Andrew @generalising@mastodon.flooey.org
Librarian and occasional researcher. Opinions of course my own. Scholarly communications, historic MPs, Wikipedia, inter alia other things. Misplaced Scot.
Joined Nov 2022
THINGS THAT SHOULD BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS, a brief and occasional #history:
Donegal, 1936: first-aid and resuscitation
Today's historical footnote: three Scottish soldiers who were taken prisoner in 1940 managed to escape, got picked up ten days later...
... and then talked Gaelic at their captors until someone decided they were Russian and it was easiest to just let them go.
(How no-one made a film of this I do not know.)
Wonderful early-Victorian court-case (Globe, 25/7/1845): young gentleman up from the country gets so overwhelmed by the excitement of the big city he starts ringing doorbells at 3am, gets promptly locked up until the next day and fined 20s.
This morning's reading: 'The 12:30 From Croydon' (1934), an odd detective novel: chapter two starts with the murderer plotting how to do it. But the really interesting bit is ch1: a starstruck description of the flight from London to Paris from the perspective of a child who has never been in a plane before. So many unexpected details!
The bot was inexplicably fond of Frederick Hindle, the deeply unmemorable Liberal MP for Darwen (Lancs) 1923-24, and tweeted him five times out of ~1800 - despite having 13500 names to choose from.
So, by popular request, a happy retirement.
That same issue gives us the 1931 Christmas Day national program - which did include a brief unexpected interlude in Welsh, but no Prime Minister. https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/page/aa476837d22b409dae79388432fb7a9d?page=66 And let us not forget: five minutes for news, "if any".
Wonder what was up here. Did people anticipate a PM's message? Was it just a guess it was the sort of thing that might plausibly happen?
An interesting detail from a Dorothy L. Sayers short story: from the (arbitrary but hilarious) list of things people used as answers in a game of Animal Vegetable Mineral a) you can date the story to 1930 or 1931 and b) it suggests that Ramsay MacDonald made a Christmas radio broadcast? I had no idea.
(Also: mineral? I guess?)
Do they give out *prizes* for finding the least convenient place to leave these?
The 28mm f/2.8 I have is I think circa 1980 (the serial suggests one of the last before they switched to AI-S), and it's doing a lot better than many of the rest of us are at forty-odd years old.
(The first one here was film on a camera body of about the same vintage)
I gave in and bought a (very reasonably priced second-hand) 50mm f/1.4. Absolutely loving the depth of field here!
More matrimonial oddities: a woman in 1915 brings legal action about someone who gave her name when being the Other Woman in a divorce suit. Unclear quite what the courts were going to do about it.
Found a v surprising story by accident last night: 1939, Fulham, and a young woman's father refuses her permission to marry underage. So she applied for a court order (and got it).
Seems to have been a slow trickle of these, but quite uncommon - certainly the papers seemed to remark on it as unusual each time it came up.
Bit more #histparl processing tonight: count of by-elections per year 1833-2022, and average number of candidates ditto. Some visible patterns there (eg the wartime truces on both graphs)
The two extreme points on the second graph are 1993 (two by-elections, one with 14 and one with 19 candidates, some the same people) and 2003 (one election, 16 candidates)...
Reminded of this gem today (Robert Garioch, 1966[?])
Impressive level of precision here, just in case you felt the need to use WP as a clock #wikipedia
Librarian and occasional researcher. Opinions of course my own. Scholarly communications, historic MPs, Wikipedia, inter alia other things. Misplaced Scot.
Joined Nov 2022
