The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Composer Ethel Smyth starts telling the Archbishop of Canterbury a joke, and then wishes she hadn’t...
In the late 1880s, rising composer Ethel Smyth became friendly with Nelly Benson, daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and often shared in the family’s meals. Archbishop Benson’s massive dignity never failed to disconcert Ethel, and on one occasion she started nervously babbling an anecdote about a misprint in a newspaper.
Sir Thomas More gives his explanation for the mysterious disappearance of King Richard III’s nephews.
On April 9th 1483, Edward IV’s son acceded to the throne as Edward V. But the boy’s uncle pronounced him and his brother Richard illegitimate, named himself Richard III, and shut the two princes up in the Tower of London. Thirty years later, Sir Thomas More gave his version of what happened next.
Major-General Charles Napier, given the task of policing a Chartist rally in Manchester, was alarmed to hear the protestors had brought the big guns - literally.
In 1838, the ‘Chartists’ demanded Parliamentary reforms which gained wide sympathy, especially in the industrial North West. But by the following summer violent radicals who were no friends of liberal democracy were hijacking the movement, as Major-General Charles Napier discovered for himself when keeping the peace at a rally in Manchester in May, 1839.
In 1928, a train service linking London and Edinburgh became the world’s longest non-stop run.
LNER A3 No. 4472 ‘Flying Scotsman’ won a place in the history books and in the hearts of millions worldwide when in 1934 she clocked 100 mph and set a world speed record for steam. But history had already been made when in 1928, the train service from which she took her name completed the world’s longest non-stop run.
The guardian of a lonely signalbox recounts a truly haunting experience.
While exploring the branch lines radiating out from Mugby Junction, a man has stumbled on a remote signal box near the mouth of a tunnel. ‘Halloa! Below there!’ he called to the signalman, waving his arms. The signalman’s distress was so remarkable that it required an explanation, and next day he gave it.
David Livingstone relives the historic moment when he became the first European to see the Victoria Falls.
In 1852-56, David Livingstone mapped the course of the Zambesi, hoping that agricultural trade along the river would crush the horrible trade in slaves (recently outlawed in the British Empire). On November 16, 1855, he was transported by canoe to a magnificent cataract named Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’, so becoming the first European to see the Victoria Falls.