History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
Alexander, who had just taken the bath intended for his vanquished enemy Darius of Persia and was now eating Darius’s supper, was interrupted by a commotion in the camp.
It is November 5th, 333 BC. Aided by his fast friend Hephaestion, the young King Alexander of Macedon in northern Greece has just defeated Darius III, King of Persia, at the Battle of Issus on the modern-day Turkish-Syrian border. The first thing he did after taking possession of the enemy camp was to go to the hot bath prepared for Darius. ‘So this’ he laughed as slaves poured in fragrant salts ‘is what it is to be a king!’
As he sat in his guest room at Durham Abbey, Ranulf de Capella could think of nothing but finding someone to rid him of his painful toothache.
Reginald of Durham was a monk at the Benedictine Abbey in Durham from about 1153 until his death some forty years later. The Abbey church housed the coffin and body (untouched by time, despite being regularly opened to view) of seventh-century miracle-working bishop St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and from the steady stream of pilgrims who came to visit the shrine Reginald collected a fund of amazing tales.
In 1680, Samuel Pepys sat down with Charles II to record how, many years before, a bold double-bluff saved the King from Cromwell’s men.
Following defeat at Worcester on September 3rd, 1651, King Charles II (who was just twenty-one at the time) reluctantly fled to France, stumbling in disguise towards the south coast, never more than a step ahead of Cromwell’s men. In 1680, the King looked back in the company of Samuel Pepys on those anxious days, and what happened one famous night at Boscobel House in Shropshire.
During his tour of England in 1782, Karl Philipp Moritz dropped in on the House of Commons, and thought the histrionics in the Chamber better than any play.
In 1782, German tourist Karl Philipp Moritz visited the Commons chamber, and heard Viscount Feilding rebuke Charles Fox, the Foreign Secretary, for wanting to make war hero Admiral Rodney a Lord: had the Rt Hon. Gentleman not recently declared Rodney’s second-in-command, Admiral Hood, unworthy even of a seat in the Commons? Fox’s despatch-box-thumping reply whetted Moritz’s appetite for more.
Lord Cromer, a former Consul-General of Egypt, expressed his frustration at politicians who set too much store by Foreign Office briefings.
In an Introduction to Sir Sidney Low’s study of Egypt in Transition (1914), Lord Cromer (1841-1917), former Consul-General of Egypt, humbly recalled how momentous decisions were taken by men who knew next to nothing about the peoples and societies they were dealing with. But more dangerous by far were the decisions taken by men who had been thoroughly briefed by the Foreign Office.
When it opened in 1901, the Uganda Railway still wasn’t in Uganda, and Westminster’s MPs were still debating whether or not to build it.
Two years after Uganda became a British Protectorate in 1894, work began at Mombasa in British East Africa (Kenya from 1920) on a railway inland to Uganda. Thanks to African terrain and British bureaucracy, when Winston Churchill published the following assessment of it in 1908 the meandering line terminated at Kisumu, 660 route-miles away but still short of the Ugandan border.