Well it seems like an appropriate morning injunction, since I’ve just been reading in the London Cycling Campaign magazine about the sport of bicycle polo.
No, I’m not making it up – see here: apparently it almost made it into the Olympics.
But even though for a softer, more litigious, age they’ve had to amend the rules, I don’t think I fancy it myself – hard enough from horseback, when at least your “steed” has brains of its own and the desire to remain upright.
No I was talking about, or rather have been reading about Sara. Samuel was her father. She’s been “rediscovered” and looks like being brought back into the limelight – or at least someone is giving it a rather good go.
She had a lot to write about, for her father left the family home when she was three, then:
Her husband’s parents disapproved of her marriage, three of their five children died soon after birth, she suffered severe depression in the 1830s and her husband died young in 1843.
And her final subject was breast cancer. Written soon before she died:
Doggrel Charm
To a little lump of malignity, on being medically assured that it was not a fresh growth, but an old growth splitting.
Split away, split away,
split away, split!
Plague of my life, delay pretermit!
Rapidly, rapidly, rapidly go!
Haste ye to mitigate
trouble and woe!…
That’s what you call dying well, with spirit and brave anger.
People are just waking up to the possibility of podcasts – and the way in which you can tell your stories to whole new audiences. (I’ll have some announcements on that score soonish…) But I’ve just been listening to the Australian environmental and forest history. It covered a lot of ground with which I’m familiar – it is about first/second-year OU level, but nicely done and a great introduction if you haven’t looked at the subject before.
Some of the others also look interesting – just about a complete course in the subject.
A slightly belated acknowledgement of a birthday yesterday of Kathleen Lonsdale, who discovered the hexagonal structure of benzene, an image burned into the brain of anyone who has ever studied organic chemistry.
(Twas my misfortune to do so in an agricultural science degree at Sydney Uni – I crammed vast number of chemical structures for the exam and forgot them all five minutes later, but not this one. It was a test of rote learning and nought else.)
But I won’t hold that against Kathleen, for as I learnt from Penny’s always excellent Born on This Date email – a new great woman every day… she was a true pioneer in women’s science.
Wikipedia has a short but solid account and there’s more of the chemistry here.
(Which reminds me I learnt today, from a source I can’t now recall that if you type “info” – without the quotes – after any search in Google it will give you as the first, separated, listing, Wikipedia.
Had I been forced to guess when wheelbarrows were invented I would have put it as quite recently – perhaps down to some efficiency-seeking Victorian builder – but my daily OED email proves me wrong.
The oldest usage given is from c.1340:
Sikeman lith in hors-bere..And the crepul in the wilbarewe.
(I’m struggling to translate that, though it looks fun… Any thoughts?)
In fact lots of the early usages seem to refer to escapades. From c. 1600: “To be jaunted up and down London Streets in a lethern wheelbarrow.” But I guess it was more fun to write about that than about builders or stablehands at work.
For today at least you can read the full entry here, where you can also sign up for the email.
On the American version of civil war this time: arriving in my inbox a review of Thomas P. Lowry. Confederate Heroines: 120 Southern Women Convicted by Union Military Justice. And it looks like it contains some great characters, as in this example:
Readers also learn of the remarkable case of Mary S. Terry of Maryland, who was arrested for smuggling when she was found in possession of nearly $2000.00 worth of contraband goods. Even though this was not the first time she had come to the attention of the military justice system for such offenses, the military commission trying her case initially decided to impose a fairly light punishment, requiring only that she take the oath of allegiance, accept a parole on her honor, and stay north of New Jersey’s southern border. When the commission’s decisions were sent to Gen. Lew Wallace for review, however, they provoked an exasperated and interesting response. Wallace complained that the court had imposed much too light a sentence for a woman who was demonstrated to be “an intelligent, bold, defiant, energetic, masculine Rebel, bent on mischief,” and he asked how the commission could possibly “give faith to the honor of such an unsexed merchant” (pp. 50-51), before compelling the commission to reconsider its findings. The commission responded by revising the sentence to a one-year imprisonment in a female prison in Salem, Massachusetts. As if this was not enough, it was soon thereafter discovered that there was no female prison in Salem. Consequently, Terry ended up being sent to the female prison in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, an institution that saw a number of the women whose experiences are chronicled in this book pass through its gates.
Full review here.
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