History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
The Victorian working man had John Bright’s respect and unwavering support, but he could expect no special favours.
On January 28th, 1875, John Bright MP gave a speech in Birmingham during which he regretted the pressure put on voters in manufacturing towns to elect working-class candidates. A Mr Joseph Hulme of Burslem (part of Stoke-on-Trent) wrote to express surprise at this seeming prejudice, drawing the following reply.
For George Stephenson, the motto of the Stockton and Darlington Railway was a code to live by.
However pure Science may be, a scientist’s head may be turned by ambition, politics or gain, resulting in great harm to social and economic progress. Happily, George Stephenson was not such a man, as Michael Longridge of Bedlington Iron Works testified in a letter (here abridged) to Edinburgh engineer George Buchanan in January 1832.
Richard Cobden questioned both the wisdom and the motives of politicians who intervene on foreign soil.
At the Vienna Congress in 1815, Napoleon’s former empire was shared out by Britain and other European Powers. A semi-autonomous Kingdom of Poland was allotted to Russia, which Russian troops occupied in response to the November Uprising of 1830-31. Calls grew loud for the British and Turkish Empires to restore ‘the balance of power’, but Richard Cobden heard only arrogant self-preservation.
A gentleman travelling home from London by train reached his destination carrying more than he set out with.
In 1830, the world’s first intercity passenger line began running steam-hauled trains between Liverpool and Manchester. Half a century later, Richard Pike compiled a collection of vignettes about life on the ever-growing railway network, some about engineers and locomotives, others about the surprising things that could happen in a railway carriage.
Richard Cobden was not a little envious of the USA’s open and can-do society, but he did not covet her republicanism.
In 1835 the USA stood for strict public economy (that year the national debt hit zero for the first and last time), military restraint, and wise investment of taxpayers’ dollars. These things, Richard Cobden believed, England could usefully copy; but not republicanism. A British republic, he said, she would merely replace one kind of aristocracy with a much less noble one.
If Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli really wanted a better-educated public, he must tackle the high cost of living.
As the 1860s progressed, calls grew for a Government shake-up of the education system. But in February 1868, John Bright MP, one of the country’s leading Liberals, told his Birmingham constituents that local communities would handle the three Rs without any help from fancy theories, if Government policy hadn’t made daily living into such a desperate scramble to survive.