I Never Knew That About the English

by Desconhecido

  In the grand old tradition, the man who gave the world the gift of locomotion never made a penny from his inventions. The glory went to others who knew how to exploit it, and Trevithick died broke. He is buried in a pauper’s grave at Dartford in Kent.

  Humphry Davy

  1778–1829

  HUMPHRY DAVY, INVENTOR OF THE MINER’S SAFETY LAMP, was born in PENZANCE in 1778. A natural scientist, his speciality was experimenting with the effect of gases on humans, an interest that nearly killed him more than once, as he always used himself as a guinea pig. His research on nitrous oxide, which had recently been discovered by Joseph Priestley, led him to label it ‘laughing gas’ and he was the first to spot its potential as an anaesthetic.

  At that time, a naked flame was the only way of illuminating mines and, in 1812, 89 miners were killed by a horrific gas explosion in a mine in Sunderland. Davy, as the acknowledged expert on the subject, was asked to design a safety lamp that could prevent this happening again. His solution was to cover the flame with a gauze that allowed air in to feed the flame, but kept out the dangerous gases.

  Humphry Davy was also a founder of the Zoological Society and London Zoo.

  At Paul, on the hills above Mousehole lies DOLLY PENTREATH, the last person known to have spoken only Cornish. She died in 1777 and her monument was put there, as a tribute, by Napoleon’s nephew Lucien Bonaparte, who grew up in England and loved languages.

  SIR JOHN BETJEMAN (1906–84), Poet Laureate, chose to be buried in Cornwall at St Enodoc’s church, near his Cornish home at Trebetherick, just down from Polzeath. Cornwall was Betjeman’s adopted county, and he was happier here than anywhere. St Enodoc’s is tucked into the sand dunes beside the Camel estuary, and to get there you either have to walk along the shifting sands or make a hazardous journey across the 13th hole of the golf course. It is a risk worth taking, for St Enodoc’s is a magical place to be alone and reflect. You can almost hear Betjeman chuckling contentedly from his grave beside the churchyard path.

  ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .’ Anyone can go to Manderley now, although only as far as the gate. Manderley is Menabilly, an old house tucked away down narrow lanes and at the end of a long drive, in wild country to the west of Fowey. Writer DAPHNE DU MAURIER (1907-89) discovered it in 1927 and used it in her 1938 novel Rebecca as the model for Manderley, the mysterious home of the de Winters. She actually lived in the house herself from 1943 until 1967. Du Maurier’s locations are found all over Cornwall, notably Frenchman’s Creek down on the Helford river and the eerie Jamaica Inn alone on Bodmin Moor. After her death, du Maurier’s ashes were scattered on the cliffs near Menabilly.

  One of Daphne du Maurier’s friends in Fowey was the scholar and author SIR ARTHUR QUILLER COUCH (1863–1944), known as ‘Q’. He was born in Bodmin and came to live in a house called The Haven in Fowey. He is probably best remembered as the editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse, published in 1900. Fowey was the model for his book The Astonishing History of Troy Town.

  Author ROSAMUND PILCHER was born at LELANT, near St Ives, in 1924. She based her best-selling novel The Shell Seekers in St Ives.

  At the top of Truro’s lovely Georgian Lemon Street there is a monument to RICHARD AND JOHN LANDER, who charted the true course of the River Niger in West Africa in 1830. They discovered that the Niger – previously thought to be a tributary of the Nile – in fact ran into the Atlantic Ocean. Richard Lander wasTHE FIRST PERSON TO RECEIVE THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY MEDAL.

  Cumberland

  BORDER TOWN ∗ GEORGIAN TOWN PLANNING

  ∗ CUMBERLAND DELICACIES

  Carlisle Cathedral – the only English cathedral to have been located in two different countries.

  CUMBERLAND FOLK

  John Dalton ∗ Melvyn Bragg ∗ Eddie Stobart ∗ G. M. Trevelyan

  ∗ Alfred Wainwright

  Carlisle

  The bluff on which Carlisle stands has been occupied since pre-Roman times. A border town, variously described over the years as ‘the last town in England’ or ‘the first town in Scotland’, Carlisle was fought over by the Scots and the English right up until the Jacobite rebellions of the 18th century, when Bonnie Prince Charlie, retreating into Scotland, left troops in Carlisle Castle so that he could be said to occupy at least one English town.

  Carlisle Cathedral is hence the only English cathedral to have been located in two different countries. It was founded as a priory by William II and given to the Augustinian Black Canons by Henry I in 1122. However, the monks owed their allegiance to the Bishop of Glasgow, and so, in order to make Carlisle a purely English town, Henry created the see of Carlisle and made the prior a bishop. Thus Carlisle is also the only case of an Augustinian priory becoming an English cathedral.

  Through the years, Carlisle Cathedral has suffered badly from the ravages of war and neglect, and there is precious little left of the original Norman nave except some strangely misshapen arches, warped by drought in the 13th century when the ground on which they were built settled unevenly. Carlisle is now England’s smallest cathedral after Oxford, but the Early English chancel is glorious and the huge decorated East Window is the largest after the Crecy window at Gloucester.

  Eddie Stobart’s haulage company and Carr’s water biscuits were both founded in Carlisle.

  Whitehaven

  At the end of the 16th century, WHITEHAVEN was a tiny fishing village of nine thatched cottages. By the end of the 17th century it had become England’s first planned town since the Middle Ages, with a population of 3,000, and was the second largest port on England’s west coast after Bristol. The family behind this growth were the Lowthers (later Earls of Lonsdale), who developed Whitehaven as a port for shipbuilding and the export of Cumberland coal. Much of the planning was inspired by the way that Christopher Wren was rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666, and Whitehaven’s elegant grid pattern layout was used as a template for the expansion of New York in America.

  The SALTOM COAL PIT, south of Whitehaven, in 1729 became THE FIRST COAL PIT IN THE WORLD TO BE EXTENDED OUT BENEATH THE SEA. The ruined entrance to the old pit workings is a short walk along the coast.

  In 1778, during the American War of Independence, the American privateer John Paul Jones, who was born in Scotland and had been an apprentice in Whitehaven in 1749, attacked the port in an attempt to destroy the fleet of coal ships at anchor. He was betrayed by one of his crew, who warned the town, and little damage was inflicted.

  In 1782 DANIEL BROCKLEBANK set up one of the world’s first shipping lines in Whitehaven, the Brocklebank Shipping Line, which eventually went on to merge with Cunard.

  June 1998 saw the final closure of JEFFERSON’S WINE MERCHANTS, THE OLDEST FAMILY-OWNED WINE MERCHANT IN ENGLAND, which had traded from the same shop in Lowther Street for over two centuries. In May 2000, RUM STORY, THE WORLD’S FIRST EXHIBITION ABOUT RUM, opened in its place.

  MILDRED GALE, paternal grandmother of George Washington, first president of the USA, is buried in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Whitehaven. After the death of her first husband, Lawrence Washington, by whom she had three children, in 1700 she married a sea merchant called George Gale, who had interests on both sides of the Atlantic, and settled in his home town of Whitehaven. She died in 1701.

  Jefferson’s Wine Merchants

  Cumberland Delicacies

  Whitehaven also contributes to the famous CUMBERLAND SAUSAGE, produced originally from Cumberland pigs and seasoned with the exotic spices imported into Whitehaven when it was England’s third largest port. Alas, the Cumberland Pig, which had a distinct flavour, died out in 1960 and some sausage makers believed that the traditional Cumberland sausage could never taste the same again. However, today’s local producers have introduced their own special varieties, and are fighting to have the Cumberland sausage protected, so that only sausages actually made in Cumberland, from traditional recipes, can be called Cumberland sausages.

  Made from pork, with a meat conten
t of above 80 per cent, the Cumberland sausage can be over 20 inches (50 cm) long and, unlike normal sausages which are sold on a string, comes coiled up, a characteristic that perhaps comes down from the days of Elizabeth I, when German miners came to Cumberland bringing their own meaty sausages with them.

  CUMBERLAND PIE is a dish of minced beef and vegetables topped with mashed potato and a further layer of breadcrumbs or cheese.

  CUMBERLAND SAUCE is a cold condiment made from redcurrants and flavoured with orange, port, ginger and vinegar. It was named after the Duke of Cumberland, son of George II, known as ‘Butcher’ Cumberland to the Scots, who brought the original recipe over from Germany.

  St Nicholas Church, Whitehaven, burial place of Mildred Gale

  Well, I never knew this

  about

  CUMBERLAND FOLK

  John Dalton

  In 1766 an Englishman who was to have a huge influence on the development of the modern world was born at EAGLESFIELD, near Cocker-mouth. The son of a poor Quaker weaver, JOHN DALTON was soon recognised as supremely talented and inquisitive, and at the age of 12 he became a teacher to younger children, giving lessons in a local barn. He was still a boy when he began to realise that he saw things differently from others – for instance, the colour of a soldier’s uniform and the colour of the grass both appeared to him as a shade of yellow, while what others called red he merely saw as a grey shadow. His investigations into this phenomenon led him to discover COLOUR-BLINDNESS, a disability not known about until then.

  John Dalton

  He eventually became a Professor of Mathematics at Manchester University, where he experimented with various chemicals and discovered that matter consisted of tiny particles or atoms – at that time atoms were thought to be the smallest particles that could exist. This led to the publication in 1803 of his startling and ground-breaking THEORY OF ATOMIC WEIGHTS, which formed the basis of chemistry theory and study for the next 150 years.

  MELVYN BRAGG, novelist and broadcaster, was born in WIGTON in 1939.

  EDDIE STOBART, founder of THE LARGEST PRIVATE HAULAGE COMPANY IN BRITAIN, was born in HESKET NEWMARKET, near Caldbeck, in 1954.

  The theory behind atoms was first presented in about 450 BC by a Greek philosopher called Democritus, who posed the question ‘If you break a piece of matter in half, and then in half again, and then again, how many times would you need to break it until it was too small to break any further?’ He called the smallest possible piece an atom.

  G. M. TREVELYAN (1876–1962), historian, is buried in the churchyard at CHAPEL STILE.

  ALFRED WAINWRIGHT (1907–91), writer and fell walker, who popularised the Lake District with his Pictorial Guides, had his ashes scattered on his favourite mountain, Haystacks, above Buttermere.

  Derbyshire

  LADY WITH THE LAMP ∗ BABINGTON PLOT

  ∗ WELL DRESSING

  Eyam Hall – 17th-century Hall at the heart of Derbyshire’s ‘Plague Village’, still in the hands of its original builders, the Wrights.

  DERBYSHIRE FOLK

  John Flamsteed ∗ James Brindley ∗ Herbert Spencer ∗ Barnes Wallis

  ∗ Dame Barbara Castle ∗ Alison Hargreaves

  Florence Nightingale

  1803–77

  The village of Holloway is more or less a single street that winds along the hilltops above the River Derwent, near Matlock. Buried right in the middle of England, calm and peaceful, this was the perfect place for the most celebrated woman in England to come home to, away from the noise and filth of battle, the cries of the wounded, the stench of fear and death.

  Early one summer evening in 1856, she walked down the short drive from the village street and knocked on the door of LEA HURST, the grey stone house built by her father. To the astonishment of her family, England’s ministering angel, FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, was home from the war. Talked about all over Europe, she had slipped away from the Crimea, passed through London unnoticed and arrived home before anyone knew where she was. That was the way she wanted it. No triumphant homecomings or cheering crowds. Just the sound of the Derwent carried on the western breezes to her hilltop home.

  Florence Nightingale was born in Florence in 1820. She was the daughter of a wealthy family and was expected to marry well and be the perfect young lady. Florence had other ideas. She was drawn to social issues and spent much of her childhood at Lea Hurst visiting local hospitals and the sick. To the huge embarrassment and disapproval of her family she took herself off to the Continent and trained as a nurse, before becoming a superintendent at a hospital for women in London.

  When the Crimean War broke out in 1854, Florence appealed in person to Queen Victoria to be allowed to take a group of British nurses to Scutari and set up a military hospital. It was unheard of for women, especially well-to-do young women, to go to the battlefront, but they made huge improvements in the standards of hygiene and sanitation, and shamed the government into sending out proper medical supplies and food. Florence made regular inspections by the light of her lamp and saved the lives of countless numbers of soldiers. All this was at a cost to her own health, and after her sudden return to Lea Hurst it took several months of bracing Derbyshire air before she was well enough to start crusading again, this time creating a training school for nurses at St Thomas’s Hospital in London.

  Florence Nightingale set the standards for modern nursing across the world. She overcame prejudice, ignorance and vested interests by sheer force of personality and was truly the first of the fearsome, battling Matrons – but to the men she tended she was just ‘our LADY WITH THE LAMP’.

  Lea Hurst is now a residential home but it can be visited by appointment. It is easy to imagine Florence sitting on her favourite balcony, gazing across the garden with its gorgeous views, and jotting down her ideas for a better health service. She died in 1910 and is buried in East Wellow, Hampshire – THE FIRST WOMAN TO BE ADMITTED TO THE ORDER OF MERIT.

  The Babington Plot

  A few miles from Lea Hurst down country lanes, set back from the road behind a ring of noble trees, is the Manor Farm of DETHICK, looming over its tiny neighbouring church. In 1561 the lonely bells of this church rang out to welcome into the world the heir to this great estate, ANTHONY BABINGTON (1561–86), whose plottings, tragically, would destroy his ancient family.

  The Babingtons were a wealthy Catholic family at a dangerous time, and young Anthony grew up in the remote safety of Dethick, which can hardly have changed since his time. At 16 he served as page to the captive Mary Queen of Scots and fell in love with her courage and beauty. He would frequently visit her in disguise while she was imprisoned at Wing-field House nearby, and fantasised about rescuing her and putting her on the throne.

  Babington’s looks and wit made him a favourite at Queen Elizabeth’s court, but he grew over-confident, and was set up by Elizabeth’s protector Francis Walsingham. Mary Stuart’s supporters had devised a system of getting letters to her inside a special beer barrel sent from Burton on Trent every week. Walsingham’s spies knew about this but allowed the correspondence to continue, so that they could discover the identity of those in league with the exiled Scottish queen. In 1586 Babington wrote to Mary outlining what became known as the Babington Plot, a plan to use money and troops from Philip of Spain to capture London, murder Elizabeth and make Mary the Catholic queen of England and Scotland.

  Babington and the ringleaders were arrested and charged with high treason, and they became THE LAST ENGLISH VICTIMS TO BE OFFICIALLY HUNG, DRAWN AND QUARTERED. This involved being dragged face down through the streets of London behind a horse, hung in Lincoln’s Inn Fields for a short period and then taken down, while still alive, to have their insides ripped out. Their agonies were so horrifying that even the bloodthirsty London crowds were appalled, and Elizabeth ordered that from that day on traitors were to be dead before they were taken down from the scaffold.

  Well Dressing

  WELL DRESSING is the decorating of wells, springs and water sources
with pictures made from flowers and other natural materials. The pictures consist of a wooden frame and a clay base on to which the materials are fixed. The outline of the picture is picked out with berries, and then the more durable elements of the plants such as mosses, tree bark, lichens and fir cones are put on, and finally the colourful flower petals. It is a highly skilled procedure, and villages vie with each other to create the most imaginative and most appealing tableau.

  The well dressing ceremony, which is unique to Derbyshire, originated in pagan Celtic times, when watercourses were uncertain and sacrifices were made to appease the water gods and thank them for keeping the village supplied. At first the Church frowned upon the revival of such practices, but soon relented, and today many of the pictures have a religious theme, or reflect a local or national anniversary. Most villages hold a church service to bless the well, followed by a carnival.

  The season runs from May to September and a collecting box is kept nearby for donations to chosen charities.

  Well, I never knew this

  about

  DERBYSHIRE FOLK

  JOHN FLAMSTEED (1646–1719), THE FIRST ASTRONOMER ROYAL, was born in DENBY, near Belper.

  JAMES BRINDLEY (1716–72), canal engineer and builder of the first English canal of the modern era, the Bridgewater Canal, was born in TUNSTEAD, near Buxton. He designed and mapped out England’s 18th-century canal system, which helped transform England into an industrial nation.