We held our first meeting in January 2019

2019

• 1945 (All). Rationing (buff, green & blue books), War Artists (many famous names including Lowry & Sutherland), Utility Furniture/clothes/pottery, the bombing of Dresden, the disappearance of US Navy Flight 19 over the Bemuda Triangle, the invention of the first computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator Analyzer and Computer (ENIAC), it weighed 30tons, covered 1800sq ft, failed daily and was less powerful than a modern smart watch weighing a few ounces.
• 1850 (Chris C). Franlin's last expedition to the arctic looking for the NW passage, The Great Famine (Irish potato famine), the invention of the sewing machine, the Great Exhibition, Joseph Paxton architect of Crystal Palace, Walter Hunt inventor of the safety pin.
• 1730 (John). John Harrison's clocks, The great fire of Blanford Forum (1731), Black Forest Cuckoo clocks, Josiah Wedgewood (1730-1795), The Circus at Bath & architect John Wood the elder (1704-1754), Theatre censorship, the importance of words & Samuel Johnson's dictionary; Giacomo Casanova, Guliver's Travels & Benjamin Franklin, John Kay's flying shuttle (1733), Capt James Cook (1728-1779).
• 1934 (David). The liner RMS Queen Mary, Laszlo and the Biro, Percy Shaw and the Cat's Eye road marking, Emelia Earhart, the Hat Industry in Luton, the Hoover Dam.
• 1690 (Jean). William & Mary & their architecture & furniture; The early Copper & Brass Industry in the Avon Valley; Judge Jefferies & the Salem Witchcraft hysteria & bloody assizes in 1692; Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 & the last pitchfork battle at Sedgemoor; Isaac Newton's 'Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematics' was published in 1687 by the Royal Society; the Window Tax.
• 1906 (Peter). Incorporation of Rolls Royce Ltd; 1906 San Francisco earthquake; Margaret McMillan, liberal reforms and free school meals; Dr Bernardo's homes; William Morris cars; Japanese raid on Port Arthur using 6 Thornycroft fast destroyers; The Wright Brothers, Orville & Wilbur.
• 1854 (Sue). Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy FRS, Capt of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin famous voyage, founder of meteorological weather forecasting and of the Met Office; Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman to receive a medical degree in the US, the first woman on the Medical Register of the General Medical Council and the founder of the New York Infirmary for Woman and Children. The Victoria Cross 'For Valour', the highest and most prestigious award of the British honours system; Post boxes since 1852 and 10 examples in Milford on Sea.
• 1627 (Chris M). Barbary Pirates (corsairs); Siege of La Rochelle; Slavery; The Baroque period in art; Cornhill, HM prison Shepton Mallet; Siege of Saint-Martin-de-Re; The invention of the slide rule; The Maldon grain riots.
• 1780 (Penny). William Addis (1734-1808) and the history of the toothbrush; American war of independence; Louis-Sebastian Lenormand invented the modern parachute and made the first recorded jump in 1783; The Montgolfier brothers and the hot air balloon; Milton Abbas old and new to improve the view of Lord Milton; The Derby Horse Race; The Great Hurricane of 1780 killed more than 22,000 including. At least 12 British Royal Navy ships and most of their crews, which were involved with the American war of Independence, were lost.
• 1801 (John). Richard Trevithick’s Puffing Devil (1801); Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), author (incl Coningsby & Sybil), MP & PM; Sewing Machines; Napoleon Bonaparte - income tax, Louisiana purchase, Rosetta Stone, modern French Government & laws, Trafalgar (1805) & Waterloo (1815); Acts of Union & flags; 1st UK Census (1801); Edward Jenner & smallpox vaccine (vacca=cow); The Cooperative Society.
• 1878 (David). Anglo-Zulu war of 1878/9, first British Army defeat in 64 campaigns; Transits of Venus in 1874 & 1882; Whistler suing Ruskin over his comments on his Nocturne in Black & Gold; Northeast passage first completed by Nils Nordenskjold in SS Vega in 1878/9; Blue Jeans patented by Levi Strauss & Jacob Davis in 1873; The Foundation of the Salvation Army in 1878; Cleopatra’s Needle, originally erected in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis on the orders of Pharaoh Thutmose III around 1450 BC, was installed in London in 1878.
  
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  2020
• 1841 (Peter). The Tower of London fire; Charles Goodyear patented the Vulcanisation of rubber in 1844 and Stephen Perry the rubber band in 1845; First Intercity Train from Liverpool to Manchester (L&MR); why China leased HK to Britain in in 1839; Discovery of Mt Erebus; the Colt revolving gun (revolver); Peoples’ Charter of 1838, one person one vote; the end of slavery in the British Empire; Rowland Hill’s postal reforms and the Penny Black.
• 1924 (Janet). The British Empire Exhibition; Gerald Durrell; Social History in the 1920s; John Logie Baird and the invention of television; Charles Dickens’s time at 48 Doughty St, London, now his museum; Clarence Birdseye and his development of flash freezing, inspired by the eskimos, to form Birds Eye; discovery/development of insulin by Dr Banting & Charles Best in Toronto; the model T Ford, 16.5m produced, one every 93 minutes, interchangeable parts and the moving production line.
• 1704 (Chris C). The Battle of Blenheim; Captain William Kidd, privateer and pirate; Beau Richard Nash, known as King of Bath Society, gambler and socialite; The Great Storm of 1703; John Kay and his flying shuttle; The Irish Famine of 1740; Longitude and Sir Cloudesley Shovell.
• 1835 (David). The Highway Act of 1835; the invention of the lawnmower by Edwin Beard Budding; safety of motor cars and motor bikes; Henley Regatta; London to Birmingham Railway; Wenlock Olympic Games; The Great Gold Robbery of 1855; the Tolpuddle Martyrs; the invention of the Mechanical Reaper, precursor to the combine harvester.
• 1620 (Jean). John Tradescant the elder; Cornelis Drebbel invented the submarine; John Evelyn diarist, writer & gardener; Mayflower & the Pilgrim Fathers; Indentured Labourer before Slavery; Edward Montagu 1st Earl of Sandwich; 30 year war;
• 1880 (Kim). Fingerprints; Tay Bridge disaster of 1879; Custer’s last stand in 1876; AA Milne; Hiram Stevens Maxim inventor of the machine gun; glass bottles for daily milk deliveries were first invented in 1884; Port Sunlight model village and the Lever Brothers; the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 killed more than 36,000 people and caused the Northern Hemisphere average summer temperature to fall by 0.4 deg C the following year.
• 1867 (Sue). The Royal Albert Hall; Charles Dickens and the Staplehurst rail crash; the purchase of Alaska by the USA from Russia; Mary ‘Patsy’ Cornwallis-West; John Peake Knight, railway Manager and inventor of the traffic light in 1868; the Pony Express Mail Service; London the first underground railway system.
• 1788 (Chris M). The arrival of the First Fleet in Australia; systems of measurement and the establishment of the metre; the Mutiny on the Bounty; the biography of Olaudah Equiano also known as Gustavus Vassa; Andrew Pears and pears soap; the invention of the lifeboat by Henry Greathead/William Wouldhave/Lionel Lukin; the beginning of the end of the slave trade by the UK.
• 1937 (Peter). The A-Z Street Map Book; the arrival in England of the Basque refugees from Guernica; Neville Chamberlain; WWII Identity cards; Penguin paperback books founded in 1935; Leslie Hore-Belisha and the introduction of the Belisha Beacon in 1934; The Battle of Britain.
• 1540 (Janet). Cromwell; The Jesse window in Highcliffe Castle; The Mary Rose, Henry V111’s favourite warship; Unhopped Ale and Hopped Beer, the drinks of the Middle Ages; Dunwich and the Greyfriar’s Monastery; Dissolution of the Monasteries (and Religious Houses); Calshot Castle; The Battle of the Solent.
• 1869 (Penny) Henry John Heinz (1844-1919) and the Heinz company; J Sainsbury opened its first shop in 1869 at 173 Drury Lane in Holborn, London; Mary Celeste, mystery solved or ruined?; Elizabeth Blackwell founded the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874; the world's first traffic light was a manually operated, gas-lit, semaphore signal based on railway signalling, proposed by John Peake Knight and installed in London outside Parliament in December in 1868. It exploded less than a month later and was removed. Traffic lights did not appear again in the UK until 1929, when the first electric signals were introduced in London; Victorian Health Reforms and compulsory vaccination against smallpox introduced in the 1850s, later rescinded.
  
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  2021
• 1907. (Jean) Harry Brearley and his invention of ‘rustless’(stainless) steel; The first flight across the English Channel in a heavier-than-air aircraft by Louis Blériot on 25 July 1909 in his Blériot XI; The Scout and Guide movements, its promise and 12 laws and the Baden-Powells (Robert, Agnes & Olave); The 2 expeditions of Robert Falcon Scott to the Antarctic; James Drummond Dole, the Pineapple King of Hawaii; Camden Town Murders in 1907, barrister Marshall Hall and artist Walter Sickert; James Murray Spangler who invented the first commercially successful portable electric vacuum cleaner, patent sold to Hoover in 1908; Albert Einstein and the birth of modern physics in 1905, his annus mirabilis ('miracle year'), when he published 4 groundbreaking papers covering the theory of the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass–energy equivalence, E = mc2.
• 1778 (David). HMS Victory; Captain James Cook’s third voyage and death; Beau Brummell; Boston Tea Party; John Paul Jones and the Whitehaven Raid; Joshua Tetley the founder of Tetley’s Brewery in Leeds; John Palmer and the introduction of the rapid postal delivery service; Lord George Gordon and the Gordon Riots of 1780.
• 1854 (John). The Charges of the Heavy and Light Brigades on 25th October 1854; Suez Canal; Florence Nightingale; Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Cholera, John Snow, the Broad Street Pump & William Farr; Walter Hunt prolific inventor, incl the Sewing Machine and Safety Pin; Pony Express.
• 1919 (Chris M). Amritsar Massacre; History of the WW1 memorial in Barton to the Indian Army Convalescent Depot; Afghanistan Independence Day 19/8/19 from being a British Protectorate; Flippers and the roaring 20s; Fridtjof Nansen, his adventures and Refugee Passport; Sinking of the Lusitania; Women get the vote and can stand for Parliment; The discovery of Insulin by Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip and John Macleod.
• 1865 (Peter) Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln; Completion of the US Transcontinental Railroad at Promontory Summit; Mrs Isabella Beeton and her Book of Household Management; The world’s first underground passenger railway, The Metropolitan, from Paddington to Farringdon connecting Paddington, Euston & Kings Cross; Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prize; Mary Tealby founder of the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home; The Suez Canal.
• 1924 (Sue) Lyons and the Nippies; FA Cup Final of 1923 and its inauguration of the old Wembley Stadium; Model T Ford & Henry Ford; Mount Rushmore National Memorial; 1st BBC Royal Charter of 1/1/1927; Ramsey MacDonald, the first Labour Party Prime Minister in 1924.
• 1889 (Penny) Richard D’Oyly Carte, his Opera Companies & collaboration with G&S, the Savoy Theatre & Savoy Hotel; Gustavo Eiffel & the Eiffel Tower; The Statue of Liberty - Liberty Enlightening the World; The Match Girls’ Strike of 1888; The original Ferris Wheel designed and built by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. as the centerpiece of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; The life and travels of Rudyard Kipling; The Bascule Tower Bridge.
• 1821 (Janet) William John Bankes, the exiled collector, Kingston Lacy and the Philae Obelisk; The Stockton to Darlington Railway; 1816, The Year Without a Summer; The History of the Tin Can; General Gregor MacGregor as the Cazique of Poyais, the Scottish soldier, adventurer, and confidence trickster.
• 1803 (David) The Lewis and Clark Expedition; The first National Census of 1801; The development to the Steam Engine from the Aeolipile (Hero’s engine) through Trevithick to Stephenson’s Rocket; Joseph Marie Jacquard and his development of the earliest programmable loom; John Heathcoat, the warp-loom and his invention of the bobbinet to make machine made lace; The Act of Union of 1801; George Bass, his circumnavigation of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and his naming of the Bass Strait; Mary Anning the Palaeontologist and her discovery of an Ichthyosaurus fossil at Lyme Regis.
• 1881 (John) William Rose inventor of packaging machines through cars to bomb & gun sights; Josephine Cochran inventor of the first commercially successful automatic dishwasher; John S Pemberton inventor of Coca-Cola; The Selborne Society formed for the protection of birds, plants and pleasant places. Later spawning the National Trust and RSPB; Wyatt Earp, gambler, lawman and the gunfight at the OK Corral; The Battle of the Little Bighorn, also know as the Battle of the Greasy Grass and Custer’s Last Stand.
• 1831 (Jean) Sir George Gilbert Scott RA (1811-1878) the prolific English Gothic revival architect who designed or altered over 800 buildings including St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow, the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station and the Albert Memorial; Joseph Aloysius Hansom (1803 –1882) was a prolific English architect working principally in the Gothic Revival style who invented the Hansom cab and founded the eminent architectural journal, The Builder; Highcliffe Castle; Tolpuddle Martyrs; History of London Bridge; The Boat Race; The Moon Hoax concocted by Richard Adams Locke, editor of the Sun, in 1835; Charles Darwin and the Voyage of HMS Beagle under Captain Robert FitzRoy to chart the Magellan Strait.
• Christmas Lunch at South Lawn Hotel.
  
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  2022
• 280 AD (Chris C) The Real Santa Claus; The Great Wall (of China); Crisis of the 3rd Century or The Imperial Crisis of the Roman Empire; Saint Alban; Roman Emperors Diocletian & Maximian; 29 things to know about the British Museum; Odin & Father Christmas.
• 1791 (Penny) Founding of the Ordnance Survey; Marylebone Cricket Club - MCC; Thomas Paine, political activist, philosopher and revolutionary who authored ‘Rights of Man’ and ‘Common Sense’; Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin; Semaphore signalling; South Sea Bubble; William Bligh and the Mutiny on the Bounty.
• 1849 (Sue) Boots; The first Public Park was in Birkenhead; Louis Vuitton; Marie Manning and the 1849 Bermondsey Horror; The Bowler Hat; Crimean war.
• 1526 (Chris M) The Naming of Storms. 1526 Hurricane in Puerto Rico named 'San Francisco' and then more recently storms named with girls' names in 1950s; When was beer first made in England? 1524, hops first grown in Kent, introduced by the Dutch; St James's Palace built 1531-1536 by Henry VIII of red brick. Incorporates York house, Lancaster House, and Clarence House; Two ladies of the period, both born in 1521. Lady Dorothy Stafford and Rose Lok, who both became protestant exiles at some stage during Queen Mary's reign. Rose wrote an account of her early life which is now in the British Library; Henry Fitzroy (1519-1536). First son of Henry VIII, but illegitimate! Became Duke of Richmond and Somerset aged 6, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland at 10, Married at 14 and died of 'consumption' at 17!; Martin Luther and the Diet of Worms 1521; William Tyndale (1494-1536) Oxford scholar and theologian. Translated the New Testament into English. Leading figure in Protestant Reformation but caught and executed in 1536 (strangled and burnt at the stake!).
• 1952 (David) The 3 Saunders-Roe Princess Flying Boats; The Lynmouth, Lynton and East Coast Flood disasters; Bill & Ben The Flower Pot Men & Weed; The de Havilland (DH106) Comet; Ian Fleming, James Bond & the first book Casino Royale; Royal Festival Hall; Changes in family life in the 1950s including package tours, washing machines, fridges, dishwashers, carpet sweepers/hoovers, TV & fashion (both men’s & woman’s).
• 1712 (Janet) Kit Cavanagh, the Irish woman who masqueraded as a man to join the British Army; the full political union of the Kingdom of Great Britain by the Treaty of Union in 1707; The Great Frost of 1709; Rob Roy the Scottish outlaw and folk hero; William Fortnum was a footman in the household of Queen Anne who collected and sold the half used candles and together with his landlord Hugh Mason started Fortnum and Mason in 1707; Robert Walpole was a British Statesman and Whig Politician who was falsely accused of embezzlement and corruption by the Tories and spent 6 months in the Tower of London in 1712 and was de facto the first Prime Minister of Great Britain from around 1721 to 1742; The Darien Scheme which was an unsuccessful attempt by Scotland to establish a Colony on the Isthmus of Panama; Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, instrument maker and glass blower, who invented the Fahrenheit scale and the mercury-in-glass thermometer, the first widely used, accurate, practical thermometer.
• 1901 (Peter) 1901 The Welsh 3year Slate Strike; Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt and the Teddy Bear; London Symphony Orchestra (LSO); San Francisco earthquake; Frank Hornby, English inventor, business man, politician and visionary toy maker - Meccano, Hornby Model Railways and Dinky toys; Shortest war in recorded history (38-45 minutes) between the UK Royal Navy and Sultan Khalid bin Barghash of Zanzibar.
• 1890 (John) Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, the inventor of the motion picture camera; The Statue of Liberty; The Tower Ballroom, Blackpool; The Motor Car; The Pram Murders of 1890, Mary Eleanor Wheeler and Frank Hogg; Enid Blyton.
• 1895 (Chris M) Nettie J. Honeyball, the founder of the British Ladies' Football Club; Government sponsored tourist attractions leaving a lasting legacy including Chrystal Palace, Skylon, Atomium & Eiffel Tower; Agatha (Mary Clarissa) Christie. Born in Torquay in 1890, Agatha Christie became, and remains, the best-selling novelist of all time. She is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, as well as the world’s longest-running play – The Mousetrap. Her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and a billion in translation; The National Trust was founded in 1895 by Hardwicke Rawnsley Octavia Hill & Sir Robert Hunter; Aspirin. Medicines made from willow and other salicylate-rich plants have been used for their health effects for at least 2,400 years; Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William Alexander Gordon Gordon-Cumming, 4th Baronet and a friend of Edward, Prince of Wales, for over 20 years, was a Scottish landowner, soldier, adventurer and socialite. A notorious womaniser, he is best known for being the central figure in the royal baccarat scandal of 1891; Harrods opened London's first 'moving staircase', crafted from leather, in 1898 with staff at the top offering cognac to men and smelling salts to ladies who 'were overcome with joy'.
• 1854 (Penny) Dr John Snow, waterborne diseases & stopping the spread of the soho cholera outbreak by removing the handle of the Broad Street Pump; The Electric Whaling Apparatus; Big Ben, the Elizabeth Tower and the Clock; Paddington Station; Dorothea Beale, leading woman’s educator, suffragette & founder & Principal of Cheltenham Ladies College & founder of St Hilda’s College Oxford; John Owens, a founder of Manchester University; the Boat Race.
• 1605 (Chris C) The Gunpowder Plot; The trial of Sir Walter Raleigh; Steganography; The wrecking of the Sea Venture off Bermuda, part of the third supply mission to the Jamestown Colony, and the description of the storms which subsequently inspired Shakespeare’s Tempest; The first printed newspaper, the 'Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien' (Account of all distinguished and commemorable news) published by Johann Carolus in Germany in 1605.
• Christmas lunch at South Lawn Hotel
  
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  2023
• 1935 (Sue) It started with two towers - Battersea Power station, its history and subsequent development of the 42 acre site for housing, hospitality, shops & work space; the Enigma machine, Bletchley Park, Alan Turing & the Bombe; the history of the London Underground Tube Map; the death at sea of Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Party PM; Sir Malcolm Campbell, British racing motorist, motoring journalist & holder of 13 land and water speed records.
• 1888 (David) T E Lawrence, his life in Arabia, his book The 7 Pillars of Wisdom and his quest for speed, as a mechanic, with RAF rescue launches and the Schneider trophy; Jack the Ripper and his 5 victims; Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson of Sway, told to build the Sway tower by Sir Christopher Wren through the medium William Lawrence; The design changes needed to build skyscrapers above 4 stories - safe lifts and William Jenny’s use of a steel skeleton frame to bear the weight of the building’s external walls; Comic Cuts, one of the first comic books in England, designed as cheap easy reading matter for adults; Krakatoa eruptions of 1883 were around 13,000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb and ejected 6 cubic miles of rock. 165 villages and towns were destroyed near Krakatoa, and 132 were seriously damaged. At least 36,417 people died, and many more thousands were injured, mostly from the tsunamis that followed the explosion. The eruption destroyed two-thirds of the island of Krakatoa.
• 1956 (Peter) Birth of the Shipping Container; the 1950s Fashion Rebellion incl Mary Quant & Twiggy; 1953 North Sea Flood; London’s last Tram week - Operation Tramway; examples from the Swinging Sixties, incl Lava lamp, zip code, new materials, meat balls, the Twist, Elvis, birth control pill, Mini, E-type, TR6, nylon (NYLONdon), etc; the Mini.
• 1924 (Penny) Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, of Beagle fame, introduced a storm warning service after the clipper Royal Charter was wrecked in a strong storm off Anglesey and 450 people lost their lives. This became the BBC Shipping Forecast in 1924; Alexander Fleming and the discovery of Penicillin; Cadbury’s chocolate and their model village; Finding the North Pole; Charles Augustus Lindbergh.
• 1820 (Chris M) The life of Mary Moffat Livingstone (1821-1862), daughter of missionaries and wife of Dr David Livingstone; Cpt George William Manby FRS, English author of 17 publications and inventor of the Manby Mortar (later to be used with the breeches buoy) that fired a thin rope from shore into the rigging of a ship in distress and a new whaling harpoon based on the same principles as his mortar, advocate of the Preservation of Lives from Shipwreck, later the RNLI, and fire brigades. He receiver 12 awards; James Blundell, the English obstetrician who performed the first successful transfusion of human blood to a patient; Rosetta Stone; Alexander Gordon Laing, the first modern European to reach Timbuktu in Mali and the first European to cross the Sahara from north to south but was murdered in the desert on his return journey; The Peterloo Massacre; Charles Barbier who served in Napoleon Bonaparte’s French army developed a unique system known as “night writing” so soldiers could communicate safely during the night. As a military veteran, Barbier saw several soldiers killed because they used lamps after dark to read combat messages. Louis Braille lost his sight aged 3 and found inspiration to modify Charles Barbier’s “night writing” code in an effort to create an efficient written communication system for fellow blind individuals by reducing Barbier’s 12 dots to 6
  so they could be covered by one finger.
• 673 AD (Chris C) St Etheldreda, Anglo Saxon princess who founded the monastery on the site of Ely Cathedral after two unconsummated marriages to regional kings; The siege of Constantinople by the Arabs; The invention of Greek fire; Theodore Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury from 668 - 690; Defining the English Church at the Synods of Whitby 664 and of Hertford 673, agreeing to go towards Roman Christianity and how to calculate the date of Easter; Mael Ruba an Irish monk 642 - 722 who spread Christianity to Scotland
• 1843 (David) Hawaii, a Foreign Country using our National Flag; Charles Dickens and Urania Cottage, his home for ‘fallen women’ financed by Miss Burdett-Coutts of banking fame; Penny Black & Penny Red postage stamps; Brunel’s SS Great Britain, liner, immigrant transport, soldier transport to Crimea, coal & wool ship, coal & wool hulk in Port Stanley, restoration and now a visitor attraction in Bristol in the dry dock in which it was built; Alfred Bird, Chemist & food manufacturer, invented egg free custard and baking powder because his wife was allergic to eggs; Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, engineer & father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, married Sophia Kingdom, automated the production of pulley blocks for the Royal Navy, invented the tunnelling shield and built the Rotherhithe to Limehouse Thames Tunnel, assisted by his son, the first tunnel under the Thames; John Callcott Horsley, painter and designer of the first Christmas card.
• 1942 (Sue) The Lumber Jills of WWII; VCs, of 1355 given only 3 got a VC & bar, 2 doctors and Captain Charles Upham, a New Zealander, who got married in New Milton and remains the only combatant soldier to have received a VC and Bar; The partition of India in 1947; The Mass Observation Project started in 1937 and aimed to create an "anthropology of ourselves" - a study of the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain via interviews, questionaires and diaries. It still collects diary entries for the 12th May annually; The major turning points in WWII, from Dunkirk to the battles of El Alamein; Howard Robard Hughes Jr, American business magnate, film producer, record setting pilot and founder of Hughes Aircraft Company; Hilary Fisher Page, designer of children’s educational toys, founded Kiddicraft in 1932 initially selling wooden toys, but through his frustration with the qualities of painted wood, Page started to experiment with plastics and injection moulding producing the first ‘interlocking building brick’, with slots for windows and doors, later to be adopted and modified to become the famous LEGO brick.
• 1883 (John) San Francisco Cable Car System; Orient Express; Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi & Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson; from Greenwich Mean time (GMT) to the HTC world atomic clock; HMS Eurydice, the Ghost Ship that Haunts the IOW; Andrew Carnegie, the American industrialist and philanthropist; Cleopatra’s needle, London’s oldest man-made outdoor monument, & the demolition of the Temple Bar between Westminster and the City; The Elementary Education Act of 1880; Thomas Edison the inventor & businessman whose inventions included the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera.
• 1898 (Penny), Francis Barraud & Nipper the HMV Dog; Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail alone around the world; Oscar Wilde the Irish poet & playwright; The introduction of car registration and number plates; John Philip Holland and the first true submarine with periscope, torpedo & electric motor with petrol charging; The history of Hong Kong; Norman Percevel Rockwell, the American painter and illustrator.
• 1921 (Chris M) The first Poppy Day; The history of the Charleston (dance); The shell scandal (shortage of artillery shells in WW1), the Chilwell explosion which killed 134 and toxic jaundice; The life of Prince Philip of Greece; The life of Lady Nancy Astor - 1st female to sit in parliament; Women’s Suffrage; Branston Pickle; The Panama Canal; The discovery of Insulin; The Roaring Twenties - cars, commercial flights, household labour saving devices, radio, dress & culture
• Dec Christmas Lunch at South Lawn Hotel
  
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  2024
• 1935 (David) The Blue Riband Trophy; Events that made the 1930s a very turbulent decade; Radar - radio detection and ranging - from Heinrich Hertz & Robert Watson-Watt to the British Early Warning System in WWII; Elvis Presley, the King of rock and roll; Rowntree’s KitCat (1920s) and KitKat; Sir Malcolm Campbell’s land and water speed records; Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, inventor of the turbojetengine.
• 1900 (Thelma) The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, London; H.E.Bates, English writer including The Darling Buds of May; Thomas Sullivan, American inventor of the Tea Bag; in 1904, with war in Europe a decade away, Britain and France signed an agreement, later known as the Entente Cordiale, to resolve long-standing colonial disputes in North Africa and to establish a diplomatic understanding between the two countries; Albert Einstein, his theory of Relativity & E=mc2; The Wright Brothers made the first controlled, sustained flight of an engine-powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903; the Second Boer War.
• 1623 (Chris C) Publication of the First Shakespeare Folio; The First Pilgrim Settlers in America, their welcome & salvation by the native Indians, the Mayflower & Harvest Thanksgiving; Sir Walter Raleigh; The battle training origins of the first merry-go-round (no motor) & Carousel (motored); King James 1 and the King James Bible; the sinking of the Vasa in Stockholm harbour 1400yds into its maiden voyage in 1628 in a similar manner to the sinking of the Mary Rose in 1545. Both salvaged, in 1961 & 1982 respectively, using the same frame.
• 1967 (Peter) The Hospice Movement & Oakhaven Hospice; The London Fog & the Big Freeze; Royal Mail & the introduction of 1st & 2nd class mail; The Representation of the People Act 1969 & the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18; Dr Matin Luther King & his ‘I have a Dream’ speech; The Beetles; John F Kennedy, 35th US president, assassinated in Dallas by (possibly) Lee Harvey Oswald who was shot in the police station by Jack Ruby; Food & lifestyle changes:- calorie intake, portions & plate sizes all increased, meat & vegetable intake decreased, fast food outlets, TV Chefs, nouvelle cuisine, spam & sweets, etc; Child migration & the last 2 children sent to Australia/Tasmania; The fruitless quest for Perpetual Motion over the centuries & an attempt to design a perpetual motion car in the light of the 1969-72 energy crisis.

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