Victoria’s Daughters and the Fine Line of Time
Many might think the complete and definitive history of the Victorian age has already been written; after all, there have been plenty of books and television documentaries filling the shelves and schedules since the old Queen died exactly 114 years ago today. Well, it can be written now, for last week the final person in Britain born during that age shuffled off this mortal coil. Despite the fact that Philip Larkin playfully declared the last Hanoverian on the British throne died in 1963, it’s official in 2015; finally, the reign of Queen Victoria passes out of living memory and into the same timeless realm as the Tudor era or any other past phase of these islands’ long and winding road to where we are now.
It’s probably doubtful that the name of Ethel Lang will rank alongside that of Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Gladstone, Disraeli or any of the other eminent Great Victorians; but it should at least be a significant footnote, if only by virtue of the fact that Ethel Lang was the last of Victoria’s daughters, born in May 1900, died in January 2015. To anyone born in the middle of the twentieth century (or thereabouts), this fact is a sobering thought on the passage of time. My great-grandmother, who died when I was about eighteen, was a Victorian and my memories of her are still very vivid; I grew up watching characters on ‘Coronation Street’ such as Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell and Albert Tatlock, who could all be classified as Victorians; I remember ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ in the early 1970s, with old Jack Warner still pounding the beat, despite being born in 1895. In fact, the first twentieth century Prime Minister not to have been born during the reign of Queen Victoria was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who didn’t acquire the keys to No.10 until as late as 1963. Whether we were aware of it or not, those of us who arrived in the immediate post-war decades were born into a country in which vast swathes of the population still had one foot in the previous century.
I recall watching a documentary about Queen Victoria’s 1897 Diamond Jubilee back in the late 1990s; my mother gave me a coin as a child, one that marked the event and one that her own grandmother had saved in 1897 and passed on to her. On this documentary, there were quite a few eye-witnesses to the celebrations of the time interviewed on the programme, all gone now, of course. Then I have to check myself and remember this programme aired almost twenty years ago, and that any teenager I pass on the street today was probably just a twinkle in the plumber’s eye when I watched it. Time is a bugger for moving the goalposts of perception.
Harriette Wilson was one of the leading Regency Courtesans who fell on hard times and decided to write her memoirs when strapped for cash; she contacted all the prominent beaus who had enjoyed her services during her heyday and offered to blank their names if they paid her a sufficient fee; the Duke of Wellington refused and uttered his famous riposte – ‘Publish and be damned!’ She did publish, yet outside of the fascinating anecdotes contained within Wilson’s recollections, for me one of the most intriguing aspects of my own copy is the introduction, penned when the book was republished in 1957. In it, the editor Lesley Branch (whose age in 1957 is not specified) mentions an old lady she’d known as a child in Brighton, one who remembered meeting one of the Prince Regent’s mistresses when she herself had been a child. It brought to mind Stephen Fry’s story of when he shook the hand of the legendary broadcaster Alistair Cooke and the ‘Letter from America’ presenter explained Fry had just shaken the hand that had itself shaken the hand of Bertrand Russell, and Bertrand Russell’s aunt had danced with Napoleon.
Russell himself is a good example of someone who bridged different eras of history. Born in 1872, just two years after the death of Dickens, he died in 1970, aged 97, the same year The Beatles split-up. I watched an archive interview with him from the 1960s around twenty-five years ago, and in it Russell spoke of his clear memories of his aged grandfather, who had been born in the eighteenth century. So, we have a man speaking via the mass medium of the late twentieth century who had spent time in the company of a man who had lived during the age of the French Revolution. Winston Churchill, who died just under a year short of his 90th birthday in 1965, also bestrode two vastly contrasting periods – participating in the last cavalry charge of the British Army (the Sudan in 1898) and overseeing the British development of the atomic bomb. Thus, Churchill – himself a devoted scholar of history – played a part in a military manoeuvre connecting him to the likes of Agincourt, and also witnessed the birth of the era we all reside in now. He didn’t finally resign as Prime Minister until 1955, the year James Dean died.
More recently, around five years ago, I watched a programme about Thomas Hardy, in which the presenter spoke to an old lady who had met Hardy as a child when acting in a stage production of one of his nineteenth century novels; Hardy died in 1928. It might sound like I spend most of my time watching television, which I actually don’t; but any living link to the past never ceases to capture my imagination, possibly because I’m closer to fifty than forty and the nights are drawing-in. I once thought that if my eight-year-old niece lives to be 100, she’ll have memories of my now-deceased grandfather, who fought in the Second World War which, by then, will have taken place over 160 years previously; that’s like me living to 100 and having memories of meeting someone who’d fought in the Boer War; I may well have done, for all I know.
I used to do the shopping for a housebound old lady (now sadly no longer with us) and she would regale me with tales of running to air-raid shelters as a schoolgirl and how her older brother had been present at the Nuremberg Trials; but perhaps her most chilling childhood recollection was remembering hearing the sound of a tolling bell emanating from a nearby prison when a hanging was scheduled to take place, echoing across the vicinity like a sonic Tardis straight from nineteenth century Newgate. She passed this on to me in the best oral tradition and you are free to pass it on to someone else, as I have no one to pass it on to. It will remain ‘present tense’ as a consequence.
If anyone says history is irrelevant and has no bearing on today, they may as well be a goldfish. John Lydon once said the past is as relevant as the future because both happen in the present – an obvious observation, but a truism many a politician would be wise to take heed of. Time is a continuum we are all woven into as much as our ancestors and those who will come after us, something that makes every age within touching distance; dividing time into days, weeks, months, years, decades and centuries could be regarded as a convenience that enables us to put time in some sort of manageable order, no more than placing the receipts from paying our respective energy and telecommunication suppliers in separate folders. At the time of writing, I am now approximately an hour older than I was when I began penning this post, and at the point at which you are reading it, I am approximately four days older.
Is that the theme from ‘The Twilight Zone’ I hear?
Petunia Winegum
-
January 22, 2015 at 9:48 am -
“the British purchase of the atomic bomb”: we didn’t purchase it, we made it ourselves.
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:16 am -
‘Purchase’ shall therefore become ‘Development’. In the land of the Blog, the edit button is God.
-
January 22, 2015 at 6:11 pm -
” In the land of the Blog, the edit button is God.”
I, for one, have always-well since the invention of the Intrawebbythingy- what The Almighty ,upon Mount Sinai, would have given for an ‘Edit’ Button .or even just masonry grade Tip-Ex . Spell check might have also found Divine favour. But at least the Lord had no MS-Paperclip to contend with…
*Bing* “Hey, it looks like you’re writing a list of fundamental laws for humanity, can I help with that?”
-
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 10:03 am -
What an interesting article. I have long believed that we ignore history at our peril and have contempt for those believe that those who seek to erase it.
-
January 22, 2015 at 10:05 am -
” Time is a bugger for moving the goalposts of perception.”
That quote will accompany me in my endeavours, ponderings and musings this day.
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:24 am -
Hahah! I have a small army of Oompa Loompas that churn these quotes out for me.
-
January 22, 2015 at 1:44 pm -
January 22, 2015 at 3:58 pm -
The First Nation Black Persons Of Restricted Growth Bong Bong Bark Eating Alliance has deemed your post racist and DEMANDS that you delete it forthwith. Please contact their Solicitors in deepest darkest Islington to arrange reparation payments of ”
green caterpillars, beetles, eucalyptus leaves” (NB Payment in Chocolate will NOT be acceptable as it was the currency of our slavery, the food of our slave masters).{for those not up on their 70s children’s literature the Oompas were: “a tribe of 3,000 amiable black pygmies who have been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.”
-
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 10:40 am -
My father ( born 1907) was taken as a small boy to listen to an old lady who would retell the eyewitness account,which she had heard as a young girl, of the arrival of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his army in Derby in 1745.
Father had a very retentive memory. He recalled that there were no currants for the Christmas pudding in 1912. When he asked why, he was told “because the Turks are fighting the Montenegrins in the mountains”. He didn’t know who they were but looked it up later when he could read well.
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:24 am -
January 22, 2015 at 2:10 pm -
Currant affairs have never interested me.
-
January 22, 2015 at 2:30 pm -
Is there a raisin for your lack of interest?
-
January 22, 2015 at 2:52 pm -
I dont get it. Why wouldnt the Turks let the raisins through?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Did the Sultana get jealous? -
January 22, 2015 at 2:59 pm -
Mainly the date – I couldnt give a flaming fig what somebody had for pudding in 1907…
-
January 22, 2015 at 3:41 pm -
Don’t be such a Corinthian.
-
January 22, 2015 at 5:26 pm -
Dont be such a Doric
-
-
-
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 2:11 pm -
I’m guessing they had goose that year too, then…?
-
January 22, 2015 at 8:24 pm -
My father was also born in 1907, his father was born in 1859, and one of my great grandmothers was born in 1817, which of course was only two years after the Battle of Waterloo, and before the advent of railways. I can recall my grandmother saying that she remembered her father commenting that people were talking about the possibility of horseless carriages, but that it would never happen. It’s fascinating to think of how much history has taken place in so few generations.
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 10:48 am -
Fascinating stuff, but I think Ethel was perhaps a granddaughter of Victoria’s: she was 81 in 1900.
My father, born in 1899, had a sketchy memory as a two-year old of Victoria’s funeral. He always said he recalled it in black & white (but he was quite a joker so that’s probably untrue).
-
January 22, 2015 at 4:42 pm -
Perhaps he saw the film of the funeral, not the real thing.
-
January 22, 2015 at 4:50 pm -
Possibly he was telling truth, judging by the photos her funeral was a very monochrome event; white draped coffin, white plumes anywhere you could get one and dark clothes. Any memory from a child that age will be as much ‘wishful thinking’ as factually correct.
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:07 am -
I had a great gran who lived to 93. She wore black button sided boots and all black long skirts and a black shawl. She liked me to read the newspapers to her and discus the news. I regret the not asking her more about her life. She had 12 children, mostly sons. Some of whom died in the flu pandemic that swept the world during the first world war. At the very end of her life she was homeless, and slept in an armchair at my gran’s house over the street. My mum and I used to visit her in her digs on our way back from town, and take her cakes and change her bed. Bring away clothing and bedding to wash. I don’t think I could learn from her anything momentous, but it did strike me, as a child, what a hard life she had lived. So I have a connection to an ancestor who lived a hard life, as most poorer women did. Nearly all her children died before her, her husband died years before her. She spoke of wars and Kitchener. She ended up homeless, but at least some of her relatives were kindly to her. She was a different kind of ‘survivor’ to the ones we have now, who have survived unwanted strokes and hugs in the distant past.
-
January 22, 2015 at 1:07 pm -
” She was a different kind of ‘survivor’ to the ones we have now, who have survived unwanted strokes and hugs in the distant past”
+1
I recall one elderly German woman mentioning being raped/sexually assaulted as a refugee hiding in a cellar by a marauding russian soldier…and I do mean she ‘mentioned’ it. Like she mentioned her baby dying in her arms or being beaten by her father for daring to play ‘negro’ music on her guitar (whose sole purpose was to glorify God). Mentioned in the same tone i might recount knocking my front teeth out on a stone step at school, mentioned as something bad that happened but not TRAUMA requiring compensation.
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:17 am -
I can remember a woman being interviewed on the radio whose grandfather had fought at Trafalgar. My recollection is it was while driving and I passed my driving test in 1981, but it may have been slightly earlier. He had been a cabin boy or some such as a very young teenager, had fathered the woman’s father at an advanced age and she was born when her father was also quite elderly.
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:31 am -
I remember once hearing an interview from the 1940s with an elderly man who had been present at the Duke of Wellington’s funeral as a small boy. Made me wish recorded sound had been invented a little earlier.
-
January 22, 2015 at 8:15 pm -
You may be interested in this, Petunia, that is if you don’t know about it already:
-
January 22, 2015 at 9:56 pm -
Perhaps the closest thing to a recording of Queen Victoria’s mother, Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saarfeld (1786-1861), trying to speak English!
From Queen Victoria – A Personal History by Christopher Hibbert
“She spoke no English and was slow to learn it: later in England she was to have her speeches written out for her phonetically – ‘Ei hoeve tu regrétt, biing aes yiett so littl cônversent in thie Inglisch, lenguetsch, uitsch obleitsches miy tu seh, in averi fiu words, theat ei em möhst grêtful for yor congratuleschen’.” -
January 22, 2015 at 11:50 pm
-
-
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:44 am -
About 4 years ago, just after the birth of my Granddaughter, my Mother-in-Law died suddenly and unexpectedly. No one had known she was ill, not even herself. Her entire body a Roquefort of Metastasis. Although I broke just about every traffic law in the Benelux and Germany we didn’t make it back home in time to say for my wife to say ‘auf wiedersehen’. Sitting with a distraught Father-in-Law , surrounded by the keening and weeping of the Women folk of the clan, listening to him recount in his grief the history of their marriage I became acutely aware that with the death of my Mother-in-Law a whole chunk of family oral history had been deleted and of just how crappy our wet ware is as a long term storage medium.
Mother-in-law was born in a country that no longer exists, into a culture that was eradicated when it’s population were ethnically cleansed. Unfortunately she was born into a family of raving pietists and as such the daily diary she kept was Christo-centric to say the least-heavy on faith and doctrine but a little light on mundane detail. Whilst photographs weren’t forbidden to the flock, they were a ‘vanity’ and in 1930s East Prussia still a luxury item….few photographs survived the exodus.
Determined that my Granddaughter should one day at least have the opportunity to hear of her foreign roots (poor mite is a mix of Prussian, Hessian, Dutch and Brit), I started recording Father-in-Law on my cellphone. Luckily Father-in-Law , despite being 80+, was (and is) of sound mind and a garrulous nature (‘stuck with a gramophone needle’ as my own Nan would have). I also scanned in every document of family history we found going through Mother-in-Laws papers. http://i61.tinypic.com/34ta5oy.jpg
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:50 am -
Nice take on the broader import of a relatively minor news event that brought to mind a quote and sparked two thoughts
First the quote.’But you have gone now, all of you that were so beautiful when you were quick with life. Yet not gone, for you are still a living truth inside my mind’ (From How Green was my Valley ….Pace Anna I believe you are no admirer of things Welsh but there are the odd things that surface occasionally from Wales).
As to thoughts?
The first a little frivolous perhaps and that is I wonder how Harriette Wilson’s might be ‘sexed up’ today if it was to get maximum impact and maximum sales.
The second perhaps a little more profound and that is that for all the ‘buzz’ of events, there are certain constants that seem to me to ultimately transcend historical events …..and gosh do I betray too much of myself as an optimist in saying that decency (or whatever term one might use) seems to endure longer than its alternative (whatever that might be) which seem to me to fade.
Neither thought of great significance other than to me personally (the quote though is by no means bad) but a thanks due to you Uncle Petunia for taking the trouble to spark them in me-
January 22, 2015 at 3:35 pm -
” the odd things that surface occasionally from Wales”
Some good things do come out of the Wales…out of the top left hand corner comes the Merioneth and Llantisilly Railway for example.
-
January 22, 2015 at 4:10 pm -
The M.4 is another fine example…..
-
January 22, 2015 at 6:04 pm -
Now Now Anna Its the Scots that say the finest sight a Scotsman sees is the road to England
-
-
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 12:36 pm -
On the verge of becoming part of history myself, I’m fascinated by the subject of time. I’ve often wondered whether time/space contains a dimension in which everything that has ever happened is preserved and is accessible if only we knew how. One of the accounts of so-called “time-slips” is the famous “Moberly-Jourdain incident” described in Wikipedia. A more recent example is that of the women who claimed to have heard the sounds of the Dieppe raid years after it took place – https://borderlandsciences.org/journal/vol/46/n06/Gaddis_on_Phantom_Armies.html All of which suggests that J B S Haldane may have been right in his suspicion that “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose…”.
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:56 pm -
Very interesting. Reminds me of stories from London Underground employees who claim to have heard screams on Balham Station before they realised 60-odd people were crushed to death there during the war in a rush to escape what they mistakenly believed to be an air-raid.
-
January 23, 2015 at 4:29 pm -
Ever come across J W Dunne?
Aircraft engineer & time-theorist?
Sounds familiar (oops)
-
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 2:49 pm -
My Grandad tried to sign up multiple times & was turned away repeatedly when they found out he was a machine engineer, as his skills were too important. He even lied on the form at one stage, mainly due to the pressure he felt from the scolds of the time. Each time he was told to get back to work when they found out about his skills
He joined a specialist task force of engineers who were responsible for getting bombed factories up and running as quickly as possible. I remember him telling me stories about working in factories with huge (500lb?) bombs still hanging in the rafters with the Royal Engineers bomb disposal men still working on them. He had enormous respect for them.
His biggest engineering triumph was the construction of the pumps for the Admiralty IX floating dry dock which required four six foot flywheels which had to be engineered to within a thousandth of an inch. Normally they would be engineered in situ & could be tuned accordingly, but these needed to be interchangeable for whatever reason. Everybody said it couldnt be done with the engineering methods of the time, but he took on the challenge & got it well under tolerance. It was the biggest floating dock ever built & was sailed out to support the fleet in the South Pacific. Just as the Japanese invaded. Therefore they had to scuttle her before they had even taken the stickers off. He was more or less able to laugh about it though.
I can remember going around the imperial war museum with him where he would look at a torpedo & tell me that somebody gave him five bob for telling showing them how to countersink the bolts here, or fit a left hand threaded screw there.
-
January 22, 2015 at 3:59 pm -
The (recently) late Sir Patrick Moore met Orville Wright, first with powered flight, the first man in space Yuri Gagarin , the first man to set foot on the moon and Albert Einstein. It is amazing what some people have lived through.
-
January 22, 2015 at 5:09 pm -
I met Sir Winston Churchill a couple of years before he died when his granddaughter, who was a friend of mine, took me to have tea with him. I was twelve at the time and had never met anyone as old as he was then. He was sitting up in bed like a huge bald baby, sucking on a soggy, unlit cigar, and insisted on kissing me goodbye too when we left.
-
January 22, 2015 at 6:04 pm -
Wasn’t one of Churchill’s granddaughters involved behind the scenes at Glastonbury?
-
January 22, 2015 at 7:16 pm -
Yes. Arabella Churchill was involved in Glastonbury from the beginning but she wasn’t behind the scenes. She ran all the kids’ activities during the festival.
-
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 5:18 pm -
“If anyone says history is irrelevant and has no bearing on today, they may as well be a goldfish. John Lydon once said the past is as relevant as the future because both happen in the present – an obvious observation, but a truism many a politician would be wise to take heed of. ”
Correct; I heartily agree. History never repeats itself as such, but the conditions of human life as such have been the same for all of recorded history, because “human nature” remains the same. Our philosophies and belief systems may evolve, but that is not the same thing. All the hate, all the greed, all the selfishness, and all the courage and self sacrifice too. Do you want to know about politics? Would you talk to Peter Mandelson, or watch Wolf Hall? Both, maybe. Tell me that Tony Blair was a better politician than Julius Caesar and I would laugh out loud. Caesar, by the way, was personally brave in a way which Blair could never comprehend, let alone match.One particular issue that gets my goat is that cliche that “Britain is a country of immigrants”. Yes, and no. First, genetic research suggests that large amounts of the population were, until recently, still rooted in the “indigenous” pre Roman population.
Second, it is true that there have been times of significant immigration, but only rarely. The Huguenots were not statistically important. The Britons were not actually that pleased with the incursion of the Saxons, who took their name from the seax, a long bladed knife used in close quarter battle. The Saxons, weren’t that keen on the incursions of the Norsemen, who did not come bearing gifts from IKEA, but battle axes and fire. The Anglo-Danish state was not that keen on the arrival of those other Norsemen, the Normans, who killed their political leaders in one fell day and then imposed tyranny (actually, another statistically unimportant class.) How many today remember the “harrowing of the North” in which William the Conqueror/Bastard laid waste the North of Britain to put down rebellion. Tens of thousands, possibly hundres of thousands, died by fire, sword and starvation as an act of deliberate terror.
As I say, people should know their history.
Here endeth the rant.
G the M
-
January 22, 2015 at 6:08 pm -
Gildas ….Please tell Anna the Welsh and Scots are the most British of the British !!!!!
-
January 22, 2015 at 6:15 pm -
“How many today remember the “harrowing of the North”
I see a UKIP Election poster in the making…posh Harrow educated Europhiles (ie plastique French)….
-
January 23, 2015 at 10:46 am -
That is true at least as far as the Welsh are concerned . The indigenous British were pushed back into the west, or at least that is where the British culture survived. Many fled overseas (hence Brittany). From memory, the British name for themselves was something along the line of meaning “fellow countrymen” and it too the form of a word along the lines of Cumru or Comry – hence in “welsh” Wales is Cymru. Similarly, hence Cumbria. The term “Welsh” by the way stems from the English word “Wylich” and it means something highly derogatory, akin to the use of the “n” word.
As for the Scots, they have always been independent, although most of the Scottish kings did pledge loyalty to King Athelstan at the fortress of Dunnottar, after he launched a massive invasion.-
January 23, 2015 at 3:32 pm -
Gotta say Gildas if the Welsh exemplify the height of true general British Culture then immigration has been no bad thing !!!! but actually the high culture of just about any culture (Australian Aboriginal even) is worth some respect perhaps because I detect synchronicity though whether that is wishful thinking on my part I am not sure
-
-
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 5:22 pm -
I said hello to Frank Bruno in the pound shop in Leighton Buzzard a few years back.
I was also just behind Tottenham Ayatollah Abu Izzadeen in the check-in queue to a flight to Algiers in 2010. -
January 22, 2015 at 5:29 pm -
I recall my grandfather taking me to the circus regularly when I was young. His love of the circus no doubt stimulated when he went to see an American chap performing in a touring Wild West show, the chap was known as Buffalo Bill. Invalided out of the navy during WW1, he would not talk of the war like so many of that generation, including a great-uncle who died of wounds 30 years after being gassed. Now a broken fingernail is cause for complaint and compensation, but amongst the memories of our recent ancestors are the workhouses and real poverty, disease, hunger and I know they considered themselves lucky to have survived to better times.
-
January 22, 2015 at 5:39 pm -
I was amazed to find in a back street of Bergerac, the French equivalent of a ‘Blue Plaque’ saying ‘Buffalo Bill’ stayed here during his European tour. Heaven only knows what he made of Bergerac!
-
January 22, 2015 at 6:02 pm -
“Heaven only knows what he made of Bergerac!”
He shaved off his facial hair, put on a ton of ‘slap’ and joined the “Bureau des étrangers” ?
-
January 22, 2015 at 10:03 pm -
My great grandfather saw Buffalo Bill Cody’s show. There’s a photo online of a group of red indians in full regalia standing on rocks at the beach.
-
-
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 8:31 pm -
I had grandparents born in 1880, parents born in the 1910s, and me in the 1950s – unfortunately with that wide generation-spread, the old folk died in the 1960s before I was old enough to plunder their knowledge and experiences of such hugely different times, something which I have regretted ever since as my interest in history developed. Sadly, very little formal recorded history is about the normal folk, so the real memories of long survivors are so precious and should be captured whenever possible.
One staggering thing about Ethel Lang is that her daughter is still hale and hearty at 91 – you can imagine the looks she got recently when she told people “I’m just going to see my mum”.
-
January 23, 2015 at 12:36 am -
Had the same kind of experience. The only grandparent (mother’s mother) I knew was born in 1880 or 1881 – nobody could remember and there weren’t birth certificates in those days. My parents were born in 1906 (father) and 1910,( mother); I was born in 1951, but my father died in 1953, so I never got an opportunity to speak to him. My grandmother had 12 brothers and sisters, some of whom lived close to us in Manchester. One, my great-uncle Victor had volunteered to fight in WW I, and had been in the RASC; said he had driven a tank, and my mother belatedly told me that he had been one of the first cinema projectionists in Manchester; he died when I was 18. I had his 1914-15 star, but lost it in a house fire in 1998. I wish I’d talked to him more, also another great uncle, who was in a tunneling company. There are so many opportunities lost, but when you are young, you are always looking to the future.
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 9:48 pm -
“Last of Victoria’s daughters.” Pet old thing, don’t you mean Granddaughters? Surely Queen Vicky wasn’t still popping out the next generation that late in life?
Yes, I know you meant it figuratively. ‘Born during Victoria’s reign’. Perhaps “Last daughter of Victoria’s reign” would have been clearer?
Yours pedantically,
Bill
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:01 pm -
Surely William would be more appropriate and correct than Bill?
-
January 22, 2015 at 11:12 pm -
Tsk. Petunia, really. Play the ball, not the man.
Bill is my chosen casual sobriquet. William, I find, is a tad starchy and formal.
-
January 23, 2015 at 2:39 pm -
A lot of Victorians were reputed to be very uptight and formal. I speculate that it may have been the result of too much starch in their bloomers.
-
-
-
-
January 22, 2015 at 10:44 pm -
You might find Gilead by Marilynne Robinson an interesting read. Set in the 60’s the main character is an elderly chap who vividly recalls his grandfather’s tales of the American Civil war. It really brought home to me why and how wounds that appear historical can linger on, barely healing with the passage of time.
-
January 23, 2015 at 11:47 am -
I now think I am spending a lot of my time in the previous century; times change so quickly.
Great Great Grandmother Opus was born in the Eighteenth century, yet I missed her youngest son (my great Grandfather by a mere twelve years).
In about 1962 I recall my mother’s father talking – as if he were talking about an event that happened yesterday, of perhaps the most traumatic event in his life – he was recalling having as a nine year old boy taken the day’s copy of The Telegraph up to his mother who was in bed, and on coming down stairs heard a scream from her: he rushed back up, enquiring ‘what’s wrong Mother’. The Telegraph had recorded the death of his father; his father’s employers The Royal Navy having overlooked first reporting to her the tragic news. I had been – vividly – transported back to 1883.
-
January 23, 2015 at 12:12 pm -
Sibelius is an interesting bridge too, as Donald McLeod explained when he was Composer of the Week.
Sibelius was born in the year that Schubert’s unfinished symphony was first performed, and died in the year that Jailhouse Rock was released.
-
January 23, 2015 at 2:29 pm -
On a similar note, here is a clip from American TV in 1956 featuring an elderly man who was by then the last living witness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln Assassination Eyewitness (Feb 9, 1956): http://youtu.be/I_iq5yzJ-Dk
-
January 23, 2015 at 4:22 pm -
I had a Great Aunt, who died in the early 1950’s … when she was a teenager, she “went into service” & as a result was present (probably as the most junior maid) in the British Embassy in Paris … in 1870. She would never, ever tell anyone how she acquired that bayonet!
One of my uncles told the authorities in 1915 that he was a year younger than his older brother (true) & was therefore 18 (false) – he was at the battle of Cambrai, emigrated to Australia in 1922, volunteered to “have another go at Jerry” in 1939, fought in Iran & Syria, went back to Singapore, – just in time for the IJA to arrive. He & some mates buggered off to Sumatra & were not captured until April 1942. He survived “The Railway”.
I’ve also worked with people who had interesting numeric tattooes on the insides of their left wrists, one of whom had also been in the Gulag (!)All of this gives one an interesting perspective on history – & yes I can remember exactly what I was doing on 22/11/1963.
-
January 23, 2015 at 5:55 pm -
Paris 1870 – interesting place to be at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War!
-
January 26, 2015 at 4:23 pm -
And the siege & the second siege ….
-
-
-
January 25, 2015 at 2:33 pm -
“one of whom had also been in the Gulag”
Yes indeed, there were some unfortunates whose fates included both those delightful systems.
-
January 28, 2015 at 1:57 pm -
I enjoyed reading an article written by a journalist who wrote about his first editor’s favourite stories, which concerned an old lady who said that her first husband’s first wife’s first husband knew Oliver Cromwell and liked him well. A very wide disparity in their ages at each marriage allowed this memory to propagate.
{ 75 comments… read them below or add one }