ChaoticMusings

Digger · Admin

Great Britain

Digger · Admin

In November 1841, nineteen enslaved men took an American slave ship in the middle of the Atlantic. They sailed it to the nearest British port. 128 of them walked off into freedom that day. And America wanted them back.

Madison Washington had been born enslaved in Virginia. He escaped to Canada in 1840 and made it to freedom. Most enslaved people who reached Canada never went back. Madison Washington went back. His wife Susan was still in Virginia. He couldn't leave her there. He didn't reach her. He was recaptured. Sold. Put on the Creole, bound for the New Orleans slave markets. So were eighteen other men who had decided this voyage would not end the way it was supposed to. One of them was called Ben Blacksmith. Ben Blacksmith had heard a story. The year before, an American slave ship calledthe Hermosa had run aground in the Bahamas. The Bahamas were British.

British magistrates had boarded the ship, taken the 38 enslaved people off, and freed them under British law. That was the story Ben Blacksmith carried with him onto the Creole. On 7 November 1841, the rebels took the ship. They killed one slave trader. They wounded the captain but kept him alive. They needed him to navigate. Their first instinct was Liberia. The captain told them they didn't have enough food or water to cross the Atlantic. That was when Ben Blacksmith spoke. They turned the ship toward the Bahamas. When the Creole sailed into Nassau harbour, something extraordinary happened. Small boats put out from the shore, rowed by Black Bahamian mariners. Most of them had once been enslaved themselves. All of them were now free under British law. They surrounded the Creole. They were there to make sure the rebels could not be taken back. A British colonial officer came aboard. He was clear. Under British law, slavery was illegal. Anyone aboard the Creole who had been enslaved was, from that moment, free.

A hundred and eleven walked off the Creole into freedom that day. The Friendly Society of Nassau housed them, fed them, found them work. Madison Washington and sixteen others were held to face trial. In Washington, the news arrived with fury. The Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, demanded the rebels back to face charges of mutiny and murder. Southern politicians demanded compensation. Some called for war with Britain. Britain refused.

For five months. Through every threat. In April 1842, the Admiralty Court in Nassau ruled. The men had been illegally held as slaves under British law. They had the right to use force to free themselves. They were not pirates. They were not murderers. They were free men who had escaped illegal captivity.

On 16 April 1842, Madison Washington and his fellow rebels walked out of the Nassau jail into the Bahamian sun.

The Creole was not the first. In 1830, the Comet wrecked off the Bahamas. Britain freed 164 people from it. In 1834, the Encomium. 45 freed. In 1835, the Enterprise. 78 freed. In 1840, the Hermosa. 38 freed. In 1841, the Creole. 128 freed. Across twelve years, British colonies had freed nearly 450 enslaved Americans from American ships in British waters. The most successful slave revolt in American history had ended on a British dock.

Britain abolished slavery. Then refused to hand a single soul back, no matter who demanded it.

Digger · Admin

Every car on the road today rolls on what a Belfast vet invented for his 9 year old son. In 1887, John Boyd Dunlop watched his son Johnnie come home from cycling with bruised wrists. Belfast was cobblestones. The solid rubber wheels on Johnnie's tricycle jarred every bone in the boy's body. His father refused to accept it. Dunlop was 47. A Scottish veterinary surgeon who'd built his life in Belfast. He had never designed a wheel. But he knew rubber. From horse harnesses. From surgical tubing. He cut a strip of rubber sheet. Sealed it into a tube. Filled it with air. Then he tested it. He rolled two wooden discs down the garden path. One fitted with solid rubber. One with his new air-filled tube. The solid rubber stopped first. The pneumatic kept rolling. He fitted them to Johnnie's tricycle. The boy rode the cobbles without pain. On 7 December 1888, Dunlop filed UK Patent 10607. The pneumatic tyre. Then came the twist. His patent did not hold. A Scottish engineer named Robert William Thomson had filed a pneumatic tyre patent in 1845. Over 40 years earlier. But Thomson had never built one. Never sold one. Never proved it could work. Dunlop's was the one the world used. By 1889 a factory had opened in Dublin. Cyclists rode further. Then the motorcar came. Every car. Every lorry. Every bus. Every bicycle on every road. All rolling on what a Belfast vet invented for his son. Dunlop sold the rights in 1896 for a modest sum. He never became rich from his name. He had not made the wheel for himself. He had made it for a child. He died on 23 October 1921. Aged 81. He was Scottish. He lived in Belfast. He was British.

Digger · Admin

For a thousand years, the British people governed themselves without the state. This is how they did it. A thousand years ago in England, there were no police. There were no prisons. There was no central state strong enough to reach every village. And yet, somehow, England worked. The reason was something the Anglo-Saxons had built into the foundations of their society. They called it frankpledge. Every man in every village belonged to a group of ten. They were called a tithing. And each man, by law, was responsible for the conduct of every other man in his tithing. If one man committed a crime, his nine neighbours were responsible for bringing him to justice. If they failed, they paid the fine themselves. The whole tithing answered for the crime of one man. The system was given the force of law by King Canute, the Anglo-Danish king who united England in peace. Between 1016 and 1035, Canute decreed that every man over the age of 12 must belong to a tithing. When the Normans came in 1066, they could have abolished it. They did the opposite. William the Conqueror kept the Anglo-Saxon system. And he made it stronger. Twice every year, the Sheriff would arrive in the village. He would call the tithings together. He would check that every man was accounted for. This was called the View of Frankpledge. The system held England together for 300 years. And when the king's courts eventually grew to replace it, two pieces of frankpledge stayed behind. The first became the jury. Twelve neighbours, called to judge another. The same idea, transplanted from the village to the courtroom. The second became the constable. The man chosen from among neighbours to keep the peace. Not imposed from above. Chosen from below. Modern British policing began here. The jury system began here. The principle that ordinary British people are responsible for ordinary British people began in an Anglo-Saxon village a thousand years ago.

Digger · Admin

He gave Queen Victoria chloroform. Then he saved billions of lives with a map. In 1853 a London doctor named John Snow was summoned to Buckingham Palace. Queen Victoria was in labour with Prince Leopold, her eighth child. Snow administered chloroform. The Church of England had preached against pain relief in childbirth. They taught that the pain of labour was ordained by God. Women were supposed to suffer. The Queen called it "delightful beyond measure." Overnight, one London doctor had made painless childbirth socially acceptable across the Empire and beyond. But his greatest discovery came a year later. In September 1854 cholera hit the Soho area of London. 616 people died in days. Every doctor in Britain believed the same thing. Cholera was spread by bad air. "Miasma." Every medical textbook said so. Snow did not believe it. He walked door to door across Soho. He asked every grieving family the same question. Where did you get your water? He drew a map of the neighbourhood and marked every cholera death as a black bar at the address where it happened. The bars stacked up like bodies in the street. One street glowed with death. Broad Street. And at the centre of the cluster stood a single public water pump. He took his map to the Board of Health. They refused to believe him. Everyone knew cholera was airborne. The bodies kept coming. On 7 September 1854 he went back. This time they listened. The handle was removed from the Broad Street pump. The outbreak stopped. The pump had been contaminated by a nearby cesspit. One soiled nappy from a cholera victim had seeped into the groundwater. 616 dead. Snow had been right. The establishment still refused to accept it for the rest of his life. He died in 1858 aged 45, a stroke, believing he had not been believed. Twenty years later the world caught up. Every sewer system on earth. Every water treatment plant. Every clean tap in every home. Every public health department. The entire science of epidemiology. All of it is built on one English doctor's map. The Broad Street pump still stands today on Broadwick Street in Soho. The handle has been permanently removed. A memorial to the doctor who walked the streets of London and changed the world. This is your history.

Digger · Admin

The potted history of London Bridge. it's kind of fascinating. I'd love to have a time machine and walk along it with the shops and houses.

https://x.com/ProudofusUK/status/2045173962666062320

Digger · Admin

Frederick Hopkins. From Eastbourne, England. He was a major influence in the discovery and naming of vitamins. In 1912, people were eating full meals and still dying. Nobody knew why. Hopkins fed milk to starving rats and proved something invisible in ordinary food was keeping us alive. He won the Nobel Prize. Four of his students won Nobel Prizes of their own. Every vitamin pill on earth traces back to him. A British scientist changed how the entire world understands food.

Digger · Admin

In 1946 a Hungarian visiting Britain made an observation. "An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one." He was right. But nobody told you why. It started in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. Same factory. Same start time. Same end time. Suddenly everyone needed the same thing at the same time.

The queue was born. Then came WW1. Food ran short. People started joining queues without even knowing what they were for. Just in case it was something useful. Then came 1939. Britain stood alone. Everything was rationed. The government promoted taking your turn as a wartime virtue. Queue-jumping became a moral failing. Not just bad manners. Letting your country down. By 1945 it was who we were.

The queue is democracy in its simplest form. Your time is worth no more than mine. A duke or a dustman. You wait your turn. In 2011 rioters looted a shop in London. They formed an orderly queue to climb through the broken window. One at a time. Even the rioters queued. In 2022 a quarter of a million people queued for twenty-four hours to say goodbye to the Queen. Nobody pushed in. Nobody complained. The whole world watched and didn't understand. That is your history.

Digger · Admin

Britain called her a housewife. She’d mapped the molecule that saved the war. Dorothy Hodgkin’s hands were destroying themselves. Rheumatoid arthritis twisting every joint, locking every finger. The instruments she needed were the size of pins.

She kept working. 1945. Soldiers dying of infected wounds. Penicillin could save them — but no one knew its molecular shape. Without that, you can’t mass-produce the drug. Hodgkin mapped it. Seventeen atoms. Four years. With hands that could barely hold the equipment. Penicillin went into mass production. Millions survived. Then she went bigger. Vitamin B12. A hundred and eighty-one atoms. The most complex molecule ever mapped at the time. Eight years. They said it couldn’t be done. She did it anyway. 1964. Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The only British woman ever to win a science Nobel. The Daily Mail headline? “Oxford housewife wins Nobel.” She’d solved the molecule that saved the war. Cracked the one they said was impossible. And they called her a housewife.

But she wasn’t finished. Insulin. Seven hundred and eighty-eight atoms. She started in 1935. Finished in 1969. Thirty-four years. By the end, her hands were almost useless. She taught at Oxford for half a century. One of her students was a young chemist named Margaret Roberts. Who became Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher hung Dorothy’s portrait in Downing Street.

Every antibiotic you’ve ever taken. Every insulin injection. Every life saved by understanding the shape of a molecule. That traces back to a woman whose hands were failing her, and who never stopped,

Magica · Still Here!

Oh wow very interesting reading Digs. Thank you, enjoyed it. Taught me things I didn't know. 😊

I never knew why we queued, interesting to see why. Now we do as it's normal and polite.

Didn't know we freed slaves on a slave ship. As we know, Britain was the first to abolish the hateful slavery.

Red Okktober · Musing at the Chaos

Digger wrote:
The potted history of London Bridge. it's kind of fascinating. I'd love to have a time machine and walk along it with the shops and houses.

https://x.com/ProudofusUK/status/2045173962666062320

You'd better take an umbrella - they used to empty chamber pots full of shit and piss, aka 'night soil', out of the upstairs windows!

Digger · Admin

Red Okktober wrote:
Digger wrote:
The potted history of London Bridge. it's kind of fascinating. I'd love to have a time machine and walk along it with the shops and houses.

https://x.com/ProudofusUK/status/2045173962666062320
You'd better take an umbrella - they used to empty chamber pots full of shit and piss, aka 'night soil', out of the upstairs windows!

I forgot about that!