The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
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.
When Penda tried to burn down Bamburgh Castle, St Aidan turned the pagan King’s own weapons against him.
St Aidan (?590-651) came from the island of Iona to Northumbria during the reign of King Oswald, and remained there under Oswald’s successors until his death in 651. He settled himself on the island of Lindisfarne.
After escaping from six years as a slave in Ireland, Patrick wanted only one thing: to go back.
Patrick was born into a well-to-do family in a town somewhere in Roman Britain, perhaps about 410. But however obscure his origins may have been, he was destined to be known everywhere as the man who brought Christianity to Ireland, and in that cause he accepted anything and everything that God asked of him.
John of Gaunt watches in despair as his country is milked for its wealth and shared out among the king’s favourites.
It is 1399, and for two years King Richard II has (in addition to legalised murder) been levying extortionate rents on the property of his opponents, and handing out grace-and-favour homes to his cronies. As John of Gaunt lies dying, he charges his nephew with being ‘landlord of England, not king’.
Lord Armstrong’s home was an Aladdin’s cave of Victorian technology.
Modern ‘green’ policies cost money and jobs, and blight the environment. Victorian industrialist Lord Armstrong managed to conserve the environment and yet also trial a range of emerging technologies that now bring comfort and prosperity to hundreds of millions of people.