A wall in Bath Abbey

A portion of a wall in Bath Abbey.
Recently I went to Bath. One of the places I visited was Bath Abbey. I have been into many ancient churches over the years and into many Cathedrals, most more than once, Winchester,Wells, Salisbury, Canterbury,Rochester, Westminster Abbey,St Pauls, Chichester, St David's, Manchester, York Minster and the list could go on.However, I have never seen what confronted me on entering Bath Abbey.

All cathedrals and ancient churches have monuments where the rich and famous are remembered and they all have their tombs in the crypt or prominently placed in an aisle or recess .Bath Abbey is unique, however,because so many crowded and massed monuments fill the walls and floor.  The monuments are crammed together. Obviously Bath has been a popular place to die, be remembered and buried in. The ages, and often a mention of where they came from or originated, tells a story. People of a certain age , mid fifties and older, came for the waters to improve their health but died in Bath and so got buried in the Abbey.Others who died in other locations are remembered too on some of the plaques. They either were born and lived in Bath for part of their lives or they felt an affinity with Bath after having visited the city on numerous occasions perhaps.The Abbey is a testimony to the popularity of Bath in the 18th and 19th centuries for the wealthy and god fearing.

Here are a few interesting tomb inscriptions which tell a story to be told.


" Near this stone are deposited the mortal remains of major general Sir Henry White K.C.B. On 7th November 1822. he served in the Bengal Army. A distinguished officer for a period of fifty years. The judicious position taken by his division in the attack on Agra which accelerated it's fall and the reduction of the strong hill fort of Gwalion by siege are proofs of zeal and military skill which do honour the memory of a soldier."

This is the stuff of novels and Hollywood films.

Another stone records:


" Near this place lies the body of Roger Elletson Esquire late lieutenant Governor of His Majesties land of Jamaica who after having borne a very long and painful and lingering illness with the utmost Christian Patience and Fortitude was by the goodness of his creator released from his sufferings at this place on November the 28th 1775 aged 48."

He must have promoted,encouraged and taken profits from slavery. A wealthy man indeed.

And another interesting inscription reads:

" Near this place lyeth the body of Jacob Bosanquet of the City of London Esquire. A truly good and honest man. A tender husband. Affectionate father. And faithful friend. Not more industrious in acquiring a fortune than generous in dispensing it. Thus happily furnished with every social virtue he lived beloved and died lamented on the 9th day of June 1767 and in the 54th year of his age."

I was nearly crying myself with that one. He was so perfect. He was obviously great at a party with all his ,"social virtues," and he acquired a fortune. I wonder how?

The slave trade in Britain and the British Empire was not abolished until 1807 and slavery itself was not abolished until 1833.

Links to information about:

 Jacob Bosanquet: 

https://www.bathabbeymemorials.org.uk/person/bosanquet-jacob

Sir Henry White: 

https://www.bathabbeymemorials.org.uk/person/white-henry

Roger Elletson Esquire: 

https://discovery-cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/c/F67604

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Hope_Elletson

A Bath Front Door

Number 17 The Circus.

Thomas Gainsborough lived here.

Mr and Mrs Andrews. Although this portrait was not painted during Gainsborough's time in Bath it does show that perhaps, he was a landscape artist at heart.

Gainsborough's two daughters, Mary and Margaret. They skipped up to that front door.

Mrs Philip Thickness painted in Gainsborough's Bath studio.

Ignatius Sancho painted in Bath in 1760. This one is obviously unusual because it shows a slave or perhaps a freedman.His master thought so highly of Ignatius, he payed for his portrait to be painted. Much of 18th century wealth was derived from the sugar plantations and hence, slavery. Many of the wealthy of Bath would have been slave owners and they would have had black servants.

The Byam family painted in Bath in 1762. Their wealth came from the sugar plantations.

A BATH FRONT DOOR

This front door is number 17, The Circus, Bath. Approaching, The Circus, are three roads, Gay Street from the south, where Jane Austen lived for a short while, Bennet Street from the North East, which leads to The Upper Assembly Rooms and Brock Street to the North West which leads to the Royal Crescent. These three roads enter The Circus, dividing this circular road exactly into thirds. Number 17 is in the northern third and is near the entrance to Bennett Street.

It’s situation could not be closer to and was indeed part of the elite residences of Bath in the 18th century. It is also within a minutes walk of The Upper Assembly Rooms where the bright young things of the 18th century and some not so young, danced, gambled, flirted, paraded and generally made a show of themselves. These beautiful young things had time on their hands and many had money to spend.

The resident of number 17 The Circus between 1759 and 1768 was there to take advantage of this situation. He was Thomas Gainsborough an up and coming portrait artist.

Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk in May 1727 and he was the son of a cloth merchant.He had a natural talent for drawing and painting and when he was 13 years old he was sent to London to study drawing and etching under the French engraver Hubert Gravelot. In London, Gainsborough, met William Hogarth and Francis Hayman.

In 1746 he married Margaret Burr   and around 1749 Gainsborough returned to Suffolk where he lived for the next ten years.. Here he painted the portraits of the local, wealthy farm owners and gentry. He was able to make a good living. They  had two daughters  Mary (1750-1826) and Margaret (1752- 1820). However Thomas Gainsborough was ambitious. 

In 1759 he moved to number 17 The Circus in Bath. He was attracted by the possibilities of expensive commissions that the society of Bath could offer.
His sitters were authors, actors and members of high society. In 1768 he was elected a founder member of the Royal Academy.

In 1774 he moved to London where he set up a studio in Pall Mall. In 1780 he was commissioned to paint the portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte and he became a royal favourite causing a rivalry between himself and Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Thomas Gainsborough always claimed that he preferred painting landscapes but the portraits were far more lucrative. In one of his most famous paintings , Mr and Mrs Andrews, he has caught this rich couple displaying their relaxed attitude and sense of elite power and authority, but he has pushed them over to the left of the picture and behind and to the right of them he has depicted the beautiful landscape and vast acres they owned and ruled over. I am sure the couple were very happy with the display of their wealth, authority and property.

Returning to the picture of the front door in, The Circus. On those stone flags Thomas Gainsborough, his wife and two daughters undoubtedly trod but think of the fine and beautiful ladies and elegant gentlemen, dripping in wealth and finery, who stepped that way too. The hand on the doorknocker and the sedate deportment as they crossed the threshold.

Dr Who at The Albert Hall

The Summer Proms at The Albert Hall are with us again. They are sponsored by the BBC and the BBC records the lot, for radio and much for TV. The BBC is a National Treasure. I honestly don't know how the rest of you do without one.

In recent years, I think from 2008 the PROMS have devoted one evening to Dr Who music.

Two years ago Nigel Kennedy performed his version of the Dr Who opening title music on his electric violin.
Nigel Kennedy, if you don't know, is one of the leading violinists in the world today, a protege of Yehudi Menuin and a Sheffield United supporter. He also plays brilliant jazz and versions of Jimmy Hendrix classics on his violin.

If you met him in the street you might think he was a skin head, yob or hooligan. He's supposed to be quite nice really. Here he is in all his glory, playing the Dr Who theme tune outside The Albert Hall two years ago.
"ROCK AND ROLL!!"



Tonight it is this years Dr Who themed concert at The Albert Hall with Matt Smith and other Dr Who actors presiding over events.

You will be able to access the concert throught the BBC i-player.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2010/whatson/2407.shtml#prom10


All the best and enjoy(If you are a Dr Who fan).

Tony

JANE AUSTEN

Born : 16th December 1775.

Her father wrote at the time,

" a present play thing for her sister Cassy and a future companion. She is to be Jenny."

Died: 18th July 1817.

Her sister Cassandra wrote:

" I have lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend as can never be surpassed,-She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her,& it is as if I had lost a part of myself."

Anniversary of The Battle of Britain (Howard Reeves.)

My Uncle Howard  was nineteen and a member of the Home Guard in 1940. He was not called up to the regular forces because he had a reserved job. He was a draughtsman, alongside his father, my grandfather, in Thorneycrofts, a local shipyard in Woolston, Southampton. They were building minesweepers and destroyers.
He died a few weeks after this picture was taken, on Sunday 24th November 1940 the day after one of the worst Luftwaffe raids on Southampton. He was helping to pull the dead and wounded from the rubble of a pub in Woolston, called The London Arms, when another bomb hit them.

Howard 1940.

The lady who owned the dress shop opposite The London Arms, Mrs Adams, came out into the street after the last bomb had exploded which fatally injured my uncle. She climbed in through her own shop window that was smashed and broken and tore material from dresses she had on disapply to tie tourniquets around my uncles many wounds. She could see he was bleeding to death. She tried hard but couldn't save him. She spoke to my grandmother later about it. My grandmother had been expecting Howard home and had prepared his favourite meal of fish and chips. I often had fish and chips cooked by my grandmother in later years. The policeman who came to my mother and grandparents house later that day to tell them about their son was in tears. He cried uncontrolably. My grandparents house was the sixth he'd been  to.

The  site of The London Arms in Woolston, Southampton.

Woolston was famous for the Supermarine Aircraft factory. This was where the Spitfire was designed and built . Supermarine's chief designer, R J Mitchell, who designed the Spitfire, lived in a small bungalow about a mile from my mother and grandparents. This is an old news picture of the factory in Woolston making spitfires.

My mother told me a story of how the sirens went one night. She was on her way to their Anderson Shelter and she could hear machine gun fire from a German Bomber flying low over Woolston. She later discovered from neighbours and friends that over 100 factory workers at Supermarine had been mown down and killed in the road between the factory and the air raid shelters.

 The site of the Supermarine factory in Woolston today.   

R J Mitchells bungalow in Woolston, Southampton. He was the designer of the Spitfire.

RJ Mitchell, Supermarines chief designer and the designer of the Spitfire.

The memorial in Woolston to R J Mitchel.

My grandmother told me how on another night the sirens once again had sounded. She was standing in her back garden in Longmore Avenue when a German Bomber flew low overhead.She looked up into the pilots eyes. She yelled out to everybody, " I can see him. He's looking at me." He was being chased by a Spitfire sent up from Southampton Airport and was flying low over housing to protect himself. The Spitfire pilot would not have shot up houses and gardens to get him. The German aircraft was later shot down over the New Forest.

Spitfires over Britain.

This is one of the saddest stories from the Southampton Blitz. Some school children were having an art lesson in Southampton Art Gallery on the 6th November 1940, when the sirens went. They went with their teachers and art gallery assistants into the basement. A bomb drilled through the roof and two concrete floors before exploding in the basement and killing them all.

Seventy years ago in the Summer of 1940 the skies of Britain were the scene of a deadly struggle. Day after day The Luftwaffe and the RAF fought relentlessly for dominance of the skies.

Over London and the skies of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire the interwoven con trails of fighter aircraft laced the sky, 20,000 feet above England.

Many of the towns and cities of England were being bombed too;

Great Yarmouth,Dover,Folkestone,Portsmouth, Southampton, Plymouth,Exeter, Cardiff, Swansea and towns and cities in the industrial centre of Britain, Coventry, Birmingham and of course London, were all bombed and some devastated cruelly. But the struggle went on.

If it hadn't been for ,"the sacrifice of the few," as Churchill put it, there would have been no fortress Britain and the build up of the massive army of British, Americans, Canadians and forces from around the Commonwealth that attacked the mainland of Europe on June 6th 1944, D-Day.

Here is a link with many archive recordings of that time:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/battleofbritain/

One of the most poignant recordings is the live report by Charles Gardner of a dog fight over Dover as it actually happened, .

Why do we want to visit Chawton?

Why do people want to visit Chawton, the place where Jane Austen lived?
Sunday 20th November 1808 Jane writes to Cassandra from Castle Square:
(Jane, her mother and Cassandra are contemplating their move from Southampton to Chawton. )

“There are six bedchambers at Chawton; Henry wrote to my mother the other day,& luckily mentioned the number-which is just what we wanted to be assured of. He also speaks of Garrets for Store places, one of which she immediately planned for fitting up for Edward’s manservant- & now perhaps it must be for our own- for she is already quite reconciled to our keeping one. The difficulty of doing without one had been thought of before. - His name shall be Robert if you please.”
The coach parties arrive. The car park is used by visitors, families, groups of friends, individuals who have found their own way there.

So why do they come to Chawton, the last home of Jane Austen?

They have invariably read Pride and Prejudice or one of the other novels or all of them. They know a little about Jane Austen’s life already.

What does actually going to Chawton do for somebody?

They walk on the very ground that Jane walked on. They go inside the cottage that Jane inhabited and are surrounded by the walls of brick that enclosed Jane’s slight frame. They walk and stand in the same spaces she stood and moved in. They fill the spaces where she laughed and thought and wrote and slept and argued and loved and hated.

They can’t become Jane even if they wish for that. They can’t become the writer she was though they may want to be.

Imagination plays a large part and the imagination feeds on knowledge of Jane’s life, her stories and the period she lived, the things she used and touched.

What does the visitor come away with? It has been a pleasure to be where Jane had been. Maybe they marvel at her circumstances. Maybe they try to work out how she functioned in this environment. They empathise. The final thing they come away with is a closer emotional relationship with Jane.

They have seen, they have felt, they have thought.

THE WOMBLES OF WIMBLEDON COMMON

Woodland on the common.

The Windmill. it was in a house near here Baden Powel lived for a while.

The Wombles

Julie Andrew's old pad.

Golf on the Common. there are two golf courses, London Scottish and the Royal Wimbledon.



Elisabeth Beresford, the author of The Wombles.

Abigail with some joggers going past.

The common has a number of ponds and small lakes.

Has anybody outside this green and pleasant land heard of ,The Wombles?

Today it is raining. The BBC website shows the symbols for heavy rain with intermittent showers. That means it is raining all the time, sometimes less heavy than at other times. Heavy rain, you should see it. You should hear it. The sound is something else. Tomorrow is forecast the same. However on Wednesday it's different, the forecast says heavy rain ALL the time.

Unbelievably, two days ago we had a heat wave with clear blue skies.The temperature was 26 degrees centigrade and more.

On Saturday it was hot so I decided to take Abigail, my youngest, for a cycle ride on Wimbledon Common beneath the cool leaves and foliage of the wooded areas on the common.

Wimbledon Common is famous for the Wombles.

It's also famous for a lot of other things too.

In the 18th century it was the haunt of highwaymen who held up carriages on route to the south, Portsmouth and Southampton. It was also, because of it's seclusion, a place where gentry, miffed with each other, held duels, "by gad sir you bounder!"

Julius Caesar was reputed to have built a camp on the common on his second invasion of these islands in 54BC. But that is thought to be not true. The earth works on the common, which people thought was Caesars camp, was probably an Iron Age hill fort. The fact the Roman Road Stane Street ran from London Bridge to Chichester on the South Coast, went close to Wimbledon Common, may have suggested it was a Roman fort.

In the 17th century Wimbledon Common was used as a training ground for Charles II's Tangier Regiment.

The emancipator, William Wilberforce, in the 19th century, lived next to the common.

The Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, who lived in Putney, used to frequent one of my drinking places, the Rose and Crown, on the edge of the common. They do great beer there by the way.

There are a number a small hills on the common. They are man made. When the London Underground system was being built in the late 1800s , the earth they removed when digging the tunnels was transported to Wimbledon Common, hence the hills.

King George V used to play golf on the Royal Wimbledon Golf Course and

Baden Powel wrote Scouting for Boys in a house next to the windmill.

During the Ist World War the common was used by the army as a massive training camp for rifle regiments. They had many rifle ranges set up on the common. During the Ist World War it was also an airfield for the Royal Flying Corps which later became the RAF. The airfield was used to protect London from bombing by the German zeppelins.

Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton used to live in Merton Place at the bottom of the hill from the common.

The writer, Robert Graves, was born and brought up in a road next to Wimbledon Green on the common.

Julie Andrews lived in a pink house here before she hit super stardom and moved to Hollywood.

Of course , to one side of the common the famous tennis courts are situated too.

However it's the Wombles that the common is REALLY FAMOUS for.

Here is some information. All will become clear.

THE POWER OF KIDS TV!!!!!!!


"The Wombles are fictional pointy-nosed, furry creatures that live in burrows, where they help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in useful and ingenious ways. Wombles were created by author Elisabeth Beresford, originally appearing in a series of children's novels from 1968. The characters later became nationally famous in the mid 1970s as a result of a popular BBC children's television show using stop motion animation. A number of spin-off novelty songs also became major hits in the British music charts.

Their motto is "Make Good Use of Bad Rubbish." This "green" message was a reflection of the ecology movement of the 1970s. Although Wombles live in every country in the world, the stories focus on the life of the burrow in Wimbledon Common in London, England. "