by Walter Raleigh came back and told Elizabeth I that ‘Roanoak’, Roanoke Island off the coast of what is now North Carolina, would make an excellent English colony. The following year, Raleigh (now Sir Walter) sent out hundred and eight settlers as founding fathers but a year later they came home. So in May 1587, Raleigh tried again.
In 1609, Englishman Thomas Harriot turned his new-fangled telescope on the moon, and sketched for the first time the face of another world.
Three hundred years after the death of Thomas Harriot or Hariot (?1560-1621), the American journal Science sketched the life of a man who, though almost forgotten by succeeding generations, was involved in some of the greatest discoveries of European science, and embroiled in some of the most stirring events in English politics.
After word came that Harry Demane had been lured aboard a slave-ship, Granville Sharp had only a few hours in which to make sure he did not sail.
Thanks to campaigner Granville Sharp, ‘Somersett’s Case’ in 1772 proved that slave owners could expect no help from our courts. But they could still sell their African servants into slavery in far-off British colonies, and when Mr Jeffries of Bedford Street did just that, the race was on to find Harry Demane before his ship left port — even as London was settling down for the weekend.