Florence used her logical mind and society connections to save thousands of lives in the Crimean War.
By the time she was twenty-one, well-to-do Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was sure that God wished her to exchange European society life for nursing. Her mother begged her to think again: her intellectual gifts and social position promised so much more. And in a way she was right.
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.
The engineer put his own life on the line for the safety of his fellow-workers in the coal industry.
Cornish Professor of Chemistry and multi-award-winning scientist Sir Humphrey Davy invented a safety-lamp for mines in 1815; but up in Newcastle, colliery employee George (‘Geordie’) Stephenson (1781-1848) was already working on his own design – as if his life depended on it.
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In 1822, a rich and beautiful young woman took the cause of Greek independence into her capable hands.
The Greek war of independence lasted from 1821 to 1827, and resulted in a partial liberation from the oppressive rule of the Ottoman Turks which had begun with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Manto Mavrogenous (1796-1848) was one of the struggle’s most romantic and most tragic figures.
On May 8th, 1945, Winston Churchill took to the radio to tell the British public that almost six years of war were ended.
VE Day is Victory in Europe Day, the commemoration of Germany’s surrender at the end of the Second World War. It is kept to this day (though with less and less pomp as each year goes by) on May 8th. The passage below collects a few of the more significant dates in the months that led up to the unconditional surrender signed at Berlin on that day (more or less) in 1945.
A half-starved cat is recruited by the Allies in the fight against Hitler.
In June 1941, some six months before the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbour brought the USA into the Second World War, the USSR declared herself for Britain and her Empire, at a time when European states from Finland to Greece had been unable to stem the Nazi tide. This little tale is based on events recounted by Ovadi Savich, originally in Soviet War News.
Now that King Odysseus has failed to return from the Siege of Troy, the earls of Ithaca are eager to marry his lovely widow.
Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey tells of the many adventures of Odysseus, King of the island of Ithaca in the Ionian Sea, as he returned home from the Trojan War after almost two decades away. Penelope, his grieving queen, has all but given up hope of seeing him again, and is under increasing pressure from Odysseus’s greedy earls to marry again.
In 1720, Welsh promoter William Howell opened a pleasure garden at Belsize House, but the pleasures drew the magistrates’ frowns.
In 1722, the pleasure gardens at Belsize House near Hampstead were raided by constables on the orders of horrified magistrates, as being a den of gambling, lewdness and riot. It had all started innocently enough two years earlier, after an enterprising Welshman named William Howell obtained a lease on the stately house and gardens.
A little fable from ancient Greece about those political activists who make a living from stirring up controversy.
The ancient Greeks were the first European people to form democratic governments. The experiment was not without its problems, chief among them being the ambitious ‘demagogues’ or ‘leaders of the people’ who made a living out of setting citizens against each other. The phenomenon did not escape the notice of the storyteller Aesop.
Timur, Muslim lord of Samarkand, threw his weight behind the Golden Horde’s subjugation of Christian Russia, with unexpected results.
Timur, who succeeded his father as Lord of Samarkand in 1369, traced his ancestry back to Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire in 1206. By the time of his death in 1405, he had humbled kings and kingdoms from Russia to Iran, India and Egypt, and changed the course of history more than once — though not always as he intended.