#brilliant women

Hello. We started this blog in March last year and now we’re really close to finding out why every single day is BRILLIANT. So we’d just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has read, liked and re-posted our sometimes excessively long ramblings. It’s been a lovely thing to reach so many people across the world from our small corner of rural North Yorkshire. If we make it, and I think we might, there will be three more posts after this one. If you’re not completely fed up with us pestering you every day about things that happened ages ago, you can also find this blog on Wordpress, along with a short explanation of how it came about, and in which we reveal which of us has actually written all of this on the ’about’ page.

Why March 12th is BRILLIANT

Hester, Queen of the Desert

Today is the birthday of Lady Hester Stanhope. She was born in 1776, the eldest child of Charles, the 3rd Earl Stanhope, at Chevening in Kent. Hester was an adventurous traveller, deeply eccentric and self-styled Queen of the Desert. In her late twenties, she lived at Downing Street where she acted as hostess for her cousin, William Pitt the Younger, who was then Prime Minister. She acted as his secretary and sat at the head of his dinner table making witty and intelligent conversation. Hester was in her element, but it didn’t last. Pitt died in 1806 and she was left homeless, but with a tidy pension of £1200 a year from the government in recognition of her services.

She lived for a time in Montagu Square in London and then moved to Wales. In 1810 she was advised by her doctor to make a trip to the Continent, for the sake of her health. She would never return. She travelled with her private physician and later biographer, Dr Charles Meryon. They stopped off in Gibraltar, where she picked up another travelling companion, a wealthy young Englishman called Michael Bruce. Although he was twelve years younger than her, they were soon lovers, much to the disappointment of Dr Meryon. From there, they travelled on to Malta, Greece and Constantinople. Here, she met with the French Ambassador. She had a mind to go to France and ingratiate herself with Emperor Napoleon. She thought if she could find out what made him tick, she could return to Britain with information that could lead to his overthrow. It was a mad plan and luckily the British government got wind of it and stopped her.

With nothing better to do, she and her swelling entourage decided to head for Egypt. On the way, they were shipwrecked off the island of Rhodes. Everyone lost their luggage and it led to Hester  spending the night in a rat-infested windmill with a bunch of drunken sailors for company. Separated from her belongings, she had to find other clothes. Rather than wear a veil, she chose to dress in a robe, turban and slippers. When they eventually arrived in Egypt, she bought a purple velvet robe, embroidered trousers, a waistcoat, a jacket and a sabre. She found men’s clothes preferable and dressed that way from then on.

In Alexandria, she and her party set about learning Turkish and Arabic. The East was now in her blood and they pressed onwards to Lebanon and Syria. On the way, she met with many important Sheiks, some of whom would have been very dangerous enemies. They had never seen anything quite like her before and she seems to have been well received. Some accounts tell of how she was hailed as a princess, but it also seems possible that they all thought she was a bit mad and that just going along with her would be the polite thing to do. When she reached Damascus in 1812, she insisted on entering the city unveiled and on horseback, both of which were forbidden, but she seemed to get away with it.

The following year, she visited the ruined desert city of Palmyra. It had once been ruled by Queen Zenobia who had led a revolt against the Roman Empire in the third century. No European woman had ever seen the city before. It was a week’s ride away from Damascus over a wasteland that was ruled by dangerous Bedouin tribes. She made the journey dressed as a Bedouin and took with her a caravan of twenty-two camels. The people of Palmyra were impressed by her courage and gave her a crown of palm leaves. She was a bit carried away by this and later wrote: “I have been crowned Queen of the Desert. I have nothing to fear…I am the sun, the stars, the pearl, the lion, the light from heaven.”

In case you’re worried that her story is about to end with her being cruelly slain in a lonely desert, rest assured, it does not. Her end is not a happy one, but she has a few years to go yet. After that, she returned to Lebanon where she lived in several places before settling in a remote and abandoned monastery. Her lover returned to England in 1813, her doctor, in 1831. On her travels, she had come by a medieval Italian manuscript that said there were three million gold coins hidden under the ruins of a mosque at Ashkelon on the coast. She gained permission from the Ottoman authorities to excavate the site in 1815. It would be the first archaeological excavation in Palestine. Hester found no gold. What she did find was a seven foot tall headless marble statue. The thing she did next would horrify all later archaeologists and you probably won’t like it either. She had the statue smashed up and thrown in the sea. Apparently, she did this because she didn’t want to be accused of smuggling antiquities, although why she couldn’t just have left it there in one piece is beyond us.

At home in Lebanon, she became fascinated with astrology and alchemy. A fortune teller in London had once told her that she was destined to go to Jerusalem and lead the chosen people. She started to believe in the prophecy about an Islamic Messiah figure called ‘Mahdi’, and that she was destined to become his bride. She even owned a sacred horse that she believed he would ride on. It was born with a deformed spine. There was a prophecy which said that he would ride on a horse that was born saddled, and the animal’s sharply curved spine was, she thought, just like a Turkish saddle. She named the horse Layla and it was soon joined by a second horse named Lulu who she would ride alongside the Mahdi when he came for her.

Despite her eccentricities, she was generous with her hospitality. Any European traveller was well received and, when civil war broke out in the area, she gave shelter to hundreds of refugees. She fed and clothed them and, even though it nearly bankrupted her, never turned anyone away. The monastery at Djoun, which was her final home, was a hilltop house with thirty-six rooms full on secret passageways and hidden chambers. There, she kept thirty cats that her servants were forbidden to touch. In her old age, she was deeply in debt and became more and more of a recluse. Her servants resorted to stealing from her because she could not pay them. Then, in 1838, the government cut off her pension in order to pay her creditors. She sent her servants away and walled herself up in her house with her cats. She died there alone in 1839. Sad.

Hello. We’ve been writing this blog every day for almost twelve months now. As it was our intention to find out why every single day of the year is BRILLIANT, we now have less that a week to go. If we make it, there will be five more posts after this one. You can also find this blog on Wordpress, along with a short explanation of how it came about, and in which we reveal which of us has actually written all of this on the ’about’ page. Thank you all for reading, liking and re-posting. It’s been fun to reach so many people across the world from our small corner of rural North Yorkshire. Will we pick up three more followers to make it a round hundred before March 15th? Probably not…

Why March 10th is BRILLIANT

Freedom

Today we are celebrating the life of Harriet Tubman. Harriet was born a slave in Maryland. Because of this, we don’t know when her birthday was. Harriet did not even know what year she was born, never mind what day. It was probably some time between 1820 and 1825. Harriet escaped from slavery in 1849. Then she returned to free many other slaves. She was a spy for the Union during the Civil War. In later life she was active in the cause of women’s suffrage and built an old people’s home for coloured people. So we can’t celebrate her birthday, but because she did so many fantastic things in her life, we do know that she died on March 10th 1913.

Harriet was born Araminta Harriet Ross (Minty) to parents Ben Ross and Harriet ‘Rit’ Green who were both slaves. They were owned by Anthony Thompson and Mary Brodess. Ben and Rit had nine children and three of their daughters were sold to a distant plantation, separating them from the family forever. When someone else came to buy her youngest son, Rit hid him for a month and then threatened to split open the head of anyone who tried to take him away. The sale was abandoned. It was probably a formative experience for young Minty and likely influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.

She had a terrible childhood, being hired out to people who beat her. As an adolescent she witnessed an incident when a slave was found out of the fields without permission. His owner ordered Minty to assist him in restraining the man but she refused. The slave owner then threw a 2 lb metal weight at him, but it missed him and hit her on the head. It was a serious injury that she never recovered from. She suffered from seizures and periods of narcolepsy for the rest of her life.  Already a deeply religious person, she also began to experience visions and vivid dreams that she interpreted as signs from God.

Her father was freed at the age of 45, though in fact, this made little difference to his status, as he still had to keep working for his former owner. Later, Harriet would find out that her mother was also supposed to have been freed at 45, but her owners had ignored the fact. She was not in a position to challenge this legally. In 1844 she married a free man called John Tubman and it was about this time she changed her name to Harriet. Not much is known about their marriage but if they had any children, they would have had the same status as Harriet and would also have been slaves.

In 1849, she escaped from her owners along with two of her brothers. They lost heart and returned to the plantation and Harriet went back with them. Shortly afterwards, she escaped again, this time alone. She would have got away using a series of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad and she managed to get across the state border to Pennsylvania where there was no slavery. Later she said: “When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”

But rather than stay safe in the north, Harriet returned to Maryland in 1850 to free members of her family. It would be the first of many covert trips she made across the border. Occasionally she  came across a former owner but she cleverly managed to avoid detection. Simply by carrying a few chickens around, or pretending to read a newspaper (she couldn’t read) she found that the men simply didn’t notice her. As well as members of her family, including her parents, she guided many other slaves to freedom. In 1851, she attempted to free her husband, John Tubman, but found that he had married someone else and was quite happy where he was. Rather than make a scene, she just found other slaves who did want to be free and took them instead. Harriet Tubman was given the nickname 'Moses’ because, like Moses, she led her people to freedom.

In 1850, the US government passed a law that allowed escaped slaves to be returned even when they were living in a state where there was no slavery. Harriet re-routed the Underground Railroad to Canada, where people would be safe. In 1859 she was sold a piece of land in Auburn, New York by a US senator called William H Seward who was a fervent opponent of slavery. Despite the risk of arrest she brought her parents, who were then in Canada, to live with her there.

During the Civil War she worked for the Union Army as a cook and a nurse, but she was later employed as a spy. Her ability to travel in secret in enemy territory was extremely useful. In 1863, she led an assault on plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina. She guided three steamboats around mines that had been laid by the Confederate Army. They burned the plantations and freed more than 750 slaves.

Harriet was never paid very much for her work during the Civil War and she remained poor. She worked to support her family and also took in boarders. Among them was a Civil War veteran called Nelson Davis. They fell in love and were married in 1869. He was twenty-two years younger than her. They lived together for twenty years.  Later in life, she devoted herself to the cause of women’s suffrage. She travelled New York, Boston and Washington DC speaking of women’s right to vote. She described her actions during the Civil War and used many other examples of women from history as evidence of women’s equality to men. In 1897, in Boston, there were a series of receptions honouring her lifetime of service to the nation. Harriet had spent so much of her hard earned money helping others that she had to sell a cow in order to but the train ticket to get there.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, she donated a piece of land to build a home for aged and poor coloured people. In 1911, she was admitted there herself and died in 1913. Since her death, Harriet Tubman has become a magnificent source of inspiration for civil right activists. She devoted her whole life to helping others and freed somewhere in the region of a thousand slaves. It was dangerous work but they all made it through, she never lost a single life.

Hello. We’ve been writing this blog every day for around eleven and a half months now. As it was our intention to find out why every single day of the year is BRILLIANT, we’re almost there and it seemed appropriate to have some sort of countdown. If we make it, there will be twelve more posts after this one. You can also find this blog on Wordpress, along with a short explanation of how it came about, and in which we reveal which of us has actually written all of this on the ’about’ page. Thank you all for reading, liking and re-posting.

Why March 3rd is BRILLIANT

Honestly, There’s Loads of Us

Today we want to tell you about Marie-Madeleine Jarret, who was born on this day in 1678 in Verchères, Quebec. She is also known as Madeleine de Verchères. Madeleine grew up in a small settlement surrounded by about 120 acres of farmland on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River. Her family had been granted the land in 1672 and they had several tenants.  Their settlement was fortified against the attacks of the Iroquois tribe. It was surrounded by a stockade about twelve to fifteen feet high with a bastion at each corner and a single gate of the river side. They had good reason to fear these attacks. By 1692, when Madeleine was just fourteen years old, one of her brothers and two of her sister’s husbands had been killed by the Iroquois.

On 22nd October 1692, Madeleine had been left in charge of the fort whilst her parents were away on business. They needed to collect enough supplies to see them through the winter. Most of the settlers were outside of the fort that morning tending the fields. For their protection they also had eight soldiers with them. Inside the fort were just two soldiers, one very old man, her younger siblings and the wives and children of their tenants. Madeleine was quite close by in the cabbage garden when the Iroquois suddenly attacked. Everyone was taken by surprise and the Iroquois carried off about twenty men. She only narrowly escaped, she was grabbed from behind by her head scarf, which she managed to untie and slip away. She ran into the fort crying: “To arms! To arms!” But in truth there were very few people inside the fort to take up arms against their attackers.

As she entered the fort she grabbed a soldiers helmet and put it on, ran to the bastions and fired a musket out at their assailants. She encouraged the few who were inside the fort to make as much noise as possible so it would sound like there was more of them. She also fired the cannon which would warn other forts of the attack and hopefully bring reinforcements. The Iroquois were hoping that they would take the fort easily in a surprise attack, but at the sound of the cannon, they retreated with their prisoners. In the middle of all this a French family turned up in a canoe. The soldiers refused to leave the fort so Madeleine ran to the dock and helped them inside. She pretended that they were reinforcements.

In the evening, the cattle that belonged to the settlers came back to the fort. Worried that the Iroquois could be hiding amongst the herd, covered with animal skins, she let them in one by one and checked them carefully. The real reinforcements from nearby forts arrived about an hour after the Iroquois had left, but they did manage to catch up with them and free the captured settlers. By the time Madeline’s parents returned, their daughter was a hero. She was not the only family member to have held off an attack by the Iroquois with very few men. Her mother had done something similar only two years earlier.

In the earliest reports of the raid Madeleine’s part in it was not mentioned. But when her father died in 1700 she was awarded his pension in recognition of the part she played. The earliest mention comes from Madeleine herself. A later writer rather elaborated and said that as well as putting on a soldiers helmet, she had tied up her hair and put on a man’s jerkin as well. This might seem perfectly reasonable to us but, in the early eighteenth century, people didn’t much like the idea of a woman dressing up as a man. They thought it was most inappropriate. It got to the point where accounts of her bravery were almost having to apologise for her behaviour and even later accounts are careful to emphasise how she returned to her traditional female role and became an attentive wife and mother.

Her story has been taken up by feminists but also sadly by nationalists. The fact that she was a settler fighting the Native Americans does make us a little uncomfortable. But looking at it from Madeleine’s point of view she was defending the only home she’d ever known against people who had killed members of her family.

Hello. We’ve been writing this blog every day for a little over eleven months now. As it was our intention to find out why every single day of the year is BRILLIANT, we’re almost there and it seems appropriate to begin some sort of countdown. If we make it, there will be nineteen more posts after this one. You can also find this blog on Wordpress, along with a short explanation of how it came about, and in which we reveal which of us has actually written all of this. Thank you all for reading, liking and reposting.

Why February 25th is BRILLIANT

Mission Impossible

Today we want to tell you about the last invasion of mainland Britain. It was not, as you might think, at Hastings in 1066. That was the last successful invasion. There was one in 1797 that did not go so well. It happened as Fishguard in Wales. The invading army was French and they were led by an Irish American named Colonel William Tate. In the accounts we’ve looked at, there is some discrepancy over the date of their surrender, but our favourite part of this story first appeared in the London Gazette on February 25th 1797, so we’ll go with that.

The invasion was part of a planned three pronged attack on the British Isles. The first invasion would take place in Ireland. Fifteen thousand troops would land at Bantry Bay and they would support the United Irishmen in their battle to overthrow British rule. In order to draw British troops away from Ireland, they would launch two further invasions in what they perceived to be places where they would find the most support. One at Newcastle and another near Bristol. The Irish contingent arrived off Bantry Bay on December 21st 1796, but there was such a terrible storm that they couldn’t land. The Irish didn’t know they were coming, so there was no one to help them. They decided to sail home again.

For some reason, the rest of the plan went ahead. Five thousand troops set off in barges for Newcastle, intent on destroying the collieries and shipyards. They were forced to return to Dunkirk because there was a mutiny. But still the planned invasion of Wales went ahead. Colonel Tate had fourteen hundred men for his mission. Six hundred of them where troops that Napoleon had felt were best left behind when he went off to invade Italy. The other eight hundred were made up of Republicans, deserters, convicts and Royalist prisoners. They called themselves ‘La Légion Noire’ after the dark coloured uniforms they wore. The uniforms were actually ones they had taken  from British Redcoats and dyed a very dark brown. With no support coming from Ireland or the North of England, it’s hard to see why it went ahead at all. It does look a little bit like whoever was in charge was just trying to get rid of La Légion Noire.

Four warships sailed from France under the command of Commodore Castagnier. Like the fleet bound for Ireland, they also found the weather was against them and they had to change their plans. In the early hours of February 23rd they landed near Fishguard, but they had already been spotted in the Bristol Channel. The troops and their ordnance were all taken ashore, everyone agreed that the invasion had definitely happened and Castagnier sailed away with the happy news, leaving them to get on with it. Meanwhile, the Welsh were gathering an opposing army. One of the commanders was at a ball, a whole troop happened to be at a funeral nearby. They all set off for Fishguard.

Colonel Tate lost control of a significant proportion of his troops pretty much as soon as they landed. They deserted and set about looting local villages. In Llanwnda, they broke into a church. They used the Bible to light a fire and then heaped the church pews on as well. If they were hoping to find support for their invasion among the Welsh, they certainly weren’t going the right way about it. Discipline was also not helped by the fact that the French soldiers had also discovered that the locals had a large stash of wine. They had it from a Portuguese ship that had been wrecked nearby only a few weeks before.

The Welsh troops were small in number, but they never let on. There were outnumbered by the French about 2-1. Villagers from the surrounding countryside poured in to Fishguard with crude weapons of their own, and one in particular, who we’ll mention in a minute. The Welsh decided to attack before dusk, but the French had an ambush lying in wait for them. Luckily, when they were only a few hundred yards away from lots of armed French soldiers hiding behind a hedge,. They decided it was getting a bit dark and headed back to town.

Things weren’t going Colonel Tate’s way at all. He tried to negotiate a conditional surrender. The Welsh said no, they had thousands of people on their side and they would definitely all attack if the French did not surrender unconditionally by 10 o'clock the next day. The ruse worked and Tate did surrender. Part of the reason may have been that the French, rather than being a feared enemy, had made themselves something of a local curiosity. The two sides had arranged to meet on the beach at Goodwick Sands the next day and rather a lot of people turned up to see what would happen. They stood on the cliffs above the beach. Among them were hundreds and hundred of Welsh women. Welsh women were, in those days, inclined to wear bright red cloaks and large black felt hats. This possibly made them look, from the beach, like hundreds and hundreds of British Redcoats.

The peace treaty was signed on either the 24th or 25th of February, but a report certainly appeared in the London Gazette on February 25th. It carried the story of Jemima Nicholas, the wife of a Fishguard shoemaker. She was either 47 or, according to more recent evidence 41. She took a pitchfork and single-handedly rounded up twelve French Soldiers and locked them up in a church and then set off to find more. For this, she has been given the name 'Jemima Fawr’, which means Jemima the Great, and a place in Welsh history.