I hope that you will all forgive me for being a bit liberal in my usage of the word book here, as while The Illustrated London News is technically a periodical, when you’re faced with 281 volumes of bound copies it’s easy to forget that they aren’t technically a book.
The Illustrated London News first appeared on Saturday 14 May 1842, as the world’s first illustrated weekly news magazine and ceased publication in 2003. It is an incredible resource for anyone looking to get a view for the past with contemporary images from the time mixed in with articles of the day. Anyone looking to get some insight into the topical issues of the day would be hard pressed to go any further than this.
We live in a time of international terrorism. London is seen as a prime target and is on high alert for such an attack. There have been attacks and bombings in London before of course, especially during the IRA ‘Troubles’.
But it was one hundred years ago on Friday 19 January 1917 when occurred London’s largest ever loss of life through explosion. However, this was not due to enemy action, even though it took place during a World War – it was home grown and totally avoidable.
One of the main industries in Silvertown at the time was the Brunner Mond chemical factory, which produced soda crystals and caustic soda. However the caustic soda plant had been closed down in 1912 and was standing idle. In 1915, this was “practically requisitioned” by the Government agency, the Explosives Supply Department who wanted to use it to purify the explosive trinitrotoluene (TNT) for use in ammunition. This was despite the fact that the plant was located in a heavily populated area, which also had other volatile chemical and refining industries, a point stressed by the Brunner Mond directors who were opposed to the plans. The government thought that the production of TNT was safe as long as the purification process (to be undertaken here) was kept separate from the manufacture of raw TNT. Consequently the processes did not have to comply with the regulations of the 1875 Explosives Act.
Production started in September 1915 on a 24-hour basis, employing three shifts. The protracted battles of trench warfare were consuming vast quantities of ammunition (and lives), while making little tactical advance.
The memorial to the Silvertown explosion. This is located below the Docklands Light Railway near Pontoon Dock station.
On the night of 19 January 1917, the inevitable happened and there was an explosion at 6.52 pm. It is believed that this was caused by a fire in the melt pot room. The reason for the fire breaking out was not established, as the witnesses who raised the alarm were killed in the explosion. It should not have been unexpected though. Only in the previous month, the plant had been visited by a government inspector, whose report stated that
“It is perfectly clear that the management at Silvertown did not pay sufficient attention to the explosion risk attached to the handling of TNT.”
In particular he reported that there were no precautions in place against friction sparks. The explosion was so severe that it destroyed the factory, other local factories, the local fire station (which was opposite the factory and had only opened in 1914) and damaged thousands of homes. The explosion could be heard 100 miles away. Sixty-nine people were killed in the explosion with four more subsequently dying from their injuries. Another ninety-eight people were seriously injured and more than nine hundred suffered minor injuries.
A plaque in Postman’s Park in the City of London commemorates a policeman who was on duty outside the factory when the fire broke out. He stayed at his post to warn people of the dangers of explosion, but later lost his life in hospital from the injuries he received.
The loss of life in the Silvertown disaster would be treated as a major scandal today, but unfortunately then it was just another statistic among the countless lives lost already in the Great War and those still to die before peace came in 1918. With no radio, television, internet or social media in those days, it was far easier for the government to conceal bad news. There was postal and press censorship, designed to prevent contact with the enemy and to ensure that the conflict was presented to the public in a pro-Allied light.
This censorship is illustrated by using the usual research routes. To see how news was reported at the time of an event, one can search newspaper archives such as the Times Digital Archive (log in with your library card number). However, searching for Silvertown explosion or Silvertown disaster brings no results. Neither does a similar search in The Illustrated London News. Even searching Gale News Vaultfor Silvertown 1917 only brings up an article in The Times from 1925, appealing for funds to rebuild St. Barnabas Church which had been destroyed in the explosion.
Searching the Times Digital Archive by date, on 20 February there is only a brief one line report that
“there had been an explosion in a munitions factory near London, and that considerable loss of life and damage to property were feared.”
A fuller report is given on Monday 22 February (on page 9) but again it refers to ‘The explosion near London’ and does not state the actual location or name of the factory concerned. There are no illustrations. It is interesting to note though, that while there is some ‘positive spin’ in the reporting the paper does make some critical comments about the slack enforcement of safety regulations by the authorities.
The dearth of contemporary reports, while interesting from an historical point of view, means that we have to look elsewhere for more information. One book that contains quite a bit about the explosion isLondon’s Disasters: from Boudicca to the banking crisis, by John Withington (pictured above), available from your library.
So this year Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her 90th birthday. Or rather birthdays, as while her actual birthday is today, 21 April (she was born in 17 Bruton Street at 2.40am on 21 April 1926), her formal birthday with all the pomp and ceremony is on the second Saturday in June. This year there will be a weekend of celebrations, such as the Patron’s lunch on Sunday 12 June.
But as the title says – what was said and what happened on the day itself? Using our online newspaper archives it is possible to have a glimpse of the news as it would have been read by the people of 1926.
First of all, the time of the then Princess Elizabeth’s birth was important for the daily newspapers. Normally an event which occurred on the 21st would be reported on the 22nd once it has had a chance to be written and printed. However, because the event took place so early in the morning it made it into the headlines of the day!
Check the Times Digital Archive to see how the news was reported (log in with your library card number). You could limit your searches to just 21 and 22 April, or simply browse through each day’s newspaper. Then take a look at some of the other papers, for example The Guardian – different publications can give you different types of story and varying headlines. Some, such as The Daily Mirror (available through UK Press Online), will have pictures.
Think about your search terms; which words will you use? Try out different ones. Remember that the baby born that day had not yet been named, was not yet Queen or even the heir to the throne. Here are a few tips for possible keywords: granddaughter, daughter, birth, Duchess of York, and royal are just a few.
From my searches I discovered that The Times managed to get an announcement into its 21 April ‘News in Brief’ section, and the next day mentions that the princess is third in line for succession to the throne (an important fact, as we would find out later on).
The Daily Mirror provides us with a front page image and headline the day after the birth. Disappointingly there is not much from the Illustrated London News but there are one or two images. The Guardian also provides a picture and headlines “The birth of a princess” and also reminds us that she is “The King’s first granddaughter”.
Lots of stories to explore! Why not go further and see what is written about each of the birthdays and life events over her 90 years? You can read more in one of the many books featured in our new book list celebrating the Queen’s birthday (pictured above), and find dates and events to then research in the newspapers. Be imaginative with your search terms; you never know what you might discover!
Spurred on by spotting Charles Babbage’s (1791–1871) Green Plaque on a building at 1a Dorset Street, Marylebone, I began to investigate the life of this computing pioneer, who began working on the idea of inventing automatic calculating machines at this address from the 1830s. This work followed his invention of a ‘difference engine’, a fixed-function calculator which used existing mathematical formulae to calculate an answer.
In contrast, the analytical engine was designed to calculate virtually any mathematical function using programmable numerical data, in any sequence, to find the answer. It would have been programmed by using punched cards, a technique used by loom operators at that time to control the patterns of the woven thread.
Punched holes on cards remained as the means for programming computers in many of the IBM and other early 20th century computers. In fact, immediately before the rise of the personal computer, I remember using hole punched cards denoting chosen subject terms as a means of searching for article references.
Babbage’s use of punched cards is important as it would enabled the operator to repeat the same sequence of operations and also choose alternative actions depending on the value of a result. A landmark in Babbage’s continuous development of his design came with a significant change of the machine’s internal organisation. He separated the stored numbers (data) from the section which processed it, thus laying the foundation for modern computers’ storing data together with a processor to manipulate this data.
Unfortunately Babbage never persuaded the British government or private investors to finance the construction of his machines. Luckily his notes and plans together with his correspondence with Westminster’s next computer pioneer have meant that physical reconstructions are possible. You can see examples of reconstructions at London’s Science Museum.
Babbage’s great supporter and an important contributor to his work was Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852), the daughter of Lord Byron. Her residence, 12 St James’s Square SW1, displays an English Heritage Blue Plaque celebrating this contribution to computing history.
Lovelace is credited with understanding Babbage’s machine perhaps even better than he did himself, and with devising the first complex computer programme. In a letter to Babbage dated 10 July 1843, she suggests
“I want to put in something about Bernoulli’s Number, in one of my notes, as an example of how an explicit function may be worked out by the engine, without having been worked out by human head and hands first”.
She is posthumously celebrated for this achievement with a modern programming language named after her: Ada. Without the contribution of both parties the design of the analytical machine would not evolved as one of the first programmable computers. In this partnership Babbage was the engineer and Lovelace the programmer and visionary who saw its potential.
The final pioneer, Alan Turing had a much more tenuous link with the borough, being born in Westminster at Warrington Lodge, 2 Warrington Avenue, Maida Vale before being ‘shipped out’ aged one to the to the care of relations when his parents left for several years in India. However fleeting this connection he is also recognised with an English Heritage Blue Plaque on this house.
Posthumously famous for his WW2 code breaking efforts at Bletchley Park, about which we have written before, Alan Turing is also widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computing with his design of the Turing machine in the 1930s and his postwar research.
Alan Turing’s work and life is also the subject of the recent feature film ‘The Imitation Game‘.
With pleasing symmetry there is a link between Turing and Lovelace. In the 1930s, whilst working on artificial intelligence and computing, Alan Turing rediscovered her notes on programming and this had a significant influence on his research.
Further biographical details for all three pioneers can also be found using the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log in to all of these subscription sites for free with your library membership card). It’s worth looking to the newspaper archives for further insight too – I found several further references to Charles Babbage in The Times Digital Archive as the newspaper published several of his letters relating to various scientific topics. He also wrote to the Illustrated London News describing, with illustrations, a devise which is similar to an early example of a periscope. This was designed for artillery troops to safely line up guns from beneath a parapet. (ILN Saturday, August 18, 1855; pg. 210; Issue 757).
More information about these pioneers and the wider history of computing can be obtained from two further 24/7 reference resources. Credo Referenceand Oxford Digital Reference Shelf are both searchable resources which use a number of dictionaries, textbooks and encyclopedias as source material. Just type in the relevant search term, eg: Ada Lovelace, to display a number of links to original text relating to this search.
Returning to print, on the shelves of Marylebone Information Service is an useful guide to computing history: A Brief History of Computing by Gerard O’Regan.
The book begins with early civilizations such as the Babylonians and Egyptians, who developed mathematics, geometry and astronomy using methods such as a counting board (an early form of abacus) and algebra to make theoretical calculations, and leads right through to modern computer programming and the internet revolution.
And the computer revolution goes on. Will the next pioneer come from one of our Code Clubs for kids? There are currently regular clubs meeting atCharing Cross, Church Street, Maida Vale and St John’s Wood libraries, but more are planned – ask in your library for details.
Well, 2015 is almost over, which means it’s time to look forward to 2016 and see what anniversaries we will be commemorating. It’s a particularly interesting year for them.
January
One of the great unsung heroes of medicine will be remembered on 1 January (or if he isn’t, he should be!). On that date in 1916, Oswald Hope Robertson, a British born research scientist from Harvard Medical School, then working in France, carried out the first successful blood transfusion using blood that had been stored and refrigerated.
There had been blood transfusions before (the soon-to-be-more-famous-as-an-architect Christopher Wren experimented on injecting fluids into dogs as early as 1857) but the donor and the recipient had both needed to be present as there was no way of storing the blood for later use. Robertson is usually credited with setting up the first blood bank and thus being instrumental in saving thousands of lives. So think about him if you donate blood or if you are someone who needs a transfusion. And of course, with any reference to blood donation, a mention of Tony Hancock becomes compulsory: “A pint! That’s very nearly an armful!”
February
February brings with it the 90th anniversary of Black History Month. Yes, we know that this is commemorated in October in Britain but in the USA it’s in February. The first events were in the second week of February (chosen because it coincided with the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and the great abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass) when the historian Carter G Woodson of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History announced the first Negro History Week.
This was taken up by school boards in North Carolina, Delaware and West Virginia and was soon successful enough that other states followed. By the 1970s, the week had become a month and had renamed itself as Black History Month. In Britain it has been celebrated since 1987 and is now a national institution.
March
There’s no doubt that one of the biggest anniversaries next year will be in July when football fans will be celebrating 50 years since England last won a major tournament. All very tedious for those of us not in thrall to the beautiful game but even non-footie fans will want to remember an associated story from 19 March 1966 when the World Cup was stolen from Westminster Central Hall where it was on display at a stamp exhibition. A £4,500 reward (about £70,00 in today’s money according to the excellent Measuring Worth site) was offered. A ransom note asking for £15,000 was received (the thief probably should have gone for the stamps which were worth £3 million) and the chap who posted it was soon arrested but the real thieves were never found.
However the cup was found, by the hero of the hour – Pickles, a border collie who spotted a newspaper wrapped package next to a car in South Norwood and soon uncovered the missing trophy. Read more about the story in the Guardian:
“Now Pickles began the life of a celebrity. He starred in a feature film, The Spy with the Cold Nose, and appeared on Magpie, Blue Peter and many other TV shows. He was made Dog of the Year, awarded a year’s free supply of food from Spillers and there were offers to visit Chile, Czechoslovakia and Germany.”
Pickles received an appropriate reward and British Pathé was there to capture the moment:
April
April is going to be Bardtastic as the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare will be remembered on 23 April (Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote died on the same day so expect to hear plenty about him). Shakespeare’s Globe will be projecting 23 short films on the South Bank of the Thames, one for each of the plays. They’ll probably being putting on some theatre too.
A more lowbrow commemoration will be on 11 April, 80 years after the first Butlins holiday camp opened in Skegness (which as we all know, is ‘so bracing’) in 1936. The camp was opened by Amy Johnson, the pioneer aviator and was an instant success. A week’s holiday with three meals a day and all the knobbly knees competitions you could eat would have set you back 36 shillings and people flocked there, though three years later the camp was requisitioned for use as a naval training camp. Read about the history of Butlins in Sylvia Endacott’s Butlin’s: 75 years of fun!
May
Five years later on 9 May 1941, an event took place that got little publicity at the time but which literally changed the course of the war. On that day the German submarine U-110 was captured by the Royal Navy, and with it an Enigma machine complete with code books. Fortunately the Germans didn’t realise that the machine had been retrieved (the submarine commander tried to scuttle it rather than allow it to be captured and he himself drowned) and so it became a vital part of the code breaking activities at Bletchley Park led by Alan Turing.
There are plenty of books about Bletchley available in Westminster Libraries – find out lots more in a previous blog post on the subject – or you could borrow and watch the recent film The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
June
Moving back in time, 12 June sees the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Rebecca Rolfe from Virginia with her husband and baby son Thomas. She stayed at the Bell Savage Inn in Ludgate Hill (which itself had a very interesting history, being a former theatre) and soon became the toast of the town, being presented to King James I, attending a masque by Ben Jonson and having her portrait painted by the Dutch artist Simon de Passe. Sadly though, London didn’t suit her health and she planned to return to Virginia the following year, but tragically died at Gravesend without seeing her homeland again.
Why am I telling you all this? Because Rebecca Rolfe, better known by her Algonquian name of Pocahontas was one of the first native born Americans to visit this country. You may have seen the Disney film but the reality is much more interesting. You can read about how Pocahontas saved the life of Captain John Smith and ensured peace between her people and the English settlers in A man most driven: Captain John Smith, Pocahontas and the founding of America.
July
Readers of cinema trade journals in the 1920s would have noticed adverts for Castleton Knight (a producer and distributor) who claimed he could ‘show a perfect picture through any fog’. This boast seems rather baffling now but anyone who attended the cinema before 1956 would have known exactly what the problem was – smog. This didn’t just affect the streets of London and other cities – it found its way into buildings too.
In 1952 an opera at Sadlers Wells had to be cancelled and the leading lady was treated for smoke damage. It has been calculated that 4000 people died in just a few days in 1952 as a direct consequence of the London smog.
On 5 July 1956 the Clean Air Act was passed, which introduced smoke control areas in which only smokeless fuels could be used and which ensured the removal of power stations from cities among other measures. Smog, in Britain at least, is a thing of the past though other countries certainly have a way to go to reduce air pollution.
If this article had been published by Westminster Libraries 25 years ago, it would have been typed on an electric typewriter or perhaps a PC with a basic word processing programme and then sent out in a paper newsletter rather than being researched and published online. Not that many of us would have known what the word online meant. There were online databases but it was a laborious process logging on to each one individually and then printing out search results and few but academics had access to the right computers and modems anyway.
However all this changed thanks to Tim Berners Lee, the father of the World Wide Web. While the first website went live in December 1990, it was on 6 August 1991 that Berners-Lee posted a summary of the World Wide Web project on several internet newsgroups, which marked the debut of the web as a publicly available service on the internet.
The World Wide Web has certainly changed all our lives. A smaller, but no less important event – for the people of London anyway – took place on 2 September 1666, 350 years ago when a fire broke out in Thomas Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane and raged for 5 days. Over 400 acres of London were destroyed including approximately 13,000 houses and 67 of the 109 city churches as well as St Pauls Cathedral. A witness to the Great Fire of London was the diarist Samuel Pepys, who ‘saw a lamentable fire’ with
“Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the River or bringing them into lighters that lay off. Poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons I perceive were loath to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.”
It took nearly half a century to rebuild the City, with St Pauls not completed until 1711.
For a first hand account of the city before the Fire, have a look at John Stow’s Survey of London, published in 1603, which describes in detail many of the churches and other buildings that were destroyed in 1666. For more on the Fire itself, you could listen to the podcast on the subject from Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time or you could read Adrian Tinniswood’s By Permission of Heaven: the story of the Great Fire of London.
October
In October 1941, 75 years ago, a magazine called Liliput published a cartoon of a group of schoolgirls reading a notice with the caption “Owing to the international situation, the match with St Trinian’s has been postponed.” The cartoonist, Ronald Searle, was to spend most of the war as a prisoner of the Japanese, though he continued drawing even in the terrible conditions of Changi. On his return home he began to submit cartoons to Punch, The Strand, Radio Times and other magazines and his first book, Hurrah for St Trinian’s and other lapses was published in 1948.
The ghastly schoolgirls were soon followed by their schoolboy equivalent, eternal prep school cynic Nigel Molesworth but it was St Trinians which remained Searle’s greatest success. The school, with its pupils more interested in the racing results than their education and disreputable staff soon inspired a series of successful films along with several more books, and the cartoons were collected together as St Trinian’s : the entire appalling business.
One anniversary that will definitely not go unmarked, by the BBC at least, falls on 2 November 1936 when the television service officially opened (though there had been experimental transmissions since 1932). Until the war put an end to television (the engineers were need for more important work), programmes were only broadcast within a 40 mile radius of Alexandra Palace and by 1939, 23,000 licences had been sold. The Times was impressed with the first day’s transmission
“As seen on the small screen of a receiver in Broadcasting House, the inaugural ceremony was more successful than those previously unacquainted with the achievements of television had expected… the very successful transmissions of the male television announcer suggested that there is a technique to be learned by those who wish to be well-televised.”
December
The final anniversary of the year is, appropriately enough, a festive one. For Christmas 1616 King James I requested a masque (a courtly entertainment involving singing, dancing and general razzamatazz) from the poet Ben Jonson. Christmas, his masquebegins
Enter Christmas, with two or three of the Guard.
He is attir’d in round Hose, long Stockings, a close Doublet, a high crownd Hat with a Broach, a long thin beard, a Truncheon, little Ruffes, white Shoes, his Scarffes, and Garters tyed crosse, and his Drum beaten before him.
While he’s not actually *called* Father Christmas, he is soon followed by his 10 children – Carol, Misrule, Gambol, Offering, Wassail, Mumming, New-Year’s-Gift, Post and Pair, Minced-Pie and Baby-Cake, each followed by a torch-bearer carrying marchpane, cakes and wine. It seems that this was the first time Christmas had been personified so 2016 can really be considered his 400th birthday. Find out more about the history of Father Christmas.
We’ve mentioned lots of books and online resources above, but if you want to find out more about these or any other anniversaries throughout the year, there’s much more to be found using both the 24/7 Library and of course the libraries themselves – search the catalogue and see where it takes you!
As has become traditional (see 2014 and 2013), here’s our choice of one anniversary for each month to look forward to in 2015…
January
A few seconds past midnight on 1 January 1985, Sir Ernest Harrison received a phone call from his son to wish him a Happy New Year. A few hours later, he received another call, this time from comedian Ernie Wise who, for reasons unknown, was dressed in Victorian costume and riding on a nineteenth century mail coach. So far, so dull, but these were actually the first two calls made on mobile phones in the UK, Sir Ernest Harrison being the chair of Vodaphone.
If you’d bought a mobile phone in 1985, it would have set you back £3000 and you’d have been able to talk for 20 minutes before the battery ran down. Though you’d have been unlikely to be calling another mobile since by 1995 only 7% of the UK population had them. Still, you’ve probably got one now: by 2004 there were more mobile phones in the country than people. For more about the mobile phone industry, see our online business resources.
February
On 11 February 1990, after 27 years imprisonment, mostly on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela was finally released and took his Long Walk to Freedom. The event was captured by the cameras and broadcast around the world. You can read contemporary reports in our newspaper archive and also read biographies of the great man who died in December 2013.
March
On 26 March 2005 came the television event that some of us had been waiting for since 1989 and, frankly, for most of that time had never believed would happen. Doctor Who returned to our screens after a hiatus of 16 years and was an instant success, spawning two spin-offs (Torchwood and the Sarah-Jane Adventures) as well as making us more familiar with both John Barrowman and Cardiff Bay than we had ever thought possible. Check out one of the many hundreds of books on the most famous time traveller of all, and explore some of the obscure links between the Doctor and our very own detective, Sherlock Holmes…
April
24 April 2015 sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anthony Trollope, prolific novelist and long time post office employee. His novels aren’t read as much as they should be nowadays, which is a shame, and it may be that he is destined to be best remembered as the inventor of the pillar box, first installed in Jersey in 1852. The first ones were set up in England in 1853 – at first there were only five – in Fleet Street, The Strand, Pall Mall, Piccadilly and Rutland Gate. The early ones were green – they didn’t assume their familiar red colour until the 1870s. See The British Postal Museum and Archive for more history.
May
In May it will undoubtedly be quite hard to avoid the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta. However, rather closer to home was an event at 16 Alkham Road, Stoke Newington, which has the unenviable distinction of being the first house in London to be attacked from the air. Nobody in the house was hurt but the Zeppelin went further east and seven people were killed during the one raid. In all, nearly 700 Londoners were killed by air raids in the First World War. You can read more about it in Zeppelin Nights by Jerry White or check out some contemporary accounts in our newspaper archives with the Illustrated London News being particularly interesting for photographs of the aftermath of raids.
June
A happier First World War centenary is celebrated on 16 June with the centenary of the foundation of the Women’s Institute in the UK. The movement (which started in Canada in 1897) first met here in Llanfairpwllgwyngyll and its original aim was to get women involved in growing and preserving food in wartime. By the end of 1919 there were 1405 women’s institutes across the country. They are currently enjoying a resurgance and do rather more than make cakes, though it seems to be compulsory to use the phrase ‘jam and Jerusalem’ in every article about them.
13 July will mark 60 years since Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Born in poverty in Rhyl, Ruth was determined to escape her background but her first attempt – a romance with a Canadian serviceman – left her an 18-year-old unmarried mother when her lover proved to have a wife and children back home. She did marry in 1950 but the relationship soon ended and Ruth was left to support her two children by the most lucrative work she could find – acting as a hostess in Mayfair nightclubs.
By 1955 she had two lovers – David Blakely, a hard-drinking racing car enthusiast and Desmond Cussen, a former bomber pilot whose family owned a successful chain of tobacconists. The relationship with Blakely was violent, with Ellis having a miscarriage after he punched her in the stomach, and the two men were jealous of each other. On Easter Day, 10 April 1955, Cussen gave Ellis a revolver, showed her how to use it and drove her to Hampstead Heath where she, high on drink and tranquillizers, shot and killed Blakely as he left a pub.
There was no real doubt of the outcome of the trial – Ellis didn’t mention Cussen’s involvement to her solicitor until the day before her exection. The jury took only 20 minutes to convict her and she was sentenced to hang. There was considerable interest in her case with a petition for clemency signed by more than 50,000 people. You can follow the debate in our newspaper archives and there are several biographies of Ellis available in Westminster Libraries
August
A less tragic event in 1955 was the publication on 27 August of the first edition of the Guinness Book of Records (now known as Guinness World Records). According to publishing legend, Hugh Beaver, the managing director of Guinness Breweries, wanted to settle an argument about which was the fastest game bird, the golden plover or the red grouse, but couldn’t find an appropriate reference book to answer the question.
The runner Christopher Chataway, who worked for Guinness, recommended the twins Norris and Ross McWhirter who, as well as being sports journalists themselves (Norris was the time-keeper when Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile) ran an agency which provided facts and figures to Fleet Street. They were commissioned to write the Guinness Book of Records and it became an instant hit with the annual revisions appearing in time for Christmas. The twins made regular appearance on the BBC children’s programme Record Breakers which ran for 276 episodes between 1972 and 2001 and which was presented for most of that time by Roy Castle. Readers of a certain age are probably humming the theme tune to themselves right now…
You can borrow the latest edition of the book from your local library – current random records include the Wolf of Wall Street winning the prize for the most swearing in one film with an average of 3.81 expletives per minute and Daniel Fleming of Cleethorpes holding the world record for greatest number of playable bagpipes (105). Oh, and the fastest game bird in Europe? It’s the plover.
September
Scott, John, Virgil, Alan, Gordon – also unforgettable to people of a certain age – are the five Tracy brothers, who, with their father Jeff, formed International Rescue, a top secret organisation dedicated to saving lives whose adventures were chronicled in Thunderbirds, first broadcast on 30 September 1965. The series used puppetry combined with scale-model special effects in a technique that producer Gerry Anderson called Supermarionation.
The show was an instant hit and characters such as Lady Penelope and her annoyingly nasal butler Parker became household names. The Tracy brothers were named after the Mercury Seven astronauts, while the puppets were modelled on leading actors such as Sean Connery and Charlton Heston. You can read more about Thunderbirds and other Anderson series such as Captain Scarlet and Stingray in Supermarionation Classics and don’t forget that the original series as well as its cinema incarnations are available on DVD.
October
October sees the 600th anniversary of one of the most celebrated battles in English history, Agincourt. Made famous by Shakespeare in Henry V, the battle, on St Crispins Day 1415, is well documented with several contemporary accounts surviving. While the English were heavily outnumbered, the use of the longbow against the French soldiers seems to have been a decisive fact in the English victory. Shakespeare’s play is still a favourite with theatre producers and there have been two notable cinema films – both great – one with Laurence Olivier, made during WW2, and more recently with Kenneth Branagh.
November
1940s cinema will be celebrated again, as 26 November sees the 70th anniversary of the release of Brief Encounter, the beloved romantic tragedy based on Noel Coward’s Still Life. The film tells the simple story of Laura Jesson (played by Celia Johnson), a middle class housewife in a rather dull marriage who meets doctor Alec Harvey in a railway station restaurant and finds that what starts out as a casual chat soon develops into an intensely emotional relationship. There have been other versions of the original play – one with Jane Asher and John Alderton plus Joan Collins as a slightly unlikely tea-shop manageress was broadcast by the BBC in 1991 and there was a simply terrible film version with Sophia Loren and Richard Burton – but none have matched the simple beauty of the original. that said, do check out Victoria Wood’s splendid parody (“I’ve a tin of orange pekoe I keep for the middle classes”):
December
Finally on 28 December 2015 we will have an anniversary that is central to the life of our city as we mark 950 years since the consecration ofWestminster Abbey in 1065.
It was founded by Edward the Confessor (the only English king to be canonised), who died on 5 January 1066, only a week after the consecration. It was the first church in England built in the Norman Romanesque style and has been the traditional site for coronations ever since William the Conqueror. However, only a few arches and columns survive of Edward’s church – the current one dates from the thirteenth century and the reign of Henry III.
If you want to know what St Peter’s Abbey, as it was originally known, used to look like, you’ll have to check out the Bayeux Tapestry which features its only known picture. For more about the Abbey, check out some of the many books about it and of course, it’s there to visit too!
These are just some of the anniversaries that will be commemorated next year – no doubt we’ll also be hearing about the first ascent of the Matterhorn (14 July 1865), the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815), VE Day (8 May 1945) and as if that wasn’t enough… there’s another three years of the Great War centenary to work through!
A chance conversation about how we seem to be taking up more extreme sports, sparked by news of people BASE jumping from Canary Wharf, made me jokingly say that perhaps someone should try the age old one of tightrope walking across the Niagara Falls. This led me to wonder – who was the first to do this?
Off I went to begin my search, of course, via a search engine. As I read into the subject I found it and the first person to do it (in 1859) more and more interesting. Although born in France and with this major exploit being played out between Canada and America, Jean Francois Gravelet (renamed and known forever more as Blondin) had a lot to do with my own local area (Ealing) and indeed Westminster.
Of all the sources it was the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log in with your library card) which contained the best article. Reading around this, I found it fascinating to see what else was going on 150 years ago (I browsed through articles in the Illustrated London News and other newspapers from the time about copycats such as the Female Blondin). I had always thought of extreme sports and insane stunts as a modern craze. However, it would seem that the dangers of what people get up to these days would pale into insignificance when compared to what went on in the 19th century.
Indeed, it is Monsieur Blondin’s antics over the Falls which really highlight this. He completed this challenge in 1859 and after that seemed to want to add a bit more excitement… more people (such as his daughter!), different venues (eg: Crystal Palace) and adding a bit more to his tightrope tricks.
Blondin amazingly kept working into his seventies living in what is now Westminster and Ealing (where he now has two streets and a house named after him). Indeed, having passed away due to ill health in 1897 he is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.
If you are interested in finding out more then…
Perhaps try to find him listed in the Censuses and other records from the time (have a look in Ancestry when you visit one of the Triborough Libraries).
Find articles and pictures from the 19th Century in The Times, The Illustrated London News, The Guardian or the Observer – or more recent ones about the extreme sports we get up to now: www.westminster.gov.uk/newspaper-magazine-links
Today is the 70th anniversary of the Normandy Landings, and activities commemorating the events of early June 1944 are taking place in France, England and around the world.
Reading Anne Frank’s diary I realised that it was not just the British who were awaiting the invasion of occupied Europe but also those living under the tyranny of the Nazi regime and occupation. There were feelings that the Allies’ invasion was long overdue, especially considering the fall of Mussolini’s Italy in July 1943. At the same time, the Russians were annoyed at what they saw as too much being put on their shoulders.
The invasion was planned for earlier but bad weather had postponed it until Tuesday 6 June. The landings began overnight with gliders and parachutists landing in Northern France; leaflets were dropped warning the French people of what was to come.
Unsurprisingly when the news came forth the newspapers sprang on it with a great many headlines – this from The Times:
“GREAT ASSAULT GOING WELL”
For most of us, D-Day is not a memory but a piece of history. Reading newspapers from the time can be a good way to see how events unfolded and how they were reported in the press. The Times and other papers and magazines can be read via our online archives, just go to the Online Resources page, choose a newspaper and log in with your library card number.
You could begin by browsing through the newspapers of 7 June 1944: The Times, The Mirror (via UK Press Online), The Guardian and even the FT feature relevant stories from the day.
So this year Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her 90th birthday. Or rather birthdays, as while her actual birthday is today, 21 April (she was born in 17 Bruton Street at 2.40am on 21 April 1926), her formal birthday with all the pomp and ceremony is on the second Saturday in June. This year there will be a weekend of celebrations, such as the 
One of the great unsung heroes of medicine will be remembered on 1 January (or if he isn’t, he should be!). On that date in 1916, 
A few seconds past midnight on 1 January 1985, Sir Ernest Harrison received a phone call from his son to wish him a Happy New Year. A few hours later, he received another call, this time from comedian Ernie Wise who, for reasons unknown, was dressed in Victorian costume and riding on a nineteenth century mail coach. So far, so dull, but these were actually the first two calls made on mobile phones in the UK, Sir Ernest Harrison being the 
On 26 March 2005 came the television event that some of us had been waiting for since 1989 and, frankly, for most of that time had never believed would happen. 
A happier First World War centenary is celebrated on 16 June with the centenary of the foundation of the 
It was founded by Edward the Confessor (the only English king to be canonised), who died on 5 January 1066, only a week after the consecration. It was the first church in England built in the Norman Romanesque style and has been the traditional site for coronations ever since William the Conqueror. However, only a few arches and columns survive of Edward’s church – the current one dates from the thirteenth century and the reign of Henry III.
Reading Anne Frank’s diary I realised that it was not just the British who were awaiting the invasion of occupied Europe but also those living under the tyranny of the Nazi regime and occupation. There were feelings that the Allies’ invasion was long overdue, especially considering the fall of Mussolini’s Italy in July 1943. At the same time, the Russians were annoyed at what they saw as too much being put on their shoulders.
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