Modern History

The soldier went quite deliberately into a burning room full of gunpowder and ammunition.

Mathieu Martinel was a cavalry soldier in the French army. At the age of twenty, he had already saved a fellow-soldier from drowning in the River Ill, but his heroic exploits were far from over.

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A firework display in Paris turned to tragedy in the narrow streets of the capital.

It is 1837, and Mathieu Martinel, a cavalry soldier in the French army, is now a senior officer in the military college in Paris. Fate, however, had not yet finished testing his mettle.

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In 1859, peaceful co-existence on the Canadian border was severely tested by a marauding pig.

Even quite late in Queen Victoria’s reign, Britain and the United States of America were still carving up what had once been British colonial territory. One disputed region was San Juan Island near Vancouver, where a dead pig almost led to war.

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A team of amateurs gave Europe’s finest a drubbing.

THE Lipton Trophy, a short-lived European soccer competition, was won - twice - by little West Auckland, a team of plucky amateurs from County Durham.

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The heroic and charismatic statesman’s last journey was replete with echoes of his extraordinary life.

Winston Churchill’s tenacity, eloquence and principled refusal, regardless of the cost, to embrace seductive European promises of ‘progress’ and ‘harmony’ carried Blitz-torn Britain and persuaded a hesitant America to join the Allies.

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The Whitby man held his nerve to keep five enemy ships busy at Trafalgar, and subsequently led Nelson’s funeral procession.

The Battle of Trafalgar near Spain on October 21st, 1805, in which the victorious Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson was shot and killed, is one of the defining events in British history. Many played a vital part in it, including Captain Robert Moorsom of Whitby in Yorkshire.

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