Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of a flood so devastating it became known as the Great North Sea Flood (or, in Dutch, the Watersnoodramp – the flood disaster). On the night of 31 January 1953, a major storm caused the North Sea to overflow the surrounding low lying coastal areas and to surge upstream, devastating flood plains in England, Scotland, the Netherlands and Belgium. In total, 2,551 […]
Monthly Archives: January 2013
Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 29 January 2013 The Kop is a colloquial name for a number of football stands at stadia across the country. It is a contraction of ‘Spion Kop’, in commemoration of a famous battle in the Boer War. The steep terraces were said to evoke the hill near Ladysmith in South Africa that was the scene of the Battle of Spion Kop in January 1900. Arsenal’s […]
Lasers! The future condensed into a single beam of penetrating light. What did I know about lasers? Next to nothing. What do I know now? A little bit more, including the surprising fact that laser is an acronym. Someone asked me to write about lasers. Ahem. You could easily write everything I knew about lasers on the back of a fag packet. A small fag packet. […]
Reach for the lasers
In an era when the Communist countries of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe sought to rival the west in everything, how did they respond to Eurovision? Did they mockingly highlight its kitsch naffness as demonstration of all that was wrong with capitalism? Or did they manage to create something even more awful behind the Iron Curtain? The Cold War was a period of sustained tension, […]
Singing for Communism
Nikola Tesla should be one of the most famous and celebrated men of all time, an inventor whose discoveries opened the door to electrical power, the second industrial revolution and the birth of the modern age. Yet he was overshadowed even in his own time by men such as Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. Who was Tesla, why was he so important and why is he […]
Tesla’s Egg and the battle for electricity
Today is Day Two of the First Week of Rainful in the CCXXI year of the revolution. We have just left the month of Snowful, even if the British weather has not yet caught up. This is not the start of a piece of pulp science fiction but today’s date as determined by the French Revolutionary Calendar. The republican zeal to remake society was to extend […]
Time for revolution
Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 18 January 2013 The Wimbledon tennis championship is held at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club – and the croquet came first! The All England Croquet Club was founded in 1868 and tennis only became part of the club’s name in 1877, when this was changed to the The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club. It adopted its present […]
In the dark days following the declaration of war with Germany, plans devised in the 1930s to protect the country from the worst excesses of the expected air war were put into action. Children were evacuated from London and other major cities, gas masks were distributed and an air raid protection system was established. But it wasn’t only children who were evacuated at the outbreak of […]
Hide them in caves and cellars
My recent encounter with steam on the London Underground (see Tasting the past) made me wonder what the Victorians made of the new invention. In particular, what was it like for passengers on the platforms, in the stations and on the trains when a full timetable of steam belching locomotives was in action? The choice of words used to describe the early days of the Underground […]
An experience of Hades
On 9 January 1863, the first subterranean railway journey took place between Paddington and Farringdon on the newly completed Metropolitan Underground Railway. A clutch of shareholders, City worthies and assorted VIPs were taken on a ceremonial run and then feasted at a 600-person banquet at Farringdon station. Just over 150 years later, the historic event was recreated as steam powered engines returned to the tunnels to […]
Tasting the past
Archaeological discoveries around the world seem to prove an abiding human obsession about death and the afterlife. From Stone Age burial tombs to the intricate Egyptian funerary text ‘the Book of the Dead’, thinking about what happens when we die is a universal societal trait. The emergence of the Christian concept of Hell builds on earlier ideas and, over the centuries, writers, thinkers and theologians have […]
Hell – a visitor’s guide
Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 10 January 2013 The UK’s state pension age would have to be 80 if it were to be restricted to the same percentage of people as received the original old age pensions provided in 1908, according to a study by Longevitas. Also vaguely interesting that the original pension age was set at 70 – fully two years more than will be reached […]
Today is the day that London Underground celebrates 150 years of operation. On 9 January 1863, the first underground journey took place between Paddington and Farringdon on the Metropolitan Railway. Regular passenger services started the next day, and Londoners have gone underground in their millions since then. But is the Metropolitan Line a true ‘underground’ line? And how did its northern most terminus end up just […]
London meets the Met
In August, I sang the praises of Andrew Martin’s book ‘Underground, Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube’. At the end of that post I promised a follow up covering the Americanisation of the lexicon of travel, Brunel and the war winning boots and state funerals on the Tube. Six months is no time at all in a blog, so here (finally) is the follow up! […]
Going underground II
Vaguely Interesting Snippets | 3 January 2013 In Underground, Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube the author, Andrew Martin, states that 1920s carriages from the London Underground were given a second life as changing rooms next to playing fields in southern England. The changing fashions of Londoners are vividly depicted in the returns to the London Underground’s lost property offices. In the 1930s, some 250,000 […]
As New Year’s Day dawns in the United Kingdom, people across the world have either greeted the start of 2013 or, across the Atlantic, are still waiting to celebrate. Celebrating the start of a new year is a common and ancient custom, even if mankind cannot entirely agree when the New Year starts and how to welcome it. This post looks at some of the more […]