British History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British History’
William Pitt the Elder berates Parliament for treating the public like know-nothings.
In June 1770, the Spanish invaded the Falkland Islands. The Government was inclined to sell the islanders out, and smooth over public outrage with words of assurance from King George III. But veteran statesman William Pitt ‘the Elder’, Earl of Chatham, warned them that such a patronising attitude risked losing public trust.
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.
John Heathcoat’s lace-making machine created thousands of jobs, and gave ordinary people clothes they could never have dreamt of.
The industrial revolution improved the living standards of the poor not by robbing Peter to pay Paul, but by making Peter’s luxuries so cheap that Paul could afford them too. This win-win arrangement was made possible by the self-sacrifice and determination of inventors like John Heathcoat (1783-1861).
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.