Morning, Clunkers!
On this day in 1632, Sir Christopher Wren was born in a little village in Wiltshire. Not only was he an architect but also an anatomist, astronomer, physicist and mathematician. After the Great Fire of London, he was tasked with rebuilding 52 churches including St Paul’s Cathedral. He was a founder of the Royal Society.
John Rackham - Calico Jack, the scourge of the Caribbean Sea - was captured by the Royal Navy in this day in 1720 and hanged for piracy. Calico Jack is remembered for two reasons, designing the Jolly Roger and for his two women crew members, Mary Read, and his lover Anne Bonny.
The Sunday Times was published for the first time in this day in 1822.
Grace Darling of Bamburgh died in this day in 1842 of TB. She was the lighthouse keeper’s daughter who rowed out on 7th September 1838, to rescue survivors of the Forfarshire off the Farne Islands. She was a national heroine.
In 1915, Prime Minister David Lloyd George granted women their 'Right to Serve', thus opening up many new areas of employment for women and causing resentment among newly formed male trade unionists who thought that the move would depress wages. Nice of him. Men were needed to go and fight in the WWI and women were needed to replace them in factories but he and his government were still resisting suffragist and suffragette demands for the right to vote. And men needn’t have worried about women in the workplace depressing wages. Employers came up with a cunning solution. They just paid women less for doing the same job.
In 1959, shock horror, women’s colleges at Oxford University were given equal rights to men's.
In 1973, HMQ opened the new Sydney Opera House in Sydney, designed by Danish architect John Utzon to the consternation of just about everybody. It was almost universally mocked but over the years, people have grown quite fond of it.
In 1960, Penguin Books was put in the dock at the Old Bailey over the publication of DH Lawrence’s controversial novel 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'. The judge, Mr Justice Byrne, carried the offending book to and from court each day in a blue damask bag with a blue ribbon tie, made for him by his wife. It was a tasteful bag of the sort that genteel young women of the early 20th century carried to conceal an embarrassing purchase of, ahem, sanitary products.
Lady Byrne, following the now obsolete custom of sitting on the Bench beside her husband, was the most visible woman in court during the trial. Junior counsel for Penguin, described her as sitting ‘with her arms crossed, glaring down…, a grim and disapproving spectator’. Well, she’d had to read the book for her busy husband, hadn’t she? She furiously annotated exclamations and remarks such as ‘Disgusting!” in the judge’s copy so he had an easy reference system when following the evidence.
Penguin Books was found not guilty. Bet there was cold shoulder for tea in Byrne Towers that night.
In 1996, Oscar winners Wallace and Gromit disappeared after being left in a taxi in New York. 😱 Both the life-size plastic models were later found safe and well.
So here’s to you, Grace 🥂