1267
A poem of nostalgia for the sea breezes and yellow gorse of Northumberland.
War-poet Wilfrid Gibson never served abroad, and was in fact accepted for the army only at his fifth application, in 1917. These short verses do not come from his war-themed collections (though many reflect that subject) but from a set remembering Northumberland, the county of his birth in Hexham.
Picture: © Oliver Dixon, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted October 11 2016
1268
A meditation on our instinctive love for the place in which we live.
This is just part of a rather longer poem in which Kipling explores the fundamental truth that no mere human can really love everyone and everything equally. That, he says, is why it is both necessary and right that we feel particularly bound to, and responsible for, the place we call home.
Picture: © Janet Richardson, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted October 11 2016
1269
Two famous figures, one from the sciences and one from the arts, who turned suffering to advantage.
Samuel Smiles gives two striking examples of great Englishmen who have brought much good out of their sufferings, one in the field of science, the other in the arts.
Picture: © Richard Crowest Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.
Posted October 10 2016
1270
If freedom and democracy are to have any meaning, the public must be able to talk back to their governors.
The euphoria that followed the Allied victory over Nazi Germany four years earlier had not clouded schoolmaster NL Clay’s wits. In Straightforward English (1949), a guide ‘designed to help an ordinary person to write a clear message’, he told the British public that we must speak plainly and never be satisfied with slogans or jargon, or we would find ourselves walking down the same unhappy road as the Germans.
Picture: © Roger Kidd, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted October 8 2016
1271
Victorian MP Richard Cobden pleaded for Britain to set the world an example as a nation open for business.
Richard Cobden MP urged Queen Victoria’s Parliament to embrace a policy of global free trade, instead of the over-regulated, over-taxed trade deals brokered by politicians and their friends behind closed doors. It was, he said, nothing less than the next step in Britain’s destiny, and her Christian duty.
Picture: © Bahnfrend, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0.. Source.
Posted October 7 2016
1272
An eccentric, self-made businesswoman, who ‘made three fortunes and spent five’ in the campaign against the death penalty.
Violet van der Elst (1882-1966) was a highly eccentric self-made businesswoman from a working-class background, who arguably did more than anyone else to end the barbaric practice of capital punishment. Yet she died forgotten and all but penniless, having given all she had for her cause.
Picture: © Kate Jewell, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted October 7 2016