1183
The Northumbrian saint warned of an enemy who would stop at nothing to silence the good news.
While he was a monk at Melrose in the Scottish Borders, then part of the Kingdom of Northumbria, St Cuthbert used to visit lonely villages to tell people about a God very different from the capricious pagan spirits they feared and worshipped. He became a popular figure, able to draw surprising crowds.
Picture: © Walter Baxter, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted February 23 2017
1184
Jim Hawkins, on a remote desert island, has escaped pirates only to be caught by a shadowy figure among the trees.
Young Jim Hawkins has sailed thousands of miles to a desert island to dig up a king’s ransom in hidden treasure, only to find on arrival that his ship’s crew were all pirates. He has just escaped from them — but now a strange figure emerges from the trees to confront him.
Picture: © Stephen Glauser, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted February 22 2017
1185
Samuel Smiles reminds us that until we brought the railways to India, we had little to boast about as an imperial power.
Samuel Smiles’s biography of George and Robert Stephenson opens with a heartfelt appreciation of the social and economic progress brought by the railways. He describes how this peculiarly British invention had by the 1870s already reached most European countries and beyond, and of course he could not fail to mention the railways of India.
Picture: © Rajesh Tripathi, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.
Posted February 20 2017
1186
The opening of the Bombay to Thane line was the real beginning of British India.
Just twenty-three years after the Liverpool and Manchester Railway hosted the world’s first regular steam-hauled passenger service, British entrepreneurs began running the first trains in India. The ‘Illustrated London News’ described it as an event more important than all Britain’s battles on Indian soil.
Picture: British Library Collection, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted February 20 2017
1187
A young Jewish woman in ancient Babylon falls victim to a heartless conspiracy.
‘Susannah’ is one of the books of the so-called Apocrypha, not as widely read as they once were but part of the classic English translation published in 1611, and ‘authorised to be read in churches’. It is a story about the use and the abuse of law, a reminder that even courts do not guarantee justice where there is no fear of God.
Picture: © Visit Israel, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted February 18 2017
1188
When captain Richard Pearson of the Royal Navy surrendered to American revolutionary John Paul Jones, Jones naturally assumed that meant he had won.
Following the Declaration of Independence in 1776, American resentment towards King George III’s dastardly oppression reached such a pitch that they made common cause with that champion of republican liberty, King Louis XVI of France. One mustard-keen revolutionary, John Paul Jones, even buccaneered around Britain’s coastline harassing merchant shipping convoys, until the Royal Navy stepped in.
Picture: © Paul Allison, Geograph. Licence: CC-BY-A 2.0.. Source.
Posted February 17 2017