Victorian Era
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Victorian Era’
What George Stephenson was to the railways of England, Sandford Fleming was to the railways of Canada.
At the start of the nineteenth century, railways brought a handful of struggling colonies together to form a great nation, and Sandford Fleming (1827-1915), then just a young Scottish surveyor from Kirkcaldy, played as important a part in that as any other man.
The textile moguls of Manchester and Liverpool engaged the Stephensons to complete their link to the capital.
After the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was linked to Birmingham by the Grand Junction Railway, it made sense for the business tycoons of the North West to extend this exhilarating new form of transport to London, and George and Robert Stephenson were given the job.
The Church, mother Nature and free markets had almost done for slavery at home when colonies in the New World brought it back.
Landmark anti-slavery legislation in 1807 and 1833, said Russian writer Aleksey Khomiakov, had earned England the gratitude of the whole human race. But it had not always been like this. True, by Elizabethan times the Church (with a little help from Mother Nature and the free market) had all but plucked the weed of slavery from our soil; but in our New World colonies, it was soon starting to run riot.
Fatherless teenage tearaway Fowell Buxton was not a promising boy, but the Gurney family changed all that.
William Wilberforce’s retirement in 1825 left a vacancy for the Commons’ leading anti-slavery campaigner. The man who stepped into his shoes, decrying slavery as ‘repugnant to the principles of the British constitution and of the Christian religion’, was Fowell Buxton (1786-1845), and few who knew him as a child could have believed it.
South African settlers of Dutch descent could not escape the march of the British Empire.
In 1881 and again in 1899, Britain was drawn into a conflict with settlers of Dutch descent in the South African Republic, also known as Transvaal, as her Empire continued to grow apace under the twin forces of colonial emigration and international trade - much to the chagrin of her colonial rival, Germany.