London-born Eric Ravilious (1903-42) spent his early years in Eastbourne E. Sussex and won a scholarship to attend the Eastbourne School of Art in 1919. Later he enrolled at Royal College of Art London where he studied under Paul Nash, a War Artist in WW1. Later Ravilious worked as a painter, book...
Titus Salt (1803-76) was born near Leeds, educated in Wakefield and served an apprenticeship with a wool-stapler in Wakefield. He moved to Bradford in 1821 with his parents & siblings at 18. In his years in Bradford he worked with William Rouse & Son, learning textile manufacture. Titus’s...
Examine the legacy of the islands’ knitting industry. Started in the 1500s, the knitting industry first produced garments for commercial sale incl stockings & undergarment Guernsey frocks. Using a soft worsted wool, they supplied warmth. Their stockings were popular, worn by Queen Elizabeth I...
20th explorers on their way to Antarctica, including Ernest Shackleton, often visited NZ. They used local ports and quarantine islands, and gratefully accepted other offers of assistance. They also took on New Zealander crew with them, to take part in the Antarctic trips. Capt Robert...
I have travelled the vast widths of Australia and Canada by very comfortable trains, and long parts of France and India by comfortable trains. But never on The Flying Scotsman, which was the world's most famous train service. In 1860, 3 companies established the East Coast Joint Stock for services...
6 English farm labourers who were sentenced in March 1834 to 7 years’ transportation to an Australian penal colony for organising trade-union activities in Tolpuddle Dorset. Leaders George & James Loveless created a Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers’ lodge during the national wave of...
Police court summons and photo, Nov 1911 Photo credit: Leeds Museums & Galleries Leonora Throp Cohen (1873–1978) was born in Leeds to Canova & Jane Throp. Her father was a stone carver but died in 1879 when Leonora was only 5, after he developed TB of the spine. This left her widowed...
Read Tyrannicide Brief: Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold by Geoffrey Robertson. Charles triggered the tragic civil wars (from 1642) when 1 in 10 Englishmen died. But in 1649, Parliament struggled to find a lawyer with guts to prosecute a king who claimed to be above the...
The idea of photographing the dead might be seen as morbid today but it made perfect sense to Victorians. Readers might like to find Audrey Linkman's book Photography and Death, published by Reaktion Books in 2011. Most photographs of a recently deceased person were taken by professionals, and...
ARTNEWS assembled a list of 11 must-haves books that cover art history, from classical antiquity to now. Art history is a flexible discipline, subject to revisions as things change. Below I have included the books I know and found excellent.GombrichThe Story of Art1. Penelope & Davies et...
Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922) was an art-dealer of belief; when the young Impressionists were ridiculed by French dealers, he bought their work and nurtured their cause, slowly influencing public taste in Europe. In 1865 he opened his first gallery in Paris. This dealer shaped the art market by...
The Clean Body, by Peter Ward2019In the midst of the global Covid pandemic, the author of The Clean Body: a Modern History (2019) showed that not only has the concept of clean been in flux throughout modern history, but that it is a social construction. Peter Ward made a convincing argument that...