The first I’d heard of a Dead Man’s Penny was by chance yesterday. If you know all about them you may want to skip to a digression at the end of the post.
You can’t beat a good digression and last month Edward Cholmondeley-Clarke gave us a world-class deviation in his talk to raise funds for the Benevolent Society of St Patrick.
My grandfather was shot through the back of his neck by a sniper at the Somme. He was fortunate not to bleed to death. Three other Bellews died and have no graves.
Sated with opera and black pudding we drove up the M11 to Dublin on Monday morning. Six of us in a hire car with our bags is cosy and, sportingly, the General took the rear gunner’s seat at the back. We met the Judge and Mr and Mrs Dog Lover for lunch at the Merrion.
The Wicklow Mountains is one of the last places you’d expect to find a World War Two German War Cemetery. There are 134 graves two of which are for crew members of a German destroyer and two torpedo boats sunk by the British in 1943.
Yesterday I left you in Essex on a bank of the Stour estuary at Mistley. The Mistley Thorn where we lunched has a strange and disturbing tale to tell on a board on its west wall.
On Tuesday I took a slightly shorter walk than usual, only five miles. As usual, it was along a tidal stretch of river – not the Thames, the Stour that divides Essex from Suffolk and joins the North Sea at Harwich.
A royal baby was born 199 years ago at Kensington Palace. Her father was the fourth son of George III, the Duke of Kent, her mother was Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld.