Georgian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Georgian Era’
Prussia’s invasion of Silesia in 1740 plunged Europe into turmoil, and a French invasion of England became a very real threat.
The War of the Austrian Succession began as part of the seemingly endless German quest to gobble up the continent’s smaller states. It would not have involved Britain had King George II not been also Elector of Hanover, and if France had not seen it as an opportunity to expand her empire at Britain’s expense.
John Nyren tells us about one of cricket’s truly great batsmen, John Small.
John Small the Elder (1737-1826) was a truly historic figure of cricket, a supreme batsman credited with the first recorded century in a serious match, 136* for Hampshire vs Surrey on July 13th, 1775. He was also a gifted violinist and cellist, and on one occasion it quite possibly saved his life.
Leigh Hunt reflects on the civilising effect of the game of cricket.
Essayist Leigh Hunt was a cricket-lover, and panegyrics on the game and its health-giving properties pepper his writing. He was also of the opinion that those whose got out to play the game gained an appreciation for the countryside and a perspective on the world denied to many others.
A sportsman and an officer lays a wager that he can make a trigger-happy Irishman go barefoot in public.
It is a familiar scene: the legendary gunslinger in the saloon, the young upstart ragging on him, and a table of fellow-gamblers urging the reckless boy to think better of it. In this case however, it all took place in a coffee-house in Georgian London, and the upstart was a middle-order batsman for the MCC.
Captain Cook’s friend and ship’s surgeon David Samwell gives us his impressions of the great explorer.
Welsh poet and doctor David Samwell was Captain James Cook’s surgeon on his third voyage, aboard HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery. Samwell accompanied him from Plymouth in 1776 to Hawaii, where he saw the impulsive Cook killed in an altercation over stolen stores on February 14th, 1779.
Abdullah Abdul Kadir gives us his first-hand impressions of the Founder of Singapore and of his first wife, Olivia.
In 1808, young colonial secretary Stamford Raffles went down the Malaysian coast from Penang to the formerly Dutch colony of Malacca as a rest cure. There, Raffles and his wife Olivia made the acquaintance of Abdullah Abdul Kadir, a local teacher of Malay, who left us his pen-portrait of them.