For sixteen days in August the eyes of the world will be on Rio and the finest athletes. There will be many invocations of the Olympic spirit, of fair play and sportsmanship. I expect to be accused of sour grapes when I recall that the Ancient Greeks saw their athletic events as an important preparation […]
St Mary the Virgin Church Shrewsbury 10:00 – 16:00 until 13 August 2016 Carl Jaycock is a generous man. With his wife, Zareen, he has spent months tracking down and photographing some 200 war memorials in Shropshire. The art project (financed by Arts Council England) which has resulted now stands like a pyramid before the […]
What turned a decidedly sluggish seller into the one of the most popular books of poetry ever published? Originally published in an edition of 500; at the end of two years, the poet’s brother, Laurence Housman, bought up the last few copies. The Times, in a round- up of “Books of the Week” on 27 […]
Nationally, we can understand why there’s Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Station. Historic England tells us “Battlefields have frequently been the setting for crucial turning-points in English history.” In Shrewsbury we have Battlefield Road, Battlefield Heritage Park and the church. In town there’s Alma Street marking the first battle in the Crimea and Salamanca Avenue from the […]
Admiral ‘Jackie’ Fisher wrote of HMS Warrior ‘It was not appreciated that this, our first armour-clad ship of war, would cause a fundamental change in what had been in vogue for something like a thousand years.’ Having spent a good part of my life on new product development; rather than the battle itself, it is […]
No sooner had the short war of movement ended with the retreat from Mons and victory in the Battle of the Marne, than the BEF faced a new grave threat. In October 1914 No 6 Casualty Clearing Station encountered a condition which was to become known as ‘trench foot.’ During the first winter more than 20,000 […]
Captain Brian Hanbury-Sparrow of Hillside, All Stretton, died 26 August 1918 in Baku, aged 21. Brian Hanbury-Sparrow was born in 1896 in Tettenhall in Staffordshire, the younger son of Alan and Christina Hanbury Sparrow. Brian’s father, by then a retired solicitor, built Hillside, the impressive Edwardian Villa which stands above the road from All Stretton […]
Gunner [Thomas] Edward Lewis of All Stretton, died 8 October 1918 in France, aged 24. Edward Lewis was born on 24 January 1894, the son of Edward and Rosa Hannah Lewis, the third in a family of 9 children born between 1890 and 1910. Edward gave his birth place as Shifnal on his enlistment papers […]
Alfred Henry Simpson known to all as Hal was born on the 14th June 1890, the son of Henry Simpson who was partner in the Horsehay Company Ltd. Like the Darbys, the Simpson family were members of the Society of Friends and, in late 1914 they faced a dilemma which divided the Society and initiated […]
When the clocks spring forward on March 27th who will remember that we owe British Summer Time to the First World War? And to the Germans? Happily the Hero of the Hour is impeccably British. William Willett was a keen horseman. In summer he would take an early morning ride. In 1907, returning from a […]
