Viewing all items in Resource Category: Looking at your Community

60 years ago, on 23rd November 1964, the Second Vatican Council decided to allow the use of vernacular languages (such as English) in Roman Catholic sacraments and rituals, including the Mass. It had insisted on using only Latin for several hundred years. Most people welcomed the change, and the use of Latin quickly dwindled. The...

This year Remembrance includes several significant dates from past wars. 2024 marks the 110th anniversary of the start of World War I. 2024 marks 80 years since D-Day. The Normandy Landings of 6th June were the largest seaborne invasion in history, and began the Allied invasion of Normandy, which led to the liberation of France and...

100 years ago, on 4th November 1924, Gabriel Fauré, the French composer, died in Paris. As well as a composer, he was an organist, pianist and teacher, much admired and loved not only in his own country but also abroad. He was without doubt one of the most prominent composers of his generation, and his...

Some 150 years ago, on 23rd November 1874, Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd was published. It was his first major success. Set in Wessex, an imagined area encompassing the counties around Hardy’s place of birth in Dorset, it was his fourth published novel and had appeared originally – and anonymously – as...

 250 years ago, on 22nd November 1774, Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive (Clive of India), died. He was the British general who helped found the British Empire in India. Born in Shropshire to a prominent family of limited means, Clive had a wild childhood, with episodes of violence including extortion from local shopkeepers. He was...

How do you regard your local café?  As a place to meet your friends and catch up on the local news? Or as your office, where you do emails, hold Zoom meetings and work for hours – all for the price of a cappuccino? It seems that across the country, local cafés are being invaded...

All in the month of October Remembering Desmond Tutu Oskar Schindler – the German businessman who befriended the Jews Where do postcodes come from?< Remembering the music of Chopin Walkers could lose 40,000 miles of footpaths< Safer to fly than ever before Our hedgehogs are in crisis The post and the gastropods ** Editor:  We...

 It was: – 250 years ago, on 26th Oct 1774 that the Colony of Massachusetts Bay began building up its militia of ‘minute men’, who could respond to the growing British threat at a moment’s notice. The American Revolutionary War began a few months later. 200 years ago, on 21st Oct 1824 that British mason,...

Forty years ago, on 16th October 1984, the South African Anglican, Bishop Desmond Tutu won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the opposition to apartheid. Born into a Methodist family in Transvaal in 1931, Tutu first went into teaching, but after three years retired in protest at the deteriorating standard of black...

Fifty years ago, on 9th October 1974, Oskar Schindler, Austria-Hungarian-born German businessman, died. He saved more than 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. The story is told in the film Schindler’s List. At the time of his death, in Hildesheim, Germany, he was almost unknown and very poor. After the...

 Some 65 years ago, on 11th October 1959, Britain began introducing postcodes. They started in Norwich, and by 1974 had been rolled out across the whole country. The idea was to speed up sorting following the mechanisation of the postal system. But for the process to work, people had to use it, and it was...

It was 175 years ago, on 17th October 1849, that Frederic Chopin, Polish composer and piano virtuoso, died. His final words – “Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won’t be buried alive” – revealed his taphephobia, a fairly common nineteenth-century fear shared by Alfred Nobel. Chopin had been quite seriously ill for...