Helen

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 ✝️

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧

Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed.

Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧

So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖

Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17.

They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too.

Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing.

In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave.

In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables.

In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves.

In 1807, Britain banned the trade.

Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time.

The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom.

From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓

In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans.

In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿

Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today.

That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧

So why haven't you heard any of this?

Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure.

The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account.

We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away.

This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name.

We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it.

If you can afford to support what we do: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

The cold is British. They just never told you. ❄️🇬🇧

Every air conditioner, every fridge, every freezer on earth, the cold inside all of it was first made by a Scotsman. In 1756. ❄️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

His name was William Cullen, a doctor in Edinburgh.

In a warm room, with no ice and no winter, he drew the air from a glass of ether until it boiled cold and drank the heat from the water around it, until the water froze.

No one had ever done it before.

Then he wrote it down and walked away. No machine, no patent, no fortune. Just the proof, on a bench.

It sat there the better part of a century. A British bench built the first machine that worked, and a Scot carried it across the world to Australia, where it froze meat and cooled beer.

But cold was only half the story. ❄️📖

To master the air itself took another Scot.

When the Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834, David Boswell Reid made the new building breathe, its gothic spires its lungs.

At St George's Hall in Liverpool in 1851 he built what is often called the first air-conditioned building on earth. It should have made him.

He died forgotten in America instead.

40 years on, Willis Carrier built the machine and earned his name as the father of modern air conditioning. He earned every bit of it.

But he did not make the cold.

The cold was British. America took that inheritance and cooled the world with it, and that is no theft. That is what an inheritance is for.

We are the home of British heroes.

Not built by ads, not by the government, built by us.

There's a place for you with us.
https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧

Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Helen @Hells_Bells_04]

🐝 💔

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🏛️⚖️ 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.

✍️ For a thousand years, we have been responsible for each other.

We do not need the state to teach us how to belong.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

This channel has no ads. No sponsors. No state funding.

It is built the same way the tithing was built. By the people who choose to stand in it.

Be part of us 🇬🇧👉 https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf 👈🇬🇧

Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

Rome thought flogging a queen would silence her people.

It did not.

Her name was Boudicca. It means Victorious Woman. 🇬🇧

She was queen of the Iceni, a tribe that had lived in modern Norfolk for centuries.

Her husband Prasutagus made a deal with Rome. When he died in AD 60, he left his kingdom jointly to Rome and his daughters. He thought it would protect them.

Rome ignored the will. They seized the lands. Treated the king's relatives as slaves.

Then they flogged the queen in a public square. In front of her people.

She raised an army.

Not just the Iceni. Every tribe that had had enough joined her. 120,000 people.

She marched on Camulodunum. Modern Colchester. The Roman capital of Britain. Built around a temple to Emperor Claudius. A temple paid for by the Britons Rome had conquered.

She burned it to the ground.

Rome sent the 9th Legion to stop her. She destroyed it. Almost to the last man.

The Roman governor was 250 miles away on Anglesey, massacring Druids. When the news reached him, he raced south.

London was defenceless. He made a decision. He abandoned it.

She burned London.

Today, under the streets and Tube stations of modern London, archaeologists find a thick black-red layer of ash from that fire.

They call it the Boudican Destruction Horizon.

Then she burned St Albans.

Around eighty thousand Romans and their allies were dead.

Nero, in Rome, considered abandoning Britain altogether.

But Rome's general chose his ground. A narrow valley along Watling Street. His ten thousand trained legionaries against her vast untrained force. The narrow ground broke her.

How she died, no one knows for certain. Some Roman historians said poison. Others said sickness.

Two thousand years later, her statue stands on the north bank of the Thames. Outside Parliament. The woman who burned London, watching over the city she destroyed.

What Rome did to her, she made them pay for.

Did they teach you that?

We will. 🇬🇧

That is your history.

This is who we are.

We find what Britain has forgotten. And we tell it properly.

https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Helen @Hells_Bells_04]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Happy https://t.co/SHGfZRemrt’s Day 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

[Helen @Hells_Bells_04]

@SeanyBoyy89 Can’t believe it 😲 hope the FSU can help you 🫡

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

Housework isn't work. Right? 🤨

Tell that to the British women who were getting paid sick leave for it in 1780. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

Across England, working women had a problem.

If they got sick, there was no help coming.

❌ No government. ❌ No employer. ❌ No safety net.

So they built their own. 💪

They called them Female Friendly Societies.

English and British women pooling their pennies every week into a common fund. 🪙

So that if one of them fell, the others would catch her. 🤝

But here is what made them extraordinary. 👇

The men's societies said: if you can't do your job, you get paid. Simple enough.

The women's societies went further. ✍️

Their rules said: housework is work. 🏠 Childcare is work. 👶 If you are too sick to clean, to cook, to care for your children... You get paid. 🪙

Nearly two hundred years before anyone else thought to say it. 😮

Written down by women who had never been to university. Who had no legal training. Who had no political power.

Who simply looked at their lives and said: this is work. And we deserve to be protected when we cannot do it. 💪

Nobody told them to. Nobody gave them permission. 🚫

British women just did it. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Town by town. Village by village. Across England.

The world didn't pay them for doing it. So they paid each other for losing it. Every penny from their own pockets. Nobody else was going to. 🪙

Our history is the same. Nobody else is coming to save it. So we do it ourselves. Together. 🤝

Be part of us 👉 https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf 👈🙏

Be Proud Of Us. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇨🇮🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

Before England. Before Britain. Before the Romans. 🌿

There was a class of people in this island who held everything in their heads.

The Romans called them Druids. 🌳

They were the doctors. The lawyers. The judges. The astronomers. The philosophers. The poets.

All in one. In one lifetime.

They could walk between two armies about to fight and stop the battle. With a raised hand. ✋

Caesar recorded this. Strabo recorded this. Diodorus Siculus recorded this.
Three independent sources.

Caesar himself wrote that Britain was the origin of Druidism 🇬🇧

Training took up to twenty years. Medicine. Law. Astronomy. Philosophy. History. The size of the cosmos. ⭐

All of it memorised. Not one word written down.

On the sixth day of the moon a Druid in white climbed an oak tree with a golden sickle and cut the mistletoe. Others caught it in white cloth below. It must never touch the ground.

They called it the all-healing. 🌿

They believed the soul was immortal.

After death it passed from one body to the next.

The fear of death was cast aside. 💀

Once a year they marked the barrier between the living and the dead.

October the thirty-first. 🎃

Every fire across Britain was extinguished. The Arch-Druid climbed a sacred hill in gold robes and lit a single new fire.

They burned the bones of animals in it.
The bone-fire. 🔥

We call it a bonfire now.

People dressed as monsters to hide from the spirits of the dead.

We call it Halloween.

The Druids invented Halloween. 👻

In 60AD Rome came for them. Flat-bottomed boats crossed the Menai Strait. The cavalry swam alongside their horses.

On the opposite shore women in black robes brandished torches. Druids with their hands raised to heaven. Screaming curses.

Tacitus wrote that the Roman soldiers, hardened legionaries, were frozen with terror. 😨

They stood motionless. Shields not raised. Exposed to wounds.

Their commanders had to shout at them to remember they were soldiers.

They crossed. They massacred. They cut down the sacred groves.

And Britain went silent. 🌑

No buildings. No inscriptions. No graves. Their temples were forest clearings.

Everything we know about them comes from the people who destroyed them.
And yet. 🌳

Halloween. The word bonfire. The oak groves they called sacred still stand.

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

Your support goes straight into educating fellow Britons on the history they were never taught.

Be part of us: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

Britain invented the world's first traffic lights. 🚦 1868.

Britain introduced the world's first driving licences. 1903.

And in 1931, when seven thousand people a year were dying on British roads, a man called Herbert Morrison decided enough was enough. 🇬🇧

No driving test existed. No drink-driving laws. No speed limits in towns. Roads that were absolute chaos.

So Britain's Minister of Transport sat down and wrote twenty-one pages.

For one penny.

The first line was quintessentially British: "Always be careful and considerate towards others."

It covered drivers. Cyclists. Pedestrians. Even horse-drawn vehicles.

It sold out on the first day.

It is now one of Britain's best-selling books. Ever.

In 1931 there were 2.3 million vehicles on British roads. Today there are over forty million. Britain's roads are among the safest on earth.

Twenty-one pages. One penny. One man who decided to fix it.

Britain's roads were broken. Britain fixed them. That is your history. 🇬🇧

Every story on this channel is available at https://t.co/wN9S2gRmFj

If you want to help us keep them alive: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be Part Of Us.

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🇬🇧 He called her the Enchantress of Number. 🧮

In 1843 a British woman wrote the world’s first computer programme. For a computer that didn’t exist yet. 💻

Her name was Ada Lovelace. Her father was Lord Byron. Her mother feared she would inherit his madness so she was taught mathematics instead. 📐

In 1833 she met Charles Babbage. He was building a machine that could calculate. Everyone else saw a calculator.

Ada saw something a century ahead of its time. That a machine could process not just numbers but anything expressed as symbols. Music. Language. Logic. Everything. ⚙️

She translated a French article about his engine into English. Then added her own notes. Three times as long as the original. ✍️

Note G. The world’s first computer programme. Written in 1843. For a machine that would not be built for another hundred years. 📜

Published under her initials only. A.A.L. Because she was a woman in 1843 and her name was not permitted on the page. 🔏

The computer was finally built a century later. Alan Turing referenced her work in his 1950 computing paper. The US Department of Defense named a programming language after her. 🖥️

Every computer programme ever written traces back to a note written by a British woman in a Victorian study by candlelight. 🕯️🇬🇧

Did they teach you her name?

If you want to see more stories like this, find us at https://t.co/wN9S2gRUuR

If you want to help us keep them alive: https://t.co/rih7iKwVkN

Be Part Of Us.

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[Helen @Hells_Bells_04]

@Davepower42 @TRobinsonNewEra 😂 Happy Easter

[Helen @Hells_Bells_04]

@elonmusk 🫡

[Helen @Hells_Bells_04]

@VoWalesOfficial One more cross is needed 🙂 ✝️✝️✝️

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

That pound in your pocket? 🪙🇬🇧

That's the oldest currency in the world.

It was there during two world wars. Bombs falling on London. Ration books on the counter. The pound was still there.

The civil war tore this country in half. Royalists on one side. Parliament on the other. The pound survived both. ⚔️

Henry VIII tried to destroy it. Mixed cheap copper into the silver. The silver wore away and the copper showed through on his nose. They called him Old Coppernose. The pound didn't die. The people wouldn't let it. 👑

The Normans conquered this island in 1066. Changed the language. Changed the laws. Changed the king. They kept the pound.

Vikings raided these shores for two hundred years. Burned monasteries. Sacked towns. The pound was already here when they arrived. And it was still here when they left. 🛡️

It was here before England existed. Before there was a country to spend it in.

In 780 AD, a king called Offa ruled a kingdom called Mercia. Nobody trusted anybody else's money. So he standardised the silver penny. Every coin the same weight. Every coin the same silver.

240 of them weighed exactly one pound of silver. A pound. By weight. That's where the name comes from. 🪙

1,200 years. And it's still in your pocket.

The French livre is dead. The Spanish real is dead. The Byzantine solidus is dead. Every great currency in history is gone.

Except yours. 🇬🇧

Did you ever think about where the pound came from? Now you know.

Find out more at https://t.co/wN9S2gRmFj 🇬🇧

Be part of us.

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

You've been here longer than you think. 🇬🇧

Not since the Romans. Not since Stonehenge.

For over 11,000 years. 🦌

Star Carr. The edge of a lake in Yorkshire. They built a house. The oldest house in Britain. Posts in the ground. A hearth in the centre.

They split timbers and laid a platform at the water's edge. The oldest carpentry in Europe.

They carved deer skulls into headdresses. They engraved patterns into a pendant. The oldest art ever found in Britain. 🪨

6,500 years before the pyramids. 6,000 years before Stonehenge.

Someone sat by a fire in Yorkshire. In a house they built. Wearing art they made. Surrounded by their people.

This wasn't surviving.

This was home. 🔥

That was 11,000 years ago. Same land. Same lineage.

This is your land. You're still building.

https://t.co/wN9S2gRmFj 🇬🇧

Be part of us.

Be Proud Of Us. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇮🇪🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

There's a pub in England. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

It's been open for over a thousand years. You can walk in tonight.

The Porch House. Stow-on-the-Wold. The Cotswolds. As old as England itself.

And when it opened... there was no united kingdom. No parliament. No Magna Carta. Vikings were still raiding the coast.

And someone opened a pub.

The fire's still going. You can walk in and sit by it tonight. The same space. The same warmth. A thousand years later.

There are pubs in England older than the United States. Older than the printing press. Older than the Viking invasions.

And they're not museums. No rope. No plaque. No ticket. You walk in. You sit down. You order a pint.

Empires rose and fell. Wars started and ended. Kings came and went. And the pub stayed open.

A room where anyone can sit. Rich or poor. Lord or labourer. No membership. No invitation. Just a door and a bar and a seat by the fire.

A thousand years. And the door never closed.

That's more than a building. That's England. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

The video you just watched was funded by people like you. Not a company. Not a sponsor.
Our people: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🦴 A skeleton in a cave. Nine thousand years old.

They tested his DNA. 🧬

And matched it to a man living half a mile away. 🇬🇧

In 1903, workers were digging a drainage channel inside a gorge in Somerset. They hit bone. A body. Curled up. Deep inside the rock.

He'd been there since before Stonehenge. Before the pyramids.

They called him Cheddar Man. 🧀

He hunted deer through forests that covered this island. He fished rivers that still run through the same valley today. And then he died. Alone. In a cave.

For a century, he sat behind glass. A museum piece. A curiosity. A name on a plaque.

Then in 1997, a scientist from Oxford had an idea. He took DNA from one of Cheddar Man's teeth. Then he went into the village. Walked into the local school. Swabbed the

cheeks of twenty residents.

And ran the tests.

🧬 One matched.

Adrian Targett. History teacher. Living half a mile from the cave.

Three hundred generations. Same family. Same valley. Nine thousand years. And the line never left.

He didn't know.

The longest unbroken connection between a living person and an ancient ancestor. Anywhere in the world.

Same hills. Same river. Same village. Half a mile from the cave.

You are the reason we can tell these stories. https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🥾 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 There's a road in England older than the pyramids.

It's a public footpath.

Anyone can walk it.

Five thousand years ago, traders carried flint tools along a chalk ridge in southern England. They followed the high ground. Dry. Safe. Above the forests and the
swamps.

Eighty seven miles. Wiltshire to Buckinghamshire. They called it the Ridgeway.

It passed a white horse carved into the chalk. Three thousand years old. Still there.

It passed burial mounds where chieftains were laid to rest. Stone chambers older than Stonehenge.

Bronze Age farmers walked it. Iron Age warriors built hillforts above it. Romans crossed it. Anglo-Saxons named the villages along it. Medieval drovers herded cattle down it to London.

Five thousand years of feet on the same chalk.

And it's still there. Not in a museum. Not behind a fence. A national trail. Free.

You can drive to Wiltshire on a Saturday morning. Step onto the same chalk your ancestors walked. And follow their footsteps along the ridge.

The oldest road in Britain. Still open. Still free. Still yours.

You are the reason we can tell these stories. https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf 🙏

Be part of us. 🇬🇧

Be Proud Of Us. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

They said English culture doesn't exist.

They said it in English. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

The most spoken language on Earth. Born on this island.

Fifteen hundred years ago, three tribes crossed the North Sea. Angles. Saxons. Jutes. They brought words we still use today.

Earth. Water. Fire. Love. Mother. Father. Child.

They called their language Englisc. They called this place Engla land. Land of the Angles.

Then the Vikings came. They didn't just raid. They settled. Became neighbours. And when you live next door to someone, your languages merge.

Sky. Skull. Knife. Window, the Viking for "wind-eye."

They. Them. Their. Those aren't English words. They're Viking. Ordinary people chose them because they worked better.

Then came 1066. The Normans conquered England. The new rulers spoke French. For three hundred years, English had no official status in its own country.

But the people never stopped speaking it.

The farmer called it a cow. The lord called it beef. Pig and pork. Sheep and mutton. That class divide is still on your plate tonight.

English didn't die. It swallowed ten thousand French words and came back stronger.

Today. One and a half billion people speak this language. Every pilot on Earth speaks it. Half the internet is written in it.

No academy designed it. No king commanded it. It was built by ordinary people. On this island.

They said English culture doesn't exist.

They said it in English.

You're the reason these stories reach millions of people. Not sponsors. Not ads. You.

https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧