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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.
Every Sunday, the Englishman is raised to heaven by the choir, and then taken to her bosom by Mother Earth.
In 1819, while on a five-year visit to England, American author Washington Irving began publishing his ‘Sketches’, which included the famous tale of Rip van Winkle. There were also a number of affectionately teasing reflections on the English. This extract from ‘Sunday in London’ picks up the Englishman as he makes his devotions in the parish church.
On his visits to Durham Gaol, prison reformer John Howard found conditions that were all too familiar.
‘There’s Nae Good Luck in Durham Gaol’ was the title of a music-hall song by Tyneside song-maker Tommy Armstrong (1848-1919). It would have been scant consolation to know it, but conditions in the 1770s were far worse than in Tommy’s day. Here, pioneering prison reformer John Howard takes us on a very personal guided tour.
In eighteenth-century England, the death penalty was the solution to almost any crime.
In Georgian England, the consensus was that the key to crime prevention was to dangle the hangman’s rope before every would-be criminal’s eyes. Whether he was guilty of shoplifting or murder most foul, the hangman awaited him. Yet to some at the Old Bailey the news that they wouldn’t be up on a hanging charge came as a disappointment, as George Wrong explains.
... I heard John Wesley sing. A visitor on the quayside on Sunday May 30th, 1742, would have stumbled into a crowd agape and a determined clergyman singing psalms.
In 1742, John Wesley extended his northern preaching tour to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a large, cramped city by the North Sea, founded on coal mining and the coal-trade of England’s east coast. Many areas were grindingly poor, and over time ignorance and want had so tightened their grip that violence and addiction kept areas such as Sandgate, down on the Quayside, utterly wretched. Naturally, it was to Sandgate that Wesley at once demanded to go.
In the opening lines of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, the narrator explains the perverse whim that led him to leave his home shores behind.
Laurence Sterne published A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy in 1768, only a few weeks before his death. Sterne had recently toured the Continent himself, determined to be less fractious and curmudgeonly than fellow writer and tourist Tobias Smollett. The story begins with the narrator, the Revd Mr Yorick, feeling challenged to back up his rosy view of life on the near Continent by actually paying it a visit.
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.