Category: History

Taranto

This wall in Margravine Cemetery is engraved with some 120 names of those who died serving in the two World Wars and are buried here.

The Making

In Belize in 1973 when I was briefly in the army, the Army Air Corps choppered me around in a Sioux helicopter – one with the glass bubble. It was fun but it was an opportunity to observe the landscape.

The Cranford Protocol

In ten years I will have forgotten that TV licences for 75 year-olds were once buckshee but anytime now I will mourn, selfishly, the revocation of the Cranford Protocol.

Racing Green

It took an hour yesterday to buy a used car. Last week it took longer than that to buy a toner cartridge for the printer.

The Duchess of Dudley

What became of Alice Dudley when her husband deserted her in 1605? She cannot have been left penniless as she paid most of the bills to build St Giles-in-the-Fields in London in the 1620s.

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Robert Dudley

It’s not unusual for same-sex partners to have children but I was surprised to see that Robert Dudley’s parents are Robert and Douglas. He was born in 1574 in the reign of Elizabeth I.

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Saint Leodegar

The St Leger has been run on Town Moor outside Doncaster since 1776, or thereabouts. It’s the oldest of the Classics run over a mile, six furlongs and 132 yards in September.

Rigaud and Handel

In yesterday’s post we were in the Private Chapel of St James at Great Packington and found no sculpture worth mentioning. Actually there are two recumbent plaster images succinctly dismissed by Pevsner as “rather bad”.