Grace Darling
Grace Darling and the sinking of the Forfarshire. The story of Grace Darling is well known. It’s often published in magazines that cater to young girls, possibly being thought to be inspirational. But why did she achieve such fame? Are the stories about her true? It’s certainly the case that she helped her father – a lighthouse keeper – to rescue nine people from a wrecked ship of the coast of Northumberland in 1838 but are parts of her story mythical? Were there other heroines who were similar? The Forfarshire The Forfarshire was a steamer which set sail on September 5th from Hull to Dundee. Steam ships were a novelty in those days and the Forfarshire was very grand indeed. The ship was sumptuously appointed with luxurious staterooms and lavish public salons. Although much smaller, you could call it the Titanic of its day. On that September voyage, sixty two people were aboard. On the first day of the voyage, the boilers started leaking. and the weather was becoming bad. Shortly after this, the engine broke down. Instead of turning the ship to the nearest port, Captain Humble called for the sails to be hoisted. This was fatal for the ship because steamboats had notoriously bad steering abilities when under sail. Just before four in the morning of September 7th,the ship ran aground on the perilous Big Harcar Rock in the Farne Islands and broke in two. Thirty five people died, nine escaped in a lifeboat and a further nine were stranded on the rock itself. Longstone Lighthouse The lighthouse was three quarters of a mile away from the rock where the people were stranded. The lighthouse keeper was William Darling. Together with his daughter Grace – his son being away – he rowed to the rock and rescued the eight men and one woman who were trapped there. According to legend, Grace was woken by the cries of the people on the rock. This is unlikely to be true because of the distance and the sound of the crashing waves. It is also said that William Darling had to be persuaded by his daughter to go to their aid and that he said the weather was too bad to do so. This too is most unlikely as he had a long and exemplary record. With son William away...
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The Nuremberg Trials and the Jewish interpreter
The Nuremberg Trials and the Jewish interpreter. These trials began in November 1945 and were held to bring Nazi war criminals to justice. It was a huge undertaking and interpreters were employed to translate – live in court – the testimonies of witnesses and the defence and comments of the most notorious and inhuman war criminals and their persecution of the Jews. Armand Jacoubovitch Imagine that you are a thirty year old interpreter and you have been recruited to translate at the trials. Imagine further that you spent the war as a Jewish refugee, sometimes in prison camps. Now take it a stage further and imagine that your parents were both killed in during the Nazi’s ‘final solution’. That’s the situation Armand found himself in. Not only did he have to translate the words that were being said in court, he had to sit there, day after day, in the same room as the people who had been responsible for the death of his parents, relatives and friends. The interpreters were the first to hear the truth For most of us, we learned gradually and gently about the Holocaust. But Armand and his fellow interpreters were the first civilians to hear witness accounts of the horrors that took place. during the Second World War. And in Armand’s case, he was hearing about what might have happened to his own family. Were they herded into gas chambers believing that they were showers? Was their skin tanned to make lampshades? Were they subjected to medical experiments? When he saw photographs of piles of naked bodies, did he imagine that they were people he knew? Can you imagine what that must have been like? It was a gruelling job for the interpreters. Many couldn’t take it. The courts kept a whole spare team of translators on hand to replace those who could face the court no more. Some interpretors, many of them women, would refuse to translate some of the more horrific witness accounts or the testimonies that were of an obscene nature. Is it possible that the interpreters simply processed the words they translated without taking in their meaning? Maybe they tried. As they worked, they didn’t have the time to dwell on what they heard – one sentence to translate was quickly followed by another. But they had a lifetime...
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The Queen’s Royal Standard and its usage The royal standard is actually a banner of arms and it used by members of the royal family, notably Her Majesty the Queen. It flies above her royal homes when she is in residence. Traditionally, it is the only flag that is flown from royal properties Why the flag is never at half mast The flag exists in order to show that the monarch is in residence and is never flown at half mast (or...
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Is there a secret branch of the British royal family? It’s very possible isn’t it? And many people believe that there are unknown direct descendants of Queen Victoria alive and well in Britain today. Royal princes of course were encouraged to sow their wild oats and there were several children resulted but in one case, it’s thought that family of hidden royals exists which began when one of Queen Victoria’s...
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Do you believe in ghosts? I had never thought much about this question – until one night in 1968. I was a young policeman on a lonely country beat. That’s me in the photo; the big guy, end of the row, right. And that’s the whole team at the village police station in a rural part of Essex, England, where I was sent after my basic police training. I had visions of fighting crime on mean city streets; a bit like ‘Dragnet’ on...
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What happened on this day in December? 1st Jaco Pastorious born 1951 Lou Rawls born 1933 Woody Allen born 1935 Richard Prior born 1940 Margaret Whigham born 1912 2nd MariaCallas born 1923 Desi Arnaz died 1986 3rd Agatha Christie disappeared 1926 Oswald Mosley died 1980 Ozzy Osbourne born 1948 Charles Pillsbury born 1842 JAQUO.com purchased 2014 Princess Victoria died 1935 Renoir died 1919 4th Bert Lahr died 1967 Mary Celeste found...
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The Great Beer Disaster of 1814. On Monday October 17, 1814, a huge vat of beer burst in the centre of London sending a tidal wave of black porter ale, 15 feet high, flooding into houses, drowning people, and demolishing property in its wake. At the heart of London’s retail centre today is a crossroads, where the Charing Cross Road, intersects with Oxford Street, New Oxford Street, and Tottenham Court Road. Just a few yards along...
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How do you tell someone they … stink? I think it must be as difficult today as it was for me 40 years ago. In the early 1970s I worked as a clerk in an East London Youth Employment Service. My job was to register young people under 18 for work and help them find a job. They had to sign on twice a week to get their unemployment benefit, which included checking with me to see what vacancies were on offer. At that time the employment...
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The strange story of Krystyna Skarbek. On June 15th, 1952, a woman’s body was found in the Shelbourne Hotel in London. She had been murdered, stabbed in the heart. The authorities believed her to be a thirty-seven year old married woman who worked as a stewardess on ocean liners. This was only partially true. Christine Granville was forty four year old Krystyna Skarbek, the daughter of a Polish nobleman. Yes she had been...
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