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 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...

Walkers in Britain could stand to lose thousands of miles of rights of way, because of the sheer size of the growing backlog of applications for footpaths to be recognised and protected. The Government has set a deadline of 2031 for public footpaths and bridleways to be officially mapped. But local authorities still have nearly...

This is GOOD NEWS if you are nervous about flying: your chance of dying in a plane crash has been halved in the last decade. To put it another way, one person in every 13.7 million commercial aeroplane passengers worldwide who flew between 2018 and 2022 met with a fatal accident. That was a big...

It is feared that there may be just one million hedgehogs left in Britain. This compares to about 36 million during the 1960s. About 150,000 hedgehogs are killed on our roads every year. With this in mind, England’s first ‘hedgehog crossing’ road signs have recently been launched in several Borough Councils around the country. The...

You may worry that your letter will be lost in the post, but you probably don’t worry that your letter may be eaten by snails. But perhaps it is time to start. Especially if your letter is being posted in rural Northumberland. It seems some hungry snails there have developed a taste for eating the...