#on this date

A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1924, American art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Though known primarily as an art critic, Danto also made considerable contributions to the philosophy of history and the philosophy of action.

“Arthur Danto writes for the left-liberal magazine The Nation and is a very well-known philosopher and theorist of contemporary art, particularly of what he sees as the break in art production set in train by Andy Warhol. If Warhol’s Brillo Pad boxes cannot be visually distinguished from actual Brillo Pad boxes, he argues, it follows that art cannot be defined in terms of its visual distinctiveness, and must instead be characterized philosophically. […]

Danto’s After the End of Art claims that the character of art has changed radically since the 1970s and the last gasp of the avant-garde, and is now properly post-historical. Modernist and avant-garde views were tied to an idea of historical progress – towards formal abstraction, perhaps, or the merging of art and life. For Danto, in contrast, ‘life really begins when the story comes to an end’, and those who now expect art to progress have missed the point, which is that the final synthesis has been reached. While Danto does not mention him, this stance is close to that of Francis Fukuyama’s political views in his widely publicized book The End of History and the Last Man, and is based on the same Hegelian contention that, while of course events continue to occur, History has come to a close; that we are settled for ever with a version of the system which now sustains us. Similarly, for Danto, once art had passed through the black night of the 1970s (which he compares, with its dreadful politically engaged work, to the Dark Ages), it emerged onto the sunny Elysian Fields of universal permissiveness, never to leave. And in those fields, any mixing of styles or patching together of narratives is as good in principle as any other.” — From ‘Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction’ by Julian Stallabrass

[Pg. 111 — From ‘Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction’ by Julian Stallabrass.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1643, English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and philosopher Sir Isaac Newton was born.

“According to the calendar then in use in England, Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 (4 January 1643 in most of Continental Europe). The first decade of his life witnessed the horror of the civil wars between parliamentary and royalist forces in the 1640s, culminating in the beheading of Charles I in January 1649. His uncle and stepfather were rectors of local parishes, and they seem to have existed without much harassment from the church authorities convened by Parliament to check for religious ‘abuses’. In his second decade he lived under the radical Protestant Commonwealth, which was replaced in 1660 when Charles II was restored to the throne. Newton was born into a relatively prosperous family and was brought up in a devout atmosphere. His father, also Isaac, was a yeoman farmer who in December 1639 inherited both land and a handsome manor in the Lincolnshire parish of Woolsthorpe. His mother, Hannah Ayscough, came from the lower gentry and (as was common for the period) seems to have been educated at only a rudimentary level. Nevertheless, her brother William had graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in the 1630s and would be influential in directing Newton to the same institution.

Newton’s father, apparently unable to sign his name, died in early October 1642, almost three months before the birth of his son. Newton told Conduitt that he had been a tiny and sick baby, thought to be unlikely to survive; two women sent to get help from a local gentlewoman stopped to sit down on the way there, as they were certain the baby would be dead on their return. Surviving against the odds, Newton was brought up by his mother until the age of 3, when she was approached with an offer of marriage by Barnabas Smith, an ageing vicar of a local parish. Smith was wealthy, and they married in January 1646 after he had promised to leave some land to her first born. Spending most of her time with her new spouse, she produced three more children before his death in 1653 (one of whom would be the mother of Catherine Conduitt). Although John Conduitt waxed lyrical about Hannah’s general virtues, and was careful to point out that she was ‘an indulgent parent’ to all the children, he emphasized that young Isaac was her favourite. Whatever the truth of this, Newton’s own evidence indicates that, as a teenager, he had an extremely difficult relationship with his mother, and historians have always found it difficult to make Conduitt’s account tally with the fact that for seven years Newton was effectively left in Woolsthorpe to be brought up by his maternal grandmother.” — From ‘Newton: A Very Short Introduction’ by Robert Iliffe

[Pg. 8-9 — From ‘Newton: A Very Short Introduction’ by Robert Iliffe.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1963, American actor and film producer Brad Pitt was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

“And, of course, artistic and literary reinterpretations of the Trojan War and the fate of its better-known participants, including Odysseus, have been produced and reproduced over the centuries, up to and including the present. Thus, we have not only the later Greek playwrights and the Roman poets but also Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera Hélène (1904), James Joyce's Ulysses, and the silver screen’s various takes on the epic, with numerous films appearing since the early twentieth century featuring the Trojan War, Helen, Achilles, Odysseus, and/or the Trojan Horse.

Some of these later works contain parts that may be considered inaccurate or unfaithful to Homer in details or plot—the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster movie, for instance, has no gods or goddesses in sight; Brad Pitt anachronistically placing coins on the closed eyes of dead Patroclus five hundred years before such currency is invented in Lydia ca. 700 BCE; and both Agamemnon and Menelaus killed at Troy while Paris/Alexander is not, thereby changing the familiar Homeric/Epic Cycle version—but this is a long-standing tradition going back to the Greek playwrights who followed Homer and who also felt free to change some of the details. More importantly, each has reinterpreted the story in its own way, with changes and nuances frequently reflecting the angst and desires of that particular age, such as medieval Christianity for Chaucer, the Elizabethan worldview for Shakespeare, and the Iraq war for Troy director Wolfgang Peterson.” — From ‘The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction’ by Eric H. Cline

[Pg. 108-9 — From ‘The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction’ by Eric H. Cline.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1964, Time magazine published a review of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” calling her “one of Manhattan’s brightest intellectuals.”

“Indeed, decadence has enjoyed a considerable afterlife in that over-the-top culture known as camp, which the critic Susan Sontag helpfully clarified as an ability to discriminate between inferior art and deliberately inferior art—‘the good taste of bad taste.’

That definition of camp should not be taken as a definition of decadence, although the camp sensibility does demonstrate the conflicted attitude toward modernity that we have identified with decadence. Our initial attempt to define decadence was etymological and historical, and that effort remains meaningful. But decadence is more than decline, decay, and degeneration, whether artistic, historical, or social. We need to keep those meanings in mind, certainly, while also keeping in mind a number of nuances and implications. Think of decadence as an ornate, highly artificial object that resembles nothing in nature, represented on a slide projected through an old-fashioned magic lantern, seen through a series of colored filters, each color representing a different aspect of decadence. The object, in other words, takes on a different coloration depending on the filter. One filter darkens the object and makes decadence look like pessimism; another gives it a luscious hue that makes it look like hedonism; a mottled, greenish filter turns the object rotten, suggesting degeneration; still another imparts a lavender glow and connotes, somehow, “the love that dare not speak its name” (the phrase Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover, used to describe homosexuality). But whatever coloration decadence takes, it is typically the expression—the projection—of urban experience.” — From ‘Decadence: A Very Short Introduction’ by David Weir

[Pg. 8 — From ‘Decadence: A Very Short Introduction’ by David Weir.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1954, the first Burger King was opened in Miami, Florida.

“In low-status, low-pay service work, there may be little to smile about, but not to smile can be unforgivable. Some employers install ‘smile police’ to pose as customers, while others rely on spy cameras, the monitoring of phone calls, or customer satisfaction questionnaires. Still others go for a blunt, confrontational, approach: ‘I’ll go up in their faces and I go, “What is wrong?” ’ says a Brooklyn Burger King manager. ‘They look at me like they don’t know what I am doing. “What is wrong with your face?” I am smiling. You don’t know what it is like.’ […]

Workers of this sort may seek relief in a backstage zone, such as the galley area of an aircraft, the restaurant lobby, or staff rest-room. They are places where different emotion rules apply, a temporary amnesty from their usual emotional labours. There, the ‘obnoxious’ passenger, client, or customer can safely be derided, in the presence of a receptive audience of peers.

Some companies are keen to attract employees who are prepared to ‘really take on board’ and internalize the company’s message and training; to ‘really feel’ for the customer. The service worker is encouraged to fuse their personality with their work role; tosynchronize their feelings with the required corporate line. Those susceptible to such injunctions are well-inducted emotional labourers and less fazed by pressures or inconsistencies experienced by their surface-acting counterparts. But outside of work they can find it difficult to extract themselves from the roles in which they have become so engrossed.” — From ‘Work: A Very Short Introduction’ by Stephen Fineman

[Pg. 76-7 — From ‘Work: A Very Short Introduction’ by Stephen Fineman.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1920, Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong died. Meinong was known for his unique ontology, which claimed that everything that the universe contains everything that can be thought (even contradictions!) even if those things don’t exist, but merely “subsist.”

“Consider the proposition ‘the present king of France is wise’. This is perfectly meaningful, and because it is so it seems natural to ask whether it is true or false. And to this there seems an equally natural answer. There is no king of France at present; the subject term fails to refer to anything. Therefore, it seems that the proposition should be considered false. But there is a problem here, concerning how to demonstrate why it is false. This is because if in normal circumstances we say of something (call it ‘x’) that x is wise, the proposition ‘x is wise’ will be true if x is wise, and false if x is not wise. But what if there is no x? How can we say of something that does not exist that it either is or is not wise?

Initially Russell accepted a solution to this puzzle which had been proposed by the nineteenth‐century philosopher Alexius Meinong. This solution was to say that every expression with a referring or denoting function in a sentence does denote something, either an actually existing item, as with the table in ‘the table is brown’, or a ‘subsisting’ item, where by ‘subsistence’ is meant non‐actual existence – a kind of real but half or ‘courtesy’ existence. On this view, the universe contains everything that can be thought or talked about, including the present king of France; but only some of what the universe contains is actually existent. Accordingly the descriptive phrase ‘the present king of France’ does indeed denote, and what it denotes is a subsistent – that is a real but non‐actual – king of France.” — From ‘Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction’ by A.C. Grayling

[Pg. 23 — From ‘Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction’ by A.C. Grayling.]

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A Very Short Fact: On this day in 1959, the United Nations adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, an expansion of the document first adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, in an attempt to protect and promote child rights all over the world.

“In addition to direct aid to children and their families, the United Nations has passed resolutions and initiated treaties establishing and attempting to enforce children’s rights. Going far beyond the 1924 and 1959 declarations, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child offered a wide-ranging affirmation that the best interests of the child should guide all policies and decisions regarding childhood. The convention’s forty articles reflect all of the concerns, values, and issues that had swirled around the idea of childhood throughout the previous century, including health, education, freedom of speech and religion, and the right to a name and nationality. The UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child oversees the enforcement of its provisions. Although the United States was involved in the drafting of the convention, it remained the only nation not to have ratified it as of 2017. Although the convention’s many qualifications made it sound like an agreement among lawyers recognizing the complications of trying to issue dictums applicable to dozens of political and legal systems, it had far more teeth than other efforts to provide protection for all the world’s children.

In addition to primary care programs related to nutrition and health, the UN has worked to eliminate child marriage, provide standards for children’s rights within families and the treatment of refugees, eliminate child prostitution and child pornography, and discourage the exploitation of children in armed conflicts. Despite these efforts, and the decided improvements they brought to millions of children’s lives, economic, military, and environmental conditions keep many children in distress. In 2000 an estimated 100 million school-age children were out of school, 50 million were working in harsh conditions, 30 million were involved in sex trades, 150 million were malnourished, and millions more had been orphaned by or suffered from AIDS.” — From ‘The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction’ by James Marten

[Pg. 105-6 — From ‘The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction’ by James Marten.]

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Happy birthday Lee Brilleaux (born on 10th May 1952, died on 7th April 1994)….

On 27th May 1977 the Sex Pistols released their second single, “God Save The Queen”….

The lynching of Laura Nelson, who was hanged together with her son in Okemah, Oklahoma on 25th May 1911….

The lynching of 14 year old LW Nelson, who was hanged together with his mother in Okemah, Oklahoma on 25th May 1911….

Why March 15th is BRILLIANT

The End of the Beginning

We began this blog on March 15th last year, when we wrote about Mothers’ Day. March 15th 2016 is not Mother’s Day So in this final, bonus post, we want to tell you that today it is the Ides of March. In 44 BC, a soothsayer warned Julius Caesar that harm would come to him before the Ides of March. When March 15th came, everything seemed fine and passing by the soothsayer he remarked “The Ides of March are come”. “Aye Caesar,” replied the soothsayer, “but not gone.”  As you probably know, he was the victim of an assassination plot. He was attacked by as many as 60 people, was stabbed 23 times and died. It was one of the events that led the transition from Rome as a republic into Rome, the empire.

So today, we really wanted to have a look at the Ides of March, what is so significant about it and what it has to do with ends and beginnings. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, the early Romans did not have their New Year celebrations in January, like we do. Their New Year was in March. Their year was divided up mainly into months of either 29 or 31 days as they considered even numbers unlucky. Only February had an even number of days, but as they believed that the final month of their year was beset by demons anyway, they perhaps thought the even number couldn’t make things much worse.

The Romans had an odd way of numbering their days. You’d think counting the days sequentially from the beginning of the month to the end would just be the obvious thing to do, but the Romans counted backwards from fixed points in the month. The first fixed point, the first day of the month was the Kalends, the next was the Nones at either the 5th or the 7th and the dates in between were numbered according to how many days it was before Nones. The second point was the Ides, the central point of the month at either the 13th or the 15th. So the days between Nones and Ides were numbered according to how many days it was until the Ides. All the days after that were a countdown to the next Kalends. It’s very confusing, but we suppose numbering the days that way means you’re always looking forward to something.

So at the beginning of March, the Romans were celebrating their New Year. The celebrations went on until the Ides of March and the feast of a goddess called Anna Perenna. Her name is related to our words ‘annual’ and 'perennial’, so it represents both a thing that lasts a year and a thing that lasts for many years. We don’t know much about Anna Perenna, but the name probably says it all. A new year, lasts for twelve months, but there is always another one after that. Anna Perenna seems to have been presented sometimes  as young and sometimes as very old. In one story, she is the sister of Dido. Aeneas invites her to  stay with him much to the dismay of his wife Lavinia. Anna is warned of her jealousy, by her dead sister, in a dream. She runs away and either falls or deliberately jumps into the River Numicius and is drowned. But then she becomes a water nymph and is given the name Perenna.

In another story, she is a very old woman. The god Mars, who is in love with the goddess Minerva, enlists the help of Anna Perenna to persuade Minerva to marry him. Anna pretends to go along with this but, even up to the point when Mars thinks he has married Minerva, in fact, it has been Anna in disguise all along. When he lifts up her veil on their wedding night, he sees the old lady and she just laughs in his face. It might sound like a dangerous thing to do, upsetting the God of War, but that’s the thing with old ladies, they do what they want and they don’t care.

In the third story we have about Anna Perenna, she is again an old lady, but this time human and living in the town of Bollivae. It is set in the year 494 BC. The plebeians, the common people of Rome, were tired of paying taxes, of being drafted into the army and of having no say in government. So they just left the city and headed for the hills. There, they found themselves with no means of sustenance. Anna Perenna baked them cakes and kept them fed while they negotiated with the Senate back in Rome for a better deal. For this reason she became a bit of a hero for the ordinary and downtrodden people of Rome and her feast day was pretty popular.

So, in Anna Perenna, we seem to have a figure that provides both water and food for the Roman people so she’s probably some sort of nature goddess. But, to get back to 44 BC, On her feast day, the Ides of March, most of the common people of Rome would have left the city for a celebration beside the banks of the Tiber. They would have been lying about on the grass. They might have put a tent up, they might have built themselves a little hut out of branches and leaves. Also, they would all have been very drunk. In a toast to Anna Perenna they would drink a cup of wine for every year they hoped to live. In honour of the trick she played on Mars, they would also sing bawdy songs. We found lots of references to this but, disappointingly, could not find a single example. So, on that day, with the city relatively deserted, it would have been much easier for the conspirators to carry out their plan unopposed. Although we can’t approve of anyone’s life ending so violently, looking at the bigger picture, perhaps a time of New Year celebrations is the right time to end something and to begin something new. It worked out pretty well for the Romans in the end.

We are ending this blog today, after 366 days, as in began, on the Ides of March. Now that we know why every single day is BRILLIANT, we’re not sure what we will do with that information next, but we have a few thoughts. If any of them come off, you’ll be the first to know. Thank you so much for all the likes and re-posts we’ve had over the last twelve months. It’s been great to reach so many people across the world from our small corner of rural North Yorkshire. So, au revoir, unless you’d care to head over to Wordpress, in which case, we’ll be back tomorrow to tell you all about Bacchanalia, Hooray.

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, tomorrow will be our last post. 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 14th is BRILLIANT

Irrational and Unknowable

Today is Pi Day. A day named in honour of the mathematical constant Pi (π). Pi represents a number that is almost, but not quite 3.14. On this day in 1988, a mathematician called Larry Shaw organised the first big Pi day celebration at the Exploratorium, a public learning laboratory in San Francisco. It seems to have involved staff and members of the public marching around in a circle eating fruit pies and what’s not to like about that?. The date was chosen because when you write March 14th in month/day number format it comes out as 3/14, which are the first three digits of Pi. The celebration rather took off and it is now celebrated in lots of places.

You probably remember using Pi in maths at school to work out the perimeter and area of a circle. The outside edge of a circle is the same as its diameter multiplied by Pi. So if you can find out how wide the circle is, you can pretty much find out the size of its circumference by multiplying that number by 3.14. We say pretty much because Pi is a very unusual number. If you knew the diameter and the circumference of the circle and tried to divide one by the other to find out what number Pi actually is, you can’t. Those numbers to the right of the decimal point just keep on going, perhaps for ever, no one is sure. They never settle into a repeating pattern. If, for example, you were to divide a hundred by three, you would get 33.33333… and those threes would go on forever, but that’s a pattern. Pi doesn’t have that. Pi has now been calculated to over thirteen trillion decimal places, and calculations are still going. We still don’t know what it is and can discern no pattern.

Pi is, it seems, an unknowable number. It is also an irrational number, which means it cannot be written as a fraction. The closest we can sensibly get is 22⁄7 . This means that there is, surprisingly, a second day on which Pi is celebrated: July 22nd (day/month format: 22/7) is Pi Approximation Day. But we’re having none of it, we have other plans for that day. We are really trying to avoid writing out a big string of numbers in this post, as we find them difficult to look at and don’t want to inflict them on you. But if we tell you that a more accurate definition of Pi is 3.141592, we can also tell you that March 14th 1592 was ultimate Pi day. Not that anyone was aware of it at the time. Everyone was probably far too busy sailing about discovering stuff, watching Shakespeare or dying of plague. The Pi symbol in it’s mathematical sense has only been around for about 250 years.

Humans have put a lot of effort into working out the relationship of the size of a circle and its diameter. A circle looks like such a simple thing and it seems as if it should be so easy to work out. Four thousand years ago, the Babylonians measured it as three and one eighth. The ancient Egyptians had it at three and one seventh. Egyptologists and people of a mystical persuasion have long been fascinated by the fact that the height of the Great Pyramid at Giza has the same relationship to the perimeter of its base as the diameter of a circle does to it’s circumference. But we have no idea if this was intentional or just a coincidence. Similarly, some think it significant that the first 144 digits of Pi add up to 666, the alleged ‘number of the beast’ in the Book of Revelation.

Archimedes, the ancient Greek mathematician, was so obsessed with trying to work out the value of Pi that he did not notice his city was being invaded by the Romans. His dying words are said to have been: 'Do not disturb my circles’. A sixteenth century mathematician called Ludolph van Ceulen devoted most of his life to calculating Pi to thirty-five decimal places. It was such an achievement that the numbers were engraved on his tombstone. In the nineteenth century, William Shanks calculated the first 707 digits of Pi but, unfortunately, he made a mistake at the 527th place. Luckily he didn’t know about it. The mistake wasn’t spotted until 1944.

Now, of course, we have computers on the case, which is why the calculations now run into trillions. The calculation of Pi is actually used as a stress test for computers. But for all the time and power we have devoted to it, we still don’t know the exact number of Pi. We can use it to measure any circle, but we can never know the exactly how big it is. It is pretty accurate though. If you used only the first nine digits of Pi to measure the circumference of the Earth, it would only be out by one quarter inch over 25,000 miles. If you used the first thirty-nine digits of Pi , you could measure the size of the known universe and the error would be less than the width of a hydrogen atom. So trying to figure out what Pi really is probably isn’t anything to do with accuracy anymore. It’s about our obsession with trying to find patterns in things.

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 two 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 13th is BRILLIANT

Extra Large

Today is the birthday of Daniel Lambert. He was born in 1770 at Blue Boar Lane in Leicester, England. His father was the keeper of Leicester goal. Daniel wasn’t always this huge. He was an athletic young man, fond of field sports and a keen swimmer. For much of his life, he taught local boys how to swim. At fourteen, he was made apprentice at an engraving and die casting works in Birmingham, but the business went into decline and he returned to Leicester around 1788 where he assisted his father at the gaol. Soon after that his father retired and Daniel took over his job as gaol keeper. A gaol, we should explain, was not the same as a prison. It might hold the recently convicted who were awaiting transfer to prison, but they might also be about to be transported or even hanged. It also held people who were awaiting trial. Daniel had a good reputation as a gaol keeper, he assisted people with their trials and many expressed gratitude when they left.

It was around the time that he became gaoler that his weight began to increase. He was sure that he didn’t over eat and he didn’t drink alcohol, so he was really unable to account for it. By 1793, he weighted 32 stone (450 lb, 200 kg). This did bother him and he applied his spare time to exercise. He built up his strength until he was easily able to carry five hundred weight (that’s 560 lb or 250kg). There is a story, which we hope is true, that he was happy to challenge anyone to a race, providing he had a slight head start. He would then lead the race down the narrow lanes of the city. He always won because nobody could get past him. Daniel may not have been fleet of foot but he doesn’t appear to have been severely restricted by his size. He could easily walk for miles without tiring, he could stand on one foot and kick his legs high in the air. He also continued to teach swimming and could stay afloat with two men sitting on his back.

Then, there was the time he had a fight with a bear. He was watching a dancing bear perform in Blue Boar Lane when his dog slipped its leash. The dog had once been a circus performing animal and did not care for bears. He bit it. The bear turned on the dog and Daniel asked its keeper to restrain it so he could save his dog. Instead of that, the keeper removed the bears muzzle. Daniel grabbed a stick and hit the bear with it and then punched it in the head. It distracted the animal for long enough for his dog to get away. The performers who owned the bear were pretty upset about the whole thing and complained to the Mayor. The Mayor asked where this had happened. When they mentioned Blue Boar Lane, his reply was along the lines of; that’s outside of my jurisdiction, those people in Blue Boar Lane, they do what they want. The performers stayed away form Blue Boar Lane for two years. They did consider returning sooner, but when they spotted Daniel sitting outside his house, they thought better of it.

In 1805, Daniel’s gaol was closed and he lost his job. He was granted an annuity of £50, but it wasn’t really enough to live on. He was rather sensitive about his weight but none the less, it made it difficult for him to find other work. He now weighed around 50 stone (700 lb, 318 kg) His only option was to exhibit himself as a curiosity. In April 1806, he travelled to London in a specially built coach. He resided in Piccadilly, where he received visitors for five hours each day, charging a shilling to each person.  At this point, we need to explain that people at that time didn’t consider it a terrible thing to be so overweight, they just found him a marvellous spectacle. It became rather fashionable amongst the middle and upper classes of London to visit him and be his friend. He would talk with his visitors about sports, about dogs and about animal husbandry. Sometimes up to four hundred people a day would visit him. Daniel was a huge success. He also wisely declined all offers from agents and impresarios who wanted to manage him.

Most of his guest were polite, but he did start to get fed up with being asked the same old questions. They were particularly fixated on how much his clothes cost. When he was asked, yet again, how much his coat had cost him his reply was: “I cannot pretend to charge my memory with the price, but I can put you into a method of obtaining the information you want. If you think proper to make me a present of a new coat, you will then know exactly what it costs.” Fair enough. When another man insisted on being told because he had a right to know what his shilling was paying for, Daniel replied that if he knew what part of his next coat the man’s shilling would pay for he would: “gladly cut it out.”

During his time in London he was visited by Józef Boruwłaski who was probably the last of Europe’s 'court dwarfs’. Józef was 3’ 3’’ (99 cm) and slightly built, Daniel was 5’ 11’’ (1.8 m). On this occasion, Daniel didn’t mind discussing his clothes and they decided that one of his sleeves had enough material to make a whole coat for Józef. There is something in human nature that loves to put a very big thing and a very small thing next to each other and then have a look at them. So the meeting of Daniel and Józef was a cause of great delight to anyone who witnessed it. One newspaper reported that it was like John Falstaff meeting Tom Thumb and 'a double treat for the curious.’

Daniel returned to Leicester only six months later, a wealthy man. He later made other, shorter, tours of the provinces and seemed generally in good health. But on June 21st 1809, he suddenly collapsed and died at an Inn at Stamford. He was thirty-nine. There was no question of transporting his body back to Leicester, so he was buried there. His coffin, which was built with wheels, was so huge that they had to remove a window and demolish part of the wall just to get it out of the building. His grave was dug with a sloping approach so they wouldn’t have to lower his coffin into the ground. Even so, it still took twenty men half an hour to manoeuvre it into the ground.

Daniel Lambert became a cult figure and his first biography was printed later that year. Almost every item of his clothes and his possessions were quickly bought up by collectors and can still be seen in museums today. Even a hundred years after his death the name 'Daniel Lambert’ was synonymous with anything that was exceptionally large. As this is now our 364th consecutive daily post, today we are feeling like the Daniel Lambert of historical blogging. If you’re following this on Tumblr, you will be able to wheel us into the ground on Tuesday evening. If you’re reading this on Wordpress, We will be at large until July.

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 four 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 11th is BRILLIANT

Ship of Fools

On this day on 1702, the first British daily newspaper was published. It was called ‘The Daily Courant’ The paper consisted of a single sheet of paper with news on one side and advertisements on the other. It was printed by a woman named Elizabeth Mallet, but she called herself E. Mallet as printing was a profession dominated by men. In it, she advertised that she would not add any comments of her own to the articles she printed. She thought her readers would have: “sense enough to make reflections for themselves” and “spare the public at least half the impertinences which ordinary papers contain.” It was a worthy idea and if she could see any of our newspapers, full of editorial, opinion pieces and celebrity gossip, she’d probably be quite disappointed.  Later that same year, the paper was taken over by Samuel Buckley who went on to produce the Spectator. We don’t know why, she may have sold it or it could have been that Elizabeth died.

Facts about Elizabeth’s life are hard to come by. At the end of the seventeenth century, she was printing broadsides and stories from the local area which she sold in the streets. We do know where her premises were though. Her address was next to The Kings Arms, against the Ditch at Fleet Bridge. Fleet Bridge is the old name for Fleet Street which would become the home of the British press for well over two hundred years.  We quite like the idea that it all started somewhere near a ditch.

Fleet Street had been associated with publishing since the beginning of the sixteenth century. William Caxton, who was the first person to set up a printing press in England, had an apprentice who set up a printing shop on Fleet Street in 1500. He had the lovely and appropriate name of Wynkyn de Worde. We have no idea whether the 'de Worde’ part was added as a sort of nickname or whether it is just a fine example of nominative determinism. While Caxton relied on rich and worthy patrons to support his work, de Worde made the move to printing more inexpensive books for a more commercial audience. He was the first to print on English paper and the first to make use of moveable type to print music. He also set up the first book stall in the yard of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, which then became an important centre for the booksellers of London.

One of the stories that Wynkyn de Worde published was a translation of a story called 'The Ship of Fools’ which would become a familiar trope of literature. It is an allegory that originates with Plato and is a story about a vessel with no one to guide it. It is taken over by the deranged, by the frivolous and generally by people who don’t know what they’re doing at all. They would stop at nothing to prevent a person who does know how to steer the ship from helping them.

A more modern interpretation of the story can be found in Douglas Adam’s 'Hitchhiker’s  Guide to the Galaxy’. There is a planet called Golgafrincham that was once home to the Great Circling Poets of Arium. The descendents of the poets made up stories about the planet’s impending doom. It would crash into the sun, be hit by the moon, be attacked by twelve foot piranha bees or be swallowed by a mutant star goat. They all pretended they were going to leave the planet in three arks. The 'A’ Ark would carry all the great leaders, the scientists and the high achievers. The 'C;’ Ark would hold all people who actually made things and built things. Then there was  the 'B’ Ark. The 'B’ Ark was for everyone else. The middle managers, the hairdressers, the television executives, the telephone sanitizers. The 'B’ Ark was actually the only one that set off. It was a plan to get rid of the useless third of their society. The remaining two thirds  of the Golgafrinchams remained on the planet and lived rich and happy lives, until they were wiped out by a disease caused by a dirty telephone.

Meanwhile the passengers of the 'B’ Ark crash-landed on a prehistoric earth where they slowly developed a primitive culture and became the ancestors of modern humanity. So if, as Douglas Adams would have it, we are all descended from a ship of fools, it’s little wonder that we are often more interested in having meetings than actually getting anything done. More drawn to celebrity gossip than politics. Maybe Elizabeth Mallet’s newspaper with nothing but news in it would never have worked. We certainly can’t pretend that we are doing anything different from that with this rather frivolous blog. It’s just that the celebrities we are telling you about mostly died hundreds of years ago, so we are hoping that at least some of it will seem new and interesting.

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 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 six 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 9th is BRILLIANT

Heavenly Choir

Goodness, March is turning out to be quite the month for space travel. On this day in 1961,the Russians launched their spacecraft Sputnik 9. At the beginning of the 1960s, there was a huge race between Russia and the United States to be the first nation to launch a human into space. Everyone needed to learn a lot about space flight; what it would do to a human body, how to make a successful landing, and they needed to learn it quickly. Sputnik 9 was not a manned space flight, but it was an important and interesting step along the way. On March 9th 1961, a dummy was launched into space. He was named Ivan Ivanovich which is the Russian equivalent of ‘John Doe’ or 'Joe Bloggs’.

People who were working in the space programmes were worried about the effects of the lack of gravity on the human body, about the presence of radiation and also that a human confined in a tiny capsule so far away from earth would succumb to what they called 'space madness’. As much as they wanted to send a person into space, they wanted that person to come back safe and well. The Russians tested and retested their equipment and their final test was to send something as human as possible in an orbit around the earth.

Ivan was made mostly from metal with bendable joints because they needed to dress him in a space suit. He had a skin of synthetic leather and a detachable head. His head, they decided to make as lifelike as possible. He had eyes and eye brows, even eyelashes. Then they thought about what might happen if he crash landed in a remote area. Someone might think he was a real human, even an alien. So they taped a big label over his face with the word 'maket’ which means mock-up. To make sure that space travel was as safe as possible for organic life, Ivan had companions. Because space was at a premium inside the capsule, they used cavities inside his body to carry forty white mice, forty black mice, some guinea pigs, various reptiles, human blood cells, human cancer cells, yeast and bacteria. In addition to this, they sent a dog with him called Chernushka, which means 'Blackie’.

Apart from testing how all these life forms would fare, the safety of the capsule and of the space suit, they also needed to test the ejector seat mechanism that would be used on landing. Sputnik 9, could not land safely, so the pilot would need to be ejected, along with a parachute before the capsule reached the ground. Ivan could also carry, within his body, instruments that measured things like acceleration and radiation levels but they also needed to test communication between the capsule and the ground. For this, Ivan would need a voice. They knew that their transmissions would be picked up by western countries, so they had to think carefully about what Ivan would say. If it sounded like a coded message, people might think they had secretly launched a human into space and that they were being spied upon. Perhaps, they thought, a tape of someone singing a song. This was rejected because anyone who intercepted the transmission might think they had sent up a cosmonaut  who had succumbed to space madness. Their solution was simple and rather beautiful. They fitted Ivan with a tape that would play a whole choir singing. There was no way anyone would think that they had sent a whole choir into space inside one tiny capsule.

So, Ivan Ivanovich was first launched into space on March 9th 1961. Sputnik 9 made a single orbit of the Earth in a journey that lasted a little over an hour and a half. The mission was a success, the ejector seat and parachute worked and the dummy was recovered. You’ll be happy to know that Chernushka, the dog, who crash-landed along with the craft also survived.

A second trial was made on March 25th. This time Ivan was accompanied by a dog called Zvezdochka which means 'little star’. The dog was given this name by Yuri Gagarin who would, less than three weeks later, become the first human in space. This time, they added to the choir recording, a recipe for cabbage soup, either to make the message even more confusing, or because they thought the world needed to know how to make it properly. This flight was also a success and Zvezdochka also survived her trip. This time the recovery team were unable to get to the landing site, in the Ural mountains, for twenty four hours. The local people, who had watched a figure floating down in a parachute, arms and legs flailing, were very surprised when they approached the lifeless figure and opened his helmet, only to see the word 'maket’ taped across his face.

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’re almost there and it seems appropriate to have some sort of countdown. If we make it, there will be seven 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. Will we reach a hundred followers my March 15th? Probably not…

Why March 8th is BRILLIANT

One Day I’ll Fly Away

Today is the birthday of Tito Livio Burattini, who was born at Agordo in northern Italy in 1617. Burattini explored and measured the inside of  the Great Pyramid of Giza in the late 1630s with an English mathematician called John Greaves. But we don’t want to write about that today. He was also the first person to come up with the word metre for a standard unit of length. If your interested, it was first described as the length a pendulum needs to be to measure one second with each swing. But we don ’t want to go into any more detail about that either. We don’t even want to tell you about the time he was running a mint in Poland and got into trouble for adding glass to the coins. Today, we want to tell you about Burattini’s flying machine.

As we’ve spent the last two days banging on about seventeenth century authors who wrote about imaginary flying machines, we thought it would be nice to tell you about someone who properly had a go at building one. In the 1640s Burattini went to live in Poland, where he worked as architect for King Wladislaw IV. In 1647, he built a working model of a flying machine. It is generally described as a glider, but it appears to have had moving parts, so perhaps it was an Ornithopter, a machine with wings that flap like a bird. It was four or five feet long and could rise into the air carrying a cat as a passenger. History does not record how the cat felt about this. Pierre des Noyers, who was secretary to the Queen of Poland, said it remained airborne as long as a man kept the feathers and wheels in motion by way of a string. It was demonstrated before the Polish court at the request of the King. He must have been impressed because Burattini was granted money from the Royal Treasury to build a full sized model.

By May 1648, he had built his ‘Dragon Volant’ (Flying Dragon). Again, according to des Noyers, it had four pairs of wings. The two middle pairs seem to have been fixed and were for lift. The rear pair also provided lift but, along with the pair at the front, were designed to flap, by means of pulleys, and propel it forwards. It also had a large tail which moved in all directions for steering. The tail was also meant to act as a float, in case of emergency landing on water. The machine was designed to carry a crew of three. Two operating the wings at either end and a 'master of the ship’ in the middle. It also carried a large folding parachute in case the wings failed or they needed to slow its descent. Apparently, Burattini claimed that landing the craft would only cause the most minor of injuries, so that’s a comfort.

We are told that it was tested and did rise into the air, but was never completely successful. Burattini was convinced that it would work and that he would be able to use it to fly from Warsaw to Constantinople inside twelve hours, a distance of about a thousand miles. No one knows what happened to his machine. It may have been destroyed by the Swedes when they invaded Warsaw in 1655.

In our brief research today, we’ve actually found several attempts at human flight previous to Tito Livio Burattini. Mostly they end with someone simply falling off a tower or crashing through a roof. In 1540, there was João Torto, from Portugal. He made himself two large pairs of calico wings and also a helmet shaped like the head of an eagle. He crashed because the helmet slipped over his eyes. Some time in the sixteenth century, a French labourer built himself wings from two winnowing baskets and a coal shovel for a tail. He fell out of a pear tree into a drain. In 1600, there was Paolo Guidotti who built wings of whalebone, feathers and springs. He is reported to have flown a quarter of a mile before his arms grew tired. None of these people can really be described as having flown. They really only devised a means of falling more slowly. The first truly successful heavier than air flying machine would not be flown for over 150 years. It was built by someone who is, for us, a bit of a local boy as he was from Scarborough in North Yorkshire. He built a glider which he flew in 1804. He properly understood the principles of weight, lift, drag and thrust that you need to know about if you want to build an aircraft. He also knew the importance of cambered wings. His significance in the history of flight was acknowledged by the Wright brothers.

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’re almost there and it seems appropriate to have some sort of countdown. If we make it, there will be eight 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. Will we reach a hundred followers my March 15th? Probably not…

Why March 7th is BRILLIANT

To Seek Out New Worlds

On this day in 2009, NASA launched its Kepler space observatory. Its purpose is to identify earth like planets orbiting other stars. It is focused on the Milky Way where there are billions of stars. Its only instrument is a photometer which continually measures the brightness of 145,000 stars. If any of the stars it is looking at dim periodically, that might indicate that there is a planet passing in front of it. So far, it has identified 1039 planets.

As we are thinking about space travel today and, as we casually mentioned yesterday a seventeenth century bishop who wrote a story about flying to the moon with some swans, we thought we’d take a closer look at that today, along with another story that we didn’t get chance to mention, which heavily influenced Cyrano de Bergerac’s ‘Other Worlds’. It is 'True History’ written by Lucian of Samosata some time in the second century.

Francis Godwin was born in 1562 and became Bishop of  Hereford. His father was the bishop of Bath and Wells. Both of his grandfathers were bishops. His 'The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither’ was published posthumously under an assumed name in 1638. He may have written it in about 1620. It is about a man called Domingo Gonsales, the book’s supposed author. Domingo has made a fortune in the East Indies but has to flee because he killed someone in a duel. He leaves for his native Spain along with his servant Diego. Ill health forces him to stop at St Helena. There he finds a new variety of swan he calls a 'gansa’ that he discovers can carry substantial weights. Eventually he harnesses some of them together so they can carry the weight of a man and flies around the island. Then, he decides to use the swans to fly him home. Nearing Tenerife he is attacked by British ships and forced to land. Finding the natives hostile, he takes off again. The swans carry him higher and higher. On the first day he meets demons and wicked spirits who give him a package of food for his journey. They promise to see him safely back to Spain if he promises to join them and serve a master who they will not name. He refuses.

Instead, the gansas carry him higher and higher, for twelve days, until he reaches the Moon. Suddenly, he feels hungry and opens his package to find that it contains dry leaves, goat’s hair and animal dung. There is also wine that he says smells like horse piss. He finds that the people who live on the moon are tall Christian people who live in a kind of paradise. He finds out that they maintain their Utopian existence by swapping any delinquent children for children from Earth. Here, he cites an example, the Green Children of Woolpit.

This is a very odd story dating from the twelfth century about two children who suddenly appeared near the village of Woolpit in Suffolk. They spoke an unknown language, their clothing was unfamiliar, their skin was green, and they would eat only beans. When they adapted to a normal diet, they lost their green colour. The boy died but the girl survived to adulthood. They couldn’t say how they arrived, only that they had been tending their father’s cattle, there had been a loud noise and suddenly they found themselves in a strange place. There is only one other writer we know of from this time who mentions the story and suggests that they may have come from an extra-terrestrial world. It is Robert Burton in his 'Anatomy of Melancholy’. This is an interesting piece of information for us as, over the last year, the Anatomy of Melancholy has become one of our favourite books that we’ve never read. But we digress.

After six months of living on the moon, and learning their strange musical language, three of Domingo’s gansas have died and he becomes concerned he will never get back to earth. He sets off for home, but before he leaves, the King of the Moon gives him a gift of three sorts of stones. Poleastis, which can store and generate great quantities of heat, Macbrus, which generates great quantities of light and Ebelus. Holding one side of this stone to you, renders you weightless, touching the other side makes you half as heavy again.

He uses his Ebelus to make himself lighter so that the journey back to Earth is easier for his remaining gansas. He lands in China where he is arrested as a magician. It takes him ages to learn Mandarin so he can explain himself. Eventually he makes contact with some Jesuits who write down his story and promise to send it to Spain. The book ends with him hoping that his adventures will make him famous.

The second century tale written by Lucian of Samosata was intended to be a parody against contemporary and ancient sources which quote obvious myths and legends as if they had really happened. So its title 'True History’ is a joke. In the story, Lucien and some adventuring heroes sail west beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar) and come to an island with rivers of wine filled with fish and bears. They also find marks indicating that Heracles and Dionysus have passed that way. On leaving the island they are swept up by a whirlwind and, after seven days, deposited on the moon. There, they find a huge war between the king of the Moon  and the king of the Sun over who should colonise the Morning Star (Venus). There is a fantastical description of the two armies which includes men who wear long gowns that they use like sails to fly around, dog-faced men riding winged acorns and giant spiders. The armies of the sun are victorious when they build a wall that eclipses the moon. Lucian tells us that there are no women on the moon but that children grow inside the calves of men. In our second ever post, we mentioned that the mythical figure Dionysus grew inside the thigh of his father Zeus, which now we are approaching the last few days of this blog, gives a pleasing circularity to it.

After returning to Earth, they become trapped inside a 200 mile long whale. There are some amazing things inside the whale; among them, a little garden a lake and a temple dedicated to Neptune. There are also a thousand people who they go to war with. Then they discover a sea of milk and an island of cheese. After that, they sail to the Island of the Blessed. There, they meet the heroes of the Trojan War and Herodotus who is being eternally punished for all the lies he wrote in his own 'Histories’. Herodotus was responsible for some of the more outlandish beliefs of Pliny the Elder and which persisted into medieval times, such as the belief in a race of dog-headed people. Lucian tells us that he is glad he will never suffer such a fate as he has never told a lie in his life.

Lucian then discovers a chasm in the ocean, which they manage to sail around and he ends his story as they discover a new continent and begin to explore it. It ends with the promise of more to come. No one now has any idea if there ever was more.

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’re almost there and it seems appropriate to have some sort of countdown. If we make it, there will be nine 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. Will we reach a hundred followers my March 15th? Probably not…

Why March 6th is BRILLIANT

Choose Your Own Adventure

Today we want to talk about Cyrano de Bergerac. It isn’t going to be very easy, as details of his life are scant. But he does have one, arguably two, totally fictional accounts of his life that we can tell you about.

The real Cyrano was probably baptised in Paris on this day in 1619. He was the son of Abel de Cyrano, lord of Mauvières and Bergerac. He was first educated in the countryside by a parish priest along with his friend Henri Lebret, who later became his biographer. He didn’t pay much attention to his lessons there and sounds like an awful student. His father sent him to Paris to finish his education. We don’t know where, it might have been Collège de Beauvais, because he later wrote a play called ‘The Pedant Tricked’ which made fun of one of the tutors there.

Alternatively, he was not aristocratic at all, but descended from a Sardinian fishmonger. He was the lover of Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, a burlesque poet, until 1653 when they fell out horribly and wrote lots of rude things about each other. Pick which one you like best. We suppose it is possible that they might both be true to some extent.

He enjoyed a life of drinking gambling and duelling and joined the army when he was nineteen. As he wasn’t keen on discipline, war or the death penalty, he didn’t fit in particularly well there. Cyrano was severely wounded twice, he was shot through the body and wounded in the neck with a sword. In 1641, he left the army and began to study under the philosopher and mathematician Pierre Gassendi. Gassendi tried to reconcile Christianity with Epicurean atomism, which we don’t have time to look into today, but it must have been odd as Epicurus didn’t believe any gods were watching us at all, ever.

Cyrano de Bergerac died in 1655, either as the result of a wooden beam falling on his head or because he was involved in a botched assassination attempt and suffered from ill health after he was subsequently confined to a private asylum by his brother. Or perhaps it was syphilis. Again, you choose. Or take all of them…

Cyrano’s life was fictionalised in the form of a play by Edmond Rosand in 1897. The fictional Cyrano is a renowned duellist and a gifted and joyful poet. He is also crippled by self-doubt because he has a very large nose. So he cannot tell his beautiful cousin, Roxane, that he loves her. She is also loved by a handsome young man called Christian. Just when Cyrano is about to tell Roxane how he feels, she tells him she is in love with someone. At first he thinks, and hopes that she means him But when she describes him as handsome, he finds out it is Christian. Roxane also asks Cyrano to look after Christian, they are both soldiers and she doesn’t want to see Christian hurt. After that, the two men become friends and, because Christian doesn’t have the gift of poetry, Cyrano agrees to write his love letters for him. Now Cyrano can pour out his heart to Roxane without her ever knowing that the words are his. Roxanne falls deeply in love with Christian because of his beautiful words and eventually confesses to Cyrano that the letters mean so much to her that she would love Christian even if he was ugly. Just as Cyrano is about to confess that he is the author Christian is wounded and dies. So Cyrano feels he can now never confess that it was him all along.

Fifteen years later, Roxane is in a convent, still mourning the loss of Christian. Cyrano comes to visit her, but on the way, someone drops a log on his head and he is mortally wounded. He arrives at the convent, knowing it will be the last time he sees her. She asks him to read Christian’s last love letter to her, which he does. But as he is reading it grows dark. As he continues to read even though it is too dark to see, she finally realises that he is the author of the letters. He denies it to his dying breath. He dies saying that he has lost everything, except one important thing his 'panache’. The play has been performed many times, rewritten and adapted for film.  Off the top of our heads, there is the one with Gérard Depardieu, a modern day version starring Steve Martin with an upbeat ending and 'The Truth About Cats and Dogs’ is a gender reversed version of the same story. It is from the original play that the word 'panache’ first entered the English language.

Cyrano de Bergerac also wrote stories with a hero named Cyrano which were published after his death by his biographer Lebret. But they are not obviously about his life. Cyrano’s Cyrano travels to the moon and the sun. 'L'Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune.’ (The other world: states and empires of the Moon) and 'Les États et Empires du Soleil.’ (The states and empires of the Sun) are, in a way, science fiction novels before there was any such thing as science fiction.

Cyrano first tries to reach the Moon by strapping bottles of dew to his body. The sun shines on the bottles which become clouds and lift him into the sky. When he comes down again he is in New France (Canada) because the earth has moved round beneath him. He meets a tribe of people who are naked. He, thinking he is in France, wonders how long French people in the provinces have gone about naked but expects that they are equally surprised to meet someone wearing bottles. Eventually he meets the governor of New France and explains to him that all matter is formed inside, and expelled by stars, which is a pretty surprising idea coming from the seventeenth century. He thinks that the reason the Americas have been only recently discovered is that they have only just been put there by the sun.

In his second attempt to reach the moon, he builds a flying machine and launches it off a cliff. It crashes but he escapes from the wreckage. Then some soldiers find it and think if they attach rockets to it, it will fly into the sky and look like a dragon. He catches them and is upset. He climbs into the machine to try to unfasten the rockets and is blasted into space. On the moon he meets people with four legs who have musical voices and weapons that can cook game at the same time as it is being shot. He also meet the ghost of Socrates and a man named Domingo Gonsales. Domingo is a character from an earlier novel by an English bishop, called Francis Godwin, who flies to the Moon in a chariot drawn by swans. They all decide that the concept of God is nonsense and that men have no souls. Cyrano returns to earth and lands in Italy.

He builds a second flying machine that focuses solar energy, using mirrors to create burst of air. It takes him to the sun. He lands on a sun spot and the beings that live there explain to him how the solar system works by comparing it with the movement of atoms. On the sun, he is tried by a court of birds for all the crimes of humanity But luckily, he is saved by a parrot who recognises him. Then he meets an Italian philosopher called Tommaso Campanella. They start to discuss what sex would be like in Utopia and the book pretty much ends there. As we said, it was published posthumously and it is likely that there was more but Lebret was not brave enough to publish it. There may also be a third story about a journey to the stars, but his original work is now lost. So, if you read it, you’ll have to decide how it ends.

Hello. We’ve been writing this blog every day for a little over 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 seems appropriate to have some sort of countdown. If we make it, there will be ten 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. Will we reach a hundred followers my March 15th? Probably not…

Why March 5th is BRILLIANT

Off The Map

Today is the birthday of Gerardus Mercator, who was born on this day in 1512 in Flanders. He was an extremely skilled map maker and the first person to use the word 'atlas’ for a collection of maps. He mapped the whole world at least twice and he did it all without setting foot on a ship or ever leaving Europe. He is best known to us because of his Mercator Projection, which is a way of representing the world that is still very familiar to us well over four centuries later. The projection, which he devised in 1569, has proved incredibly useful for anyone navigating the oceans. It also has glaring and insurmountable problems if you want to look at it to find out how big countries are in relation to one another. The difficulty is, that it is not possible to accurately represent a spherical object on a flat piece of paper.

Mercator began to study geography, mathematics and astronomy in 1534 at Louvain under the guidance of Gemma Frisius. (John Dee was a fellow student) Gemma had a sideline in the manufacture of globes and navigational instruments. Along with a man called Gaspard van der Heyden, he had created a terrestrial globe in  1529. But in the early sixteenth century, many new geographical discoveries were being made and by 1535, they were planning another. Along with his other lessons, Gemma taught Mercator how to make mathematical instruments and van der Heyden taught him the art of engraving. When they started work on the new terrestrial globe, he was given the job of engraving all the text, which he did in beautiful italic script.

In 1537 he produced his first map, which was of the Holy Land. It was very well received and a year later he printed a map of the world. We’ve already mentioned that it simply isn’t possible to draw something round on a flat sheet of paper. In 1538, Mercator approached the problem by drawing his map as a double heart shaped projection. It’s a beautiful map, but you couldn’t use it to plot a course over the ocean. It is the first map to use the name America for the northern half of the continent as well as the south.

He went on to publish a map of Flanders and to produce a globe of his own. He also started work on a large map of Europe, but it took him ages. This was partly because he was arrested and held by the Inquisition for a time but also because, with so much new geographical information pouring in constantly, it was hard to know when it was finished. It took him twelve years and was published in 1554. It’s detail and accuracy were unprecedented and was highly praised and sold well.

In 1569, he published a map of the world using what is now known as the Mercator Projection. But he called it: “Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate Accommodata” (New and more complete representation of the terrestrial globe properly adapted for use in navigation). This was a map that sailors would be able to use to plot a course using a compass. Because both the lines of longitude and latitude are straight and meet at right angles, it is possible to calculate the direction you need to go in to reach a certain destination, then follow your compass. As long as you stuck to your course, you would end up where you expected to be. It would be a revolution in the world of navigation.

Geographically, it’s not great. Partly because he had a lot of information that was wrong. When he made his map, everyone thought that the tip of South America was joined to a vast unexplored southern continent. His inset map of the North Pole is very peculiar indeed. It has four channels which carry the sea into an abyss at the centre. The only information he had about it came from a fourteenth century monk who had used 'magic arts’ to explore the region. Also there were vast areas that no one knew anything about. Most obviously in North America.

It was a while before people really took up with Mercator’s Projection but for centuries it has been the most recognised method of representing a map of our planet. It’s probably the one you had on your classroom wall, although the details are obviously more accurate. It does, however, have one major flaw. Because Mercator’s map shows the lines of longitude as equidistant from north to south, it means that anything close to the poles looks much bigger that it actually is. Scandinavia looks bigger than India and it really isn’t. India is three times as big. Generally speaking it manages to distort Europe and North America to make them look much bigger than they actually are. But Antarctica looks insanely huge. If you want to see a much more accurate representation of the relative sizes of the continents, you could do worse than take a look at the Gall Peters Projection. It’s still rather distorted, in that it stretches everything out a bit to thin towards the South Pole. But Europe and North America don’t look so big and important as we’ve been led to believe.

Hello. We’ve been writing this blog every day for a little over 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 eleven more posts after this one. Sorry it’s such a long one today, but it really is a great story. 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. Will we reach a hundred followers my March 15th? Probably not…

Why March 4th is BRILLIANT

Through the Roof

Today we want to tell you about Jack Sheppard, who was born on this day in 1702 in Spitalfields, London. Jack was apprentice to a carpenter, but with only one year of apprenticeship left to serve, he took to a life of crime in 1723. Jack Sheppard was a thief, he was also a notorious gaol-breaker. He escaped from prison four times in 1724. We have to warn you that this story does not end well for Jack. He was eventually hanged at Tyburn.

If you’re wondering what a notorious criminal is doing featuring on ‘Why Today is Brilliant’, it is because his exploits made him something of a folk hero. He was young, good-looking, good natured, never violent and for a while it seemed as though no prison could hold him. We also need to explain a little about the political climate. In 1720, there had been a huge financial crash which is referred to as the South Sea Bubble. Loads of people had lost money and the economy was in ruins. When the whole thing was investigated, it was found that people were making money by selling debt. Politicians had taken huge bribes to allow this to happen. Politicians were disgraced and people were forced to pay back a percentage of their profits, but largely those who were rich to begin with suffered the least. If all this sounds horribly familiar to you, you’ll understand why people had little trust in those in authority and were happy to see someone get the better of them.

Jack really didn’t have an easy start in life. At the age of six he was apprenticed to a cane-chair maker, but his master died. He was sent to another who treated him badly and then, at ten, went to work for his mother’s employer, a draper called William Kneebone, who taught him to read and write and apprenticed him the a carpenter on Wych Street, near Drury Lane. By 1722, things were going better, he was showing a great deal of promise as a carpenter. Jack was small (only 5'4”) and slightly built with pale skin and very large dark eyes. He was quick to smile and had a ready wit. It made him popular in the taverns of Drury Lane and this was really where thing started to go wrong for him.

In a tavern called the Black Lion he met a highwayman called Joseph 'Blueskin’ Blake and a character called Jonathan Wild, a criminal who operated on both sides of the law. He also fell in love with drink and a woman called Elizabeth Lyon. His work suffered and he began to steal. First shoplifting and then taking things from the houses where he was working. He gave up his apprenticeship in August 1723 and progressed to burglary. He also moved in with Elizabeth who worked as a prostitute. When Elizabeth was arrested and imprisoned in a small gaol called St Giles Roundhouse, Jack actually broke into the prison and freed her.

In February 1724, he committed a burglary with Elizabeth and his brother Tom. Tom had already been caught stealing once and had been branded on the hand. When he was arrested for a second time, he was afraid he might be hanged and informed on his brother. A warrant was issued for Jack’s arrest. Jonathan Wild (who knew full well Jack was a burglar because one of his men had fenced some of his stolen goods for him) made sure his whereabouts was known and in April, Jack was arrested and imprisoned on the top floor of St Giles Roundhouse. Although he was wearing irons, within three hours he had broken through the timber ceiling of his cell, made a rope from his bedding, climbed out onto the roof and lowered himself to the ground. He had made quite a lot of noise smashing the ceiling and quite a crowd had gathered outside. Jack, still in irons, joined them. He shouted that he could see the escapee in the shadows on the roof then quietly slipped away.

In May he was caught in the act of pickpocketing and this time sent to St Ann’s Roundhouse in Soho. The next day, Elizabeth visited him. She was recognised, arrested and immediately locked up with him. They appeared before a magistrate and were sent to New Prison in Clerkenwell. Within days, they had filed through their manacles and removed a bar from the windows. They made a rope from their bedclothes and lowered themselves into the yard of the building next door. But the building next door was… another prison, Bridewell. Somehow they managed to climb over a twenty-two foot high gate and make good their escape. The event was highly publicised and was all the more remarkable because, as we told you, Jack was rather short and also Elizabeth was rather large.

Jack was becoming a pretty successful burglar and Jonathan Wild wanted to fence his goods for a share of the profits but Jack refused. Instead, he started to work with Joseph 'Blueskin’ Blake and together they burgled Jack’s former employer William Kneebone in July. Wild found out about it. He found Elizabeth and plied her with brandy until she gave away Jack’s whereabouts. He was arrested for a third time in Blueskin’s mother’s brandy shop by one of Wild’s henchmen. Jack was imprisoned at Newgate, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. He escaped on the day his death warrant arrived. There was a barred window in his cell through which he was allowed to talk to visitors. He sawed through one of the bars. While he was being visited by Elizabeth and another woman, who had the delightful name of Poll Maggot, they distracted the guards while he removed the bar and climbed out. He escaped dressed in women’s clothes that the two had brought for him.

He evaded Wild’s men, but was arrested again in September by a posse from Newgate and returned to his condemned cell. By now Jack Sheppard was something of a folk hero. He was visited by the great, the good and the merely curious who wanted to take a look at the man who had escaped the law three times. His escape plans were thwarted twice after guards found files and other tools in his cell. Jack was moved to a strong room and put in leg irons that were attached by a chain to two massive staples in the floor. He demonstrated to his gaolers how this was not enough to hold him. He showed them how he could use a small nail to pick the padlock that held him. They bound him more tightly and also handcuffed him.

Meanwhile, his accomplice Blueskin was being tried in a court next door to the prison for the same crime. Although the evidence given by Wild did not correlate with the evidence he had given at Jack’s trial, Blueskin was convicted anyway. Blueskin was furious and attacked Wild in the courtroom. He slashed at his throat with a pocket knife and Wild was badly injured. There was a complete uproar which soon spread to the prison next door and lasted into the night. Jack Sheppard took advantage of this. He unlocked his handcuffs and removed the chains but couldn’t undo the leg irons. Even so, he still managed to climb up a chimney, but found his way blocked by an iron bar. He removed the bar, climbed back down and used it to break through the ceiling to an unoccupied cell above. From there, and still wearing the leg irons, he managed to break through another six barred doors and into the prison chapel. From here, he got out onto the roof which was sixty feet above the ground. He then went all the was back to his cell to fetch his blankets. He used them to lower himself onto the roof of the adjacent house, which belonged to a turner named William Bird. He broke into the house, walked down the stairs and out into the street. All without disturbing the occupants.

Jack hid out in a cowshed in Tottenham where he was spotted by the barn’s owner. But he managed to persuade him that he had escaped from a completely different prison to which he had been sent for failing to support a bastard son that he didn’t have. He bribed a shoemaker to fetch a blacksmith to free him from his leg irons and told them the same story. Daniel Defoe, the writer of Robinson Crusoe, who was then working as a journalist, got hold of the story and wrote an account of it. He describes how people at Newgate believed the the Devil himself had come to assist Jack in his escape.

Jack was arrested for the fifth and final time only two weeks later after he broke into a pawnbroker’s shop, stealing a black silk suit, a sword, jewellery, watches and a rather fine wig. He spent the rest of the day dressed as a dandy and swanning about town with two of his mistresses. When he was arrested, in the early hours of November 1st, he was blind drunk. This time he was put in a different cell in Newgate, where he could be watched at all times. He was also chained with 300 lbs of iron weights. Such was his fame that his gaolers charge high-society visitors four shillings each to see him. He remained cheerful with everyone and several people wrote to the King, George I, begging that his sentence be commuted to transportation. At his trial he was offered a reduced sentence if he agreed to inform on his accomplices, but he refused. He was sentenced to be hanged.

Jack Sheppard was taken to Tyburn on November 16th. He had planned one more escape, but the pocket knife he had intended to use to cut his ropes on the way to the gallows was found by a prison warder. His final journey seems to have been an oddly merry one. He was drawn in a cart along Holborn and Oxford Street accompanied by the city marshal. As many as two hundred thousand people turned out, to celebrate his life as much as anything. Just to give you an idea, this was around one third of the population of London at the time. The procession halted at the City of Oxford tavern on Oxford Street where he drank a pint of sack (sherry). His 'official’ autobiography, which was probably ghost written by Defoe,  was on sale to the public. He handed a copy out as he mounted the scaffold. He was hoisted and hanged for the prescribed fifteen minutes and then cut down. Being of slight build, it is possible that he wasn’t dead at this point. His friends planned to take his body straight to a doctor in the hope that he could be revived. But the crowd pressed around him in an effort to stop his body being taken for dissection and, sadly, it may have been this that killed him rather than the hanging.

His story was quickly adapted for the stage and a play about him opened at Drury Lane only two weeks after his death. Four years later John Gay based his 'Beggars Opera’ on the story of Jack’s life. It was extremely popular and allowed  Gay to recover the money he had lost in the South Sea Bubble. It was performed regularly over the next hundred years and used a century after that by Berholt Brecht and Kurt Weill as a basis for their Threepenny Opera.

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 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 thirteen 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 2nd is BRILLIANT

A Poem for the Queen

On this day in 1882, Queen Victoria survived her eighth and final assassination attempt. We were surprised to find out that Queen Victoria had been such a regular target. So we thought we’d take a closer look at who these people were. The first attack was in June 1840 when she was pregnant with her first child. Victoria and Albert were out driving in their carriage when Edward Oxford fired two pistols at them. Both shots missed. He was arrested and afterwards sent to Australia. He said he had done it for the notoriety it would bring him.

We were even more surprised to find out that attempts two and three were carried out on two consecutive days, in 1842, by the same man. John Francis was an angry out of work stage carpenter and failed tobacconist who felt he deserved better in life. On the first occasion, his gun failed to go off. He was only seen by Prince Albert and one other person. The next day, the Queen and Prince somewhat recklessly agreed to go out again to see if he would put in another appearance. This time Robert Peel, who was then Prime Minister, had several police officers stationed along the route.  One of these was Constable William Trounce. He had been watching a rather furtive looking man for some time. But as the Queen’s carriage approach, he was torn between the job he was meant to be doing and showing respect for his queen. He chose wrong. He decided to salute her. John Francis chose that moment to fire his weapon. Luckily the shot missed and the constable was able to arrest him. John Francis was sentenced to be drawn, hanged and quartered which is not quite the same thing as being hung, drawn and quartered. A condemned person would be drawn (dragged) on a hurdle to the place of execution, hanged until dead and then cut into four parts. His sentence was later commuted to transportation for life. Constable Trounce did not lose his job.

Shortly after that, there was a fourth attack. This time by a man called John Bean. His pistol, which was loaded with paper and bits of broken clay pipe, failed to go off. It seemed like there was a bit of a mania for taking pot-shots at the Queen. Oddly, Robert Peel responded by making it a lesser crime  punishable, not by hanging, but by flogging and imprisonment. Even more oddly, it seemed to work. There were no more attempts for another seven years. We don’t know if Queen Victoria ever used the parasol lined with chain-mail that she was given for protection.

In 1849 she was shot at by William Hamilton. He was an unemployed bricklayer who felt he would have a better life in prison. He was jailed on Gibraltar for seven years. Her fifth attacker was Robert Pate in 1850. He is generally described having been often seen behaving eccentrically in London Parks. We tried to find out more but just came up with the fact that his clothes were unusual and there was a vague mention of goose stepping. He was the only one who actually hurt her. He hit her on the head with his stick, giving her a black eye and a scar that lasted for ten years. The Queen insisted on attending the opera a few hours later just so everyone could see that she hadn’t been badly hurt. Her ladies in waiting insisted that she shouldn’t go, as she clearly was hurt. “Then” she said, “they will see how little I mind.”

Her sixth attacker, in 1872, was a young Irishman who imagined himself a martyr to the cause of Irish Nationalism. He wanted her to sign a document he had written which ordered the freeing of Irish political prisoners. He expected to be shot by firing squad and die a hero. But the Queen’s servant and very good friend John Brown knocked the pistol from his hand. He was arrested and sent to Australia.

This brings us to March 2nd 1882 and Roderick Maclean. Maclean had suffered a head injury in 1866, declared of unsound mind in 1772 and committed to an asylum in 1880. However, in 1882, he was pronounced ‘cured’ and released. From that time, he had wandered about the country, convinced that anyone wearing the colour blue would cause him harm, as would anything to do with the number four. He had sent a poem to the Queen which had been rejected on her behalf by one of her ladies in waiting and he was upset about it. He sold his scarf and concertina, bought a gun and headed for Windsor. He managed to take a single shot at Victoria before he was grabbed by some Eton schoolboys and hit over the head with an umbrella. He was probably the only one of her attackers who was completely insane. He was committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for the rest of his life.

We don’t know what his rejected poem was, but we can tell you about another poem connected with the incident. It is by William Topaz McGonagall, who many consider to be the worst poet in the English language. We’re definitely not going to inflict all of it on you, but here’s a snippet:

God prosper long our noble Queen,
And long may she reign!
Maclean he tried to shoot her,
But it was all in vain.

For God He turned the ball aside
Maclean aimed at her head;
And he felt very angry
Because he didn’t shoot her dead.

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 fourteen more posts after this one. You can also find this blog onWordpress, 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 1st is BRILLIANT

Home Grown Saint

Today is Saint David’s Day. Saint David is the patron saint of Wales and he is our only national saint who was actually born here. He could have been born anywhere between 462 and 512. He probably died in the year 589 so he had either a pretty long life for his times or was extraordinarily long lived. Legend tells us that he was over 100 when he died. Facts about his life are sparse, but about five hundred years after his death, a man called Rhygyfarch wrote a sort of biography, which was probably completely made up, that was later elaborated upon by others. But it’s worth mentioning, if only to tell you that he was baptised by Saint Elvis of Munster. We did not know there was a Saint Elvis. The saint restored several monasteries, including Glastonbury and Bath before settling in the Vale of Ross. There, he and his monks lived an extremely ascetic life, drinking only water and eating only bread and herbs. Also, he wouldn’t allow them to use animals to pull their ploughs, he made them do it themselves. Maybe the monks didn’t like this very much, because they tried to poison him. Luckily though, another Irish saint, Saint Scuthyn, rode to his rescue on the back of a sea-monster. He blessed the poisoned bread and Saint David was able to eat it without coming to any harm.

The story of Saint David’s best known miracle is about the time he was preaching to a crowd and they couldn’t really hear him. While he was speaking, a dove landed on his shoulder and the ground on which he was standing was raised up to make a little hill. So everyone could then hear him speak and see him as well. We’ve never been to Wales, but we understand hills are quite plentiful there, so yet another one was probably surplus to requirements. But that’s how you can recognise a picture of Saint David: dove on shoulder, little hill.

The leek became symbolic for the welsh because, in a battle with the Saxons, Saint David advised the soldiers to wear a leek in their hats to distinguish them from the enemy and it seems it helped them win the battle. This may be just another made up story, but there is certainly an odd association in Wales between leeks and war. You’ll find mention of it in Shakespeare’s Henry V and in the fourteenth century Welsh archers used to dress in green and white in honour of the leek. The Welsh flag is also green and white with a red dragon on it. As Daffyd is Welsh for David, we really expected to come up with some association between the saint and Wales’ other national plant, the daffodil, but we found nothing.

We did find an interesting piece of folklore connected with Saint David though. In medieval times people were terribly concerned that they never knew when they were going to die. This was a huge problem as both your body and your soul might be in jeopardy if you were not buried in a proper Christian way. The Welsh people asked Saint David to ask God to give them a sign when a person was about to die so that they could make the proper arrangements. David returned from his payers with a promise from God that whenever a Welsh person died, a light would appear, leading others to the place of their demise. A tall light warned of the death of a man, a smaller one for a woman and a tiny one foretold the death of a child. They are also supposed to vary in colour. Red for a man, pale blue for a woman and light yellow for a child.

It’s hard to imagine a world where an omen of death might be regarded as a good thing. In later times the lights, which are called ‘corpse lights’ became something to be feared. Sometimes they were said to follow the path of a funeral, we came across a story about a man who saw his own corpse candle while out walking and tried to hit it with his walking stick. The light sparked and then reformed itself into a steady glow. He died of course and, as they were carrying his coffin to the church, on the exact spot where he had struck at the light, the bier broke and his coffin fell on the ground. A corpse candle might also appear at the place where an accident would happen. In another story, a light was spotted by a hedge in the corner of a field. It was seen by several people over the course of a year. The day after it disappeared, someone out riding jumped the hedge and was killed on the exact spot the light had been.

Legends about such lights that are associated with a person’s death appear in other countries to. There are stories of corpse candles from the Highlands of Scotland and also from Denmark and, oddly, also in Japan where they are called 'hitodama’ which means human soul.

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 fifteen 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 reposting.

Why February 29th is BRILLIANT

One Giant Leap

Today is a leap day. If today is your birthday then, congratulations, you are a leapling which sounds like a joyous thing to be. February 29th is mostly added to the calendar every four years to make up for the fact that it actually takes our planet a little under 365¼ days to orbit the sun. It may seem to us that it absolutely comes round every four years without question, but that is because of the period in history we are living in. It is not actually the case. Having a leap year every four years makes our calendar drift off by about three days every four hundred years. So leap years do not happen in any year that is divisible by one hundred, unless it is also divisible by four hundred. So, for us the year 2000 was a normal leap year. The last time the leap year was skipped was 1900, which was a very long time ago, and the next one will be 2100, which needn’t trouble many of us.

This might be a little more complicated than you thought, but it is nothing compared to what the Romans had to put up with before Julius Caesar swept in and reformed the calendar. In the early days of Rome, the calendar was only ten months long. It covered the period from March to December. You can still see a remnant of this in the names of our months; September, October, November and December. Septem, octō, novem and decem being Latin for seven, eight, nine and ten. Nobody was very clear what went on in the rest of the year, where we have January and February. But as they were an agricultural people, they didn’t really need to do anything then, so it didn’t matter.

As the population became more urban, they really needed something that would cover the whole year. According to legend, the months of Ianuarius and Februarius were added by Numa Pompilius, the second King of Rome, in around the seventh century BC. This was a bit better, but it left the Romans with a year that was 355 days long, which is way too short. So, rather than having to add an extra day like we do, they occasionally had to add a whole extra leap month. That month was called Mercedonius. To make it even more confusing, it was created by lopping a few days off the end of February and cramming a few more in. So, when this happened, it gave them a year that was 377 or 378 days long.

The decision about whether the leap month was needed lay with the Pontifex Maximus who was the High Priest of Rome. He was supposed to keep an eye on the seasons and decide if they were drifting out of line but unfortunately this is not what happened. The Pontifex Maximus generally had an interest in politics as well, so he could insert the extra month to keep someone he liked, who was in a government position, in office for a bit longer. If he wanted them out quickly he could withhold Mercedonius for another year. Also he might make it a last minute decision, so you never knew if the leap month was coming or not. If you lived anywhere outside of Rome, you had little hope of knowing whatday it was. Add to that the fact that Rome was often at war and might forget about Mercedonius all together for a few years and you can see how difficult it all must have been for everyone.

By the time Julius Caesar reformed the calender in 46 BC things had gone very wrong indeed. As Julius Caesar was also Pontifex Maximus he was able to add the extra month, but it wasn’t enough. He needed to make a giant leap. To bring the calendar year back into alignment with the solar year he needed to add a whole extra two months between November and December which are sometimes referred to as Undecember and Duodecember. 46 BC was 445 days long. It is called ‘the last year of confusion’.

In addition to this he sprinkled an extra ten days throughout the year, bringing the year up to a much more manageable 365 days and added a single leap day every four years. Everyone must have been extremely relieved. So relieved that, after he died in 44 BC they changed the name of Quintilis (the fifth month) to Julius instead. Which is why we now call it July.

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 sixteen 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 reposting.

Why February 28th is BRILLIANT

It’s All About Me

Today is the birthday of Michel de Montaigne, who was born in 1533 in the Aquitaine  region of France. As he was born at the Château de Montaigne, you might gather that he came from a pretty well-to-do family. He is one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. His work was sometimes regarded as a bit odd because he mingled his philosphical ideas with little anecdotes and stories about himself. He will tell you when he has a headache, what his dog is doing or what he can see out of the window. He set his ideas out in a way that was relatable and easy to read, so his work was very popular. Generation after generation have found something thet recognise in his work, from the Enlightenment period through to Romanticism and the Victorians to our own times.

Montaigne had a rather odd upbringing. His father had him fostered out to a peasant family until he was three. The idea was to: “draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help”. When he came back to the château, his father wanted him to learn Latin. Just to make sure he really learned it, he employed a German tutor who spoke no French, so all his lessons were in Latin. Both his parents spoke to him only in Latin and they hired only servants who spoke the language. At the age of six, Montaigne was fluent in Latin. He was awoken every morning by someone playing a musical instrument and a zither player followed him and his tutor around all day, in case he got bored or tired.

In 1539, he was packed off to boarding school, where he got through the whole curriculum by the time he was thirteen. Then he went to university to study law. All this sounds like it could easily have turned Montaigne into a bit of a pompous twit, but it really didn’t. After University, he went to work in the High Court at Bordeaux, where he met his very good friend Étienne de La Boétie. Michel and  Étienne loved each other very much and told each other everything. It was a terrible blow to Michel when  Étienne died of the plague in 1563. It may have been the loss of his friend that first led him to write his great work ‘Essias’ (Essays), his readers taking the place of his lost friend.

On this day in 1571, at the age of 38, Montaigne retired from public life, shut himself up in a tower in his castle and began work on his essays. It took him almost ten years. Oddly, he begins like this: “…I myself am the subject of my book. It is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain, therefore, farewell.” His book has 107 chapters, or essays, on a wide range of subjects and his aim in writing them is to explain what humans are like, and more specifically, what he is like. Some topics are large and serious, others are shorter; he has a chapter where he tells us everything that he knows about thumbs and one where he tells us what he thinks about smells.

His essay 'of Cannibals’ is an interesting one. In his lifetime, the Americas were still a pretty recent discovery and he wasn’t entirely sure it was a good thing for the people who lived there. He wrote about a tribe in Brazil who ate the bodies of their dead enemies. He didn’t see it as such a terrible thing compared with the way that Europeans routinely tortured their enemies in ways that really hurt them a lot while they were still alive. He actually met and spoke to a tribal chief and asked him what he thought of Europe. The chief replied that he was shocked to see so many poor people begging on the street while there were so many others living in big houses. He didn’t understand how everyone put up with it.

Montaigne had a lot to say about education. He thought everyone should learn at their own pace and that a really good tutor would let his student speak first and always allow time for discussion. He felt that a child’s natural curiosity would lead them to teach themselves Too much was made of the use of books and he didn’t like the way all information was presented as facts. He said that if students were not allowed to question anything, they could never truly learn.  Montaigne didn’t think memorising things from books was any kind of education at all. Students who learned this way would grow up to be passive adults who obeyed blindly and questioned nothing. He makes a very good point. Despite being highly educated, he didn’t really like academics at all. He didn’t like the way they saw the ability to reason as a divine gift that put them above, not just animals but often other humans. He thought that they were arrogant and said everyone should remember that even the highest in the land always had to sit on their own bottoms. He also thought they sometimes made things complicated on purpose to make people feel stupid: “…difficulty is a coin the learned conjure with, so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies…”  He didn’t think it was beyond anyone to have wise ideas if we could only stop imagining that other people know better. We are all, he says, richer than we think.

Montaigne is also a man who is interested in pursuing the things that make us happiest rather than the things which will bring us glory, which is why he fits in really well here. He tells us a lovely story about a Greek philosopher and a king. The philosopher asks the king what he will do next. The king replies: 'Conquer Italy’. 'And after that?’ asks the philosopher. 'Conquer Africa’ ’…and then?’ 'Conquer the World’’ 'what will you do after you’ve conquered the World?’ he asks the king. The king replies 'I will sit down and have a glass of wine.’ The philosopher says: 'Why don’t you just sit down now and have a glass of wine?’

This is what I’m going to do now, as it is also my birthday.

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 seemed appropriate to have some sort of countdown. If we make it, there will be seventeen 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 reposting.

Why February 27th is BRILLIANT

Burning Down the House

Winter is almost over and the days are definitely getting a bit longer here. Soon, we’ll be able to look forward to getting home from work before sunset. But, until then, maybe there’s time for just one more ghost story. Today, we want to tell you about Borley Rectory in Essex, a Victorian mansion that was built in 1862. It was built to replace a previous rectory that had burned down in 1841. Borley Rectory became famous as the ‘most haunted house in England’. On this day in 1936, it was destroyed by a fire.

The church at Borley may date, in parts, from the twelfth century. It served a small rural community and not far away, there were the ruins of an old house called Borley Hall which had once been the seat of the Waldergrave family. A local legend spoke of a Benedictine monastery in the area and a monk there who had begun a relationship with a nun from a nearby convent. They were discovered. The monk was hanged and the nun bricked up alive in the walls of her convent. Many people claimed to have seen the ghost of the nun. In fact, she had been seen so often that, in what would become the garden of Borley Rectory, there was an area known as 'Nun’s Walk’.

Almost from the start, people reported hearing unexplained, heavy footsteps in the house. The first incumbent of the rectory, the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull died in 1892 and his son, Harry Bull took over the living. He had a large family of fourteen children and, in 1900, four of his daughters claimed to have seen the nun in the garden. But when they tried to approach her to talk to her, she had disappeared. Others said they had witnessed a coach driven by two headless horsemen.

The second Reverend Bull died in 1928 and Reverend Guy Eric Smith moved in. His wife was clearing out a cupboard in the house when she came across a brown paper package. Opening it, she found a human skull. After that, there were a number of incidents. More footsteps, servants bells ringing even though they had been disconnected and lights appearing in the windows of rooms that were empty. Mrs Smith thought she saw a horse-drawn carriage. In 1929, the couple wrote to a newspaper called the Daily Mirror about their experiences and asked to be put in touch with the Society for Psychical Research. They sent a reporter and also arranged for a psychical researcher called Harry Price to visit them. As soon as he arrived, new phenomena appeared. Stones were thrown and spirit messages were tapped out on the frame of a mirror. These sort of occurrences ceased as soon as Harry left the property. The Smiths left Borley about a month later.

The new Rector, Lionel Foyster, was a distant cousin of the Bulls. He moved in with his wife Marianne and their adopted daughter Adelaide in 1930. Lionel Foyster kept a record of the strange events that happened between then and October 1935 which he sent to Harry Price. Bells rung mysteriously, windows were smashed, stones and bottles were thrown. Writing appeared on the wall that seemed to appeal to Mrs Foyster for help. Adelaide was locked in a room that had no key and Marianne reported that she had been thrown from her bed. Reverend Foyster tried twice to conduct an exorcism, but it was no help. On the first occasion, he was struck in the shoulder by a fist-size stone. These incidents made their way into the Daily Mirror where they attracted the attention of several psychic researchers. The Foysters left Borley in 1935 when Lionel became ill.

Borley Rectory remained empty until 1937, when Harry Price took out a year long rental on the property. He gathered a team of forty-eight researchers who stayed there, mostly at weekends, and reported anything unusual. In 1938, the daughter of one of his researchers conducted a séance in Streatham, London and seemed to make contact with two spirits connected to Borley Rectory. One was a French nun called Marie Lairre who had left her order to marry a member of the Waldergrave family from the now ruined Borley Hall. But she had been murdered in a building that once stood on the site of the rectory. The second was a spirit called Sunex Amures who told her that he would burn down Borley Rectory that very night, March 27th 1938, and that the bones of a murdered person would be found. This did not happen.

On February 7th 1939, the new owner of the Rectory, Captain W H Gregson was unpacking some boxes in the hall when he upset a lighted oil lamp. The fire spread quickly and the house was badly damaged. Insurance investigators concluded that the fire had been started deliberately. A local woman claimed to have seen the nun looking out of one of the building’s upper floor windows during the fire. The house was left a ruin. In 1943, Harry Price returned and conducted a dig in the cellar of the rectory. He found two bones supposed to be that of a young woman. They were buried, with ceremony, in a churchyard, but not at Borley. They refused the remains because they believed them to be the bones of a pig.

Now, we need to tell you that there was no written information about the hauntings at Borley Rectory prior the the involvement of Harry Price. Someone who remembered the Bull family, Louis Mayerling, tells us how much Harry Bull’s fourteen children all loved the story of the ghost nun and exploited it at every opportunity. They claimed to have a magic piano that was played by spirits, but in fact it was one of the children hidden behind it, plucking at the strings with a poker. They found they could set off the servant’s bells by prodding at them through a nearby window. No doubt later occupants found they could do the same.

Certainly the discovery of a skull in a cupboard is a bit weird, but once you realise that the rectory garden had once been part of the cemetery, it’s exactly the sort of thing that might have been dug up by accident and held on to as a curiosity. The Smiths had written to the newspaper hoping that all the phenomena could be properly investigated and reasonably explained. Instead, they got Harry Price, who they rather suspected was responsible for the increased activity during his visit. Price did very well financially when he wrote two books about the hauntings at Borley Rectory. Marianne Foyster later admitted that she had faked some of the psychic phenomena to cover up the fact that she was having an affair with their lodger, Frank Peerless. Peerless himself probably faked some of the others. The house’s final owner, Captain Gregson, had bought the property for £500, but he had it insured for £3500.

Until the house fell down completely, the ghostly nun was still sometimes seen through the windows of the upper storey, even though there was no longer any floor there for her to stand on. With so many people having obviously faked the psychic evidence, it is now impossible to know whether the most haunted house in England was every really haunted at all.

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 seemed appropriate to have some sort of countdown. If we make it, there will be eighteen 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 reposting.

Why February 26th is BRILLIANT

Condimental

Today we want to tell you about William Kitchiner. He is one of those people who’s date of birth is lost in the mists of time, but it was probably some time in the 1770s. We do know that he attended his last party on this day in 1827. It always feels a bit odd to be commemorating a person’s death on this blog, rather than their birth, unless they were completely awful. But we can tell you that he’d had a really lovely evening with his friends.

William Kitchiner was the son of a coal-merchant who left him a large fortune, maybe £60,000 or £70,000. So he could do pretty much what he wanted with his life. He liked music, he was very fond of telescopes, but the things that he really enjoyed most were cooking, sharing his food with friends and writing about it. He wrote a book called ‘The Cook’s Oracle’, in 1822, which was a best seller in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Most of the six hundred or so recipes in his book had been prepared by him personally. He cooked them and he did the washing-up afterwards. He also tested them out at a weekly club he called his 'Committee of Taste’ at his home in Warren Street, Camden. His book contains not only recipes but general  tips on household management: how to preserve foods, look after your pans properly and where to buy the best nutmeg graters. He was also considered rather an eccentric man, particularly in respect to time-keeping.

William’s invitations were highly prized but you needed to be punctual.  He had dinner at five and supper at half past nine. Arrive late and you would probably find you were locked out. His reasoning was that, whilst it was okay for people to be hungry for a little while if the meal wasn’t quite ready, once the dinner was prepared it could easily be ruined if it was not served immediately. He even suggested that families should synchronise all their clocks and watches to make sure this did not happen. If you tried to stay too late, you would suddenly find yourself out on the street at 11pm with your hat and coat. Fail to respond to his invitation within twenty four hours and he would assume that you weren’t coming. Fail to come up with what he considered to be a proper excuse and he would think you were very rude and probably wouldn’t invite you back. He seems to have had only three acceptable excuses: being detained by the law, visiting the doctor or being dead. Interestingly, being dead did not excuse the host from providing the promised meal. In that case, he would have a stand in host in the form of either a friend or his executor. William took his food very seriously.

Manners were terribly important to him, in his book he says: “Good manners have often made the fortunes of many, who have nothing else to recommend them: Ill manners have often marred the hopes of those who have everything else to advance them.” which is very sound advice. As long as you observed his time-keeping rules, behaved well and ate what you were given, it sounds like a fun evening. He was always careful, when introducing his guests to one another, to point out what it was that they had in common and to sit like-minded people together.  We read that, on at least one occasion, he greeted his guests by playing a chorus of 'Hail the Conquering Hero’ on the piano whilst playing the kettle drums with his feet.

He wasn’t particularly bothered about whether his chosen guests were considered respectable and he didn’t much care what people thought of him, so long as they didn’t find him rude. He lived with a woman who wasn’t his wife and they had a son who they had sent to Charterhouse, which in case you don’t know is a very posh school indeed. He was no snob, as we mentioned, he had inherited his fortune from his father, who had begun life carrying coal on the London Docks and he is described as 'splendidly indifferent to social disgrace’ which is lovely. He invited Mary Shelley at a time when most people thought she was a dreadful embarrassing mess. He also invited Theodore Hook, who was renowned for his practical jokes but had been arrested for debt. Our post about him has been the most popular by far, so if your bored today and haven’t read it, you might want to check out ’The Berners Street Hoax’.

Many of his recipes are of his own invention. He had a particular fondness for gravies, sauces and condiments in general. He had a box of 28 condiments, all numbered and ordered, that he kept in his kitchen and that could also be put on the table for people to help themselves. He called it his 'Magazine of Taste’. He had a smaller version that he used to take with him to dinner parties. One of his concoctions, Wow-Wow Sauce, has gained some notoriety, not because it’s nice, but because it appears in Terry Pratchett’s 'Disc World’ novels. His book seems once to have contained a recipe for turtle soup which we couldn’t find as it has been omitted in later editions because it was so difficult and expensive to prepare. Instead he tells us he has used the space for more condiment recipes. There is however a recipe for 'mock’ turtle soup which, if you’ve looked at your 'Alice in Wonderland’ properly, you’ll know is made from the head of a calf. In case you can’t be bothered with all that he also includes a recipe for 'mock’ mock turtle soup.

We weren’t very impressed with his ideas for cooking vegetables. He tells us that carrots will take between 1½ and 2½ hours to cook. For cucumber, he suggests frying it and then boiling it. If you wanted a salad, he recommends a book by someone else entirely. There is definitely one of his vegetable recipes that you will have tried though. He invented potato crisps.

As well as his famous cookery book he also wrote about how to choose the right  opera glasses in a book called 'The Economy of the Eyes’. He also wrote  books titled: 'The Art of  Invigorating and Prolonging Life’, which you should probably ignore because he died at about the age of fifty-one. Also, in its sixth edition, it was published with an extra section 'The Pleasure of Making a Will.’

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.