Modern History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Modern History’
Granville Sharp and his surgeon brother William rescued a young African man from the streets of London.
From the late 1760s, Granville Sharp (1734-1813), a Clerk in the Ordnance Office at the Tower of London, acquired a formidable reputation as an anti-slavery campaigner. By the 1800s, the mere mention of his name brought trembling slave-owners to the negotiating table. It all began quite by accident in 1767, when Granville received a letter from someone called Jonathan Strong, claiming to know him.
Both Rudyard Kipling and the Royal Navy saw Greek sovereignty as a universal symbol of freedom.
In 1821, the Greeks declared independence from the Ottoman Empire, setting off a bloody revolution that ended in victory for the Greeks. A century later, as the Ottoman Turks shared defeat with Germany in the Great War, Kipling and the Royal Navy rubbed a little salt in wounds old and new.
Mild-mannered Grace Darling persuaded her father to let her help him rescue the survivors of a shipwreck.
Grace Darling was just 22 when she helped her father rescue the survivors of a shipwreck on the Farne Islands off the Northumberland coast. It was a moment of instinctive heroism that would change her life forever.
At Bamburgh, John Sharp organised free healthcare and education, bargain groceries, and the world’s first coastguard service.
John Sharp’s 18th-century charitable trust at Bamburgh Castle is often dubbed a ‘welfare state’ today, but that is misleading. There were no laws or taxes, no inflated public sector salaries or party politics, just spontaneous generosity and the freedom to get the job done.
Hoping to please opinion at home, the French Emperor pressured the Turks into new outrages against their Christian population, and Russia hit back.
The Crimean War of 1853-1856 cost over 600,000 lives, and in the short term changed very little for those involved. It all started because the French Emperor, Napoleon III, wanted to curry favour with Roman Catholic opinion in Europe, but in no time at all France, Russia and Britain had committed themselves to positions from which they could not back down.