History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
Ann Sancho would be in better health, said her husband, if she did not worry quite so much about him.
Several years after his death, some letters of Ignatius Sancho, a grocer trading from King Charles Street in London and a former slave, were presented to the public in the hope of demonstrating that he was a writer quite as accomplished as many a native English literary man. In this extract, dated October 24th, 1777, he talks (as he often does) about his wife Ann.
At the very centre of Sir Robert Peel’s idea of policing was the constable’s beat: a few streets, shops and families that he must know and care about.
Whenever newspapers print letters from anxious correspondents demanding more ‘constables on the beat,’ letters are sure to follow reminding us that patrolling a beat is an archaic model of policing not seen in this country for a generation. But back in 1862, the Metropolitan Police still clung to their founding principle that prevention is better than cure.
The Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police reiterated that what they liked best was a policeman who never arrested anyone.
In 1829, Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act passed into law with the blessing of Prime Minister Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and King George IV. Sir Richard Mayne, a barrister, drew up guidelines emphasising that the measure of success was not arrests and prosecutions, but tranquil communities, and thirty-three years later the Met saw no reason to change them.
After witnessing a bus conductor’s battle of wills with the London public, journalist Alfred Gardiner felt obliged to give him a little advice.
The conductor of an open-topped bus once told a lady carrying a little dog to take it upstairs, despite the lashing rain. The passengers backed her up, stopped the bus and summoned a constable. The conductor stuck to his position, however, and eventually got his way; but after everyone else had gone home he tried to win a little sympathy from journalist A. G. Gardiner.
On the day that the Unknown Warrior was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, ‘Alpha of the Plough’ wondered if the country would prove worthy of him.
Like other correspondents for London’s newspaper ‘The Star,’ Alfred Gardiner took a nom-de-plume from astronomy, choosing ‘Alpha of the Plough.’ In this extract, written on November 11th, 1920, he reflected on the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey that same day, and wondered if the people of Britain really understood what had happened.
John Adams, the second President of the USA, told army officers in Massachusetts that the Constitution he had helped to draw up could not guarantee them liberty.
On October 11th, 1798, President John Adams told officers of a Massachusetts militia brigade that the United States’ historic Constitution (which he had helped to write) was never about centralised Power. Unlike politicians over in Europe, he said, he would not promise to conjure up order out of a selfish, thoughtless and pleasure-seeking society.