Col H2

Yorkshire through & through. Lifelong Leeds United supporter. Lover of sci fi & horror movies. Mad about my family.

[Quantum Tech ⚛ @QuantumTech_X]

Do you know it took three Civilizations to invent Ice - cream? Watch this video.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🇬🇧 The story we got told is that kings made British history.

That parliaments did. That armies did.

That isn't what the record shows.

📜 1215. The barons dragged King John into a field at Runnymede and made him sign. Two years later ordinary people came back, and the Charter of the Forest gave common people written rights for the first time in history. British people stood together, and they won.

⚔️ 1381. A hundred thousand peasants, labourers and craftsmen marched on London with farm tools and the longbows the Crown had trained them to use. A fourteen-year-old king rode out to meet them and negotiated face to face with a peasant at Smithfield. Serfdom never recovered. British people stood together, and they won.

🕯️ 1791. Three hundred thousand British households stopped buying sugar. No leader. No orders. Women led it, putting notices in their windows that said this household does not use slave-grown sugar. Sales collapsed. It started the momentum that ended the slave trade. The Royal Navy spent the next fifty years intercepting slave ships. British taxpayers paid the loan until 2015. British people stood together, and they won.

🌳 1834. Six Dorset farm labourers asked for a living wage. The government made it illegal overnight and shipped them to Australia in irons. Eight hundred thousand people signed a petition. Tens of thousands marched through London. The Tolpuddle Martyrs came home, and the global trade union movement had its moment. British people stood together, and they won.

🏭 1862. The American Civil War cut off the cotton. Half a million Lancashire mill workers were starving. Slave-grown Confederate cotton was on the docks, and would have ended the famine overnight. They voted, in meeting after meeting, not to touch it. They chose hunger over slavery. Abraham Lincoln wrote them a letter calling it an example to the world. British people stood together, and they won.

No empire did any of this. No king ordered it. No parliament voted for it.

A field in Runnymede. A road to London. A kitchen window. A tree in Dorset. A meeting hall in Manchester.

Every time it mattered most, British people stood together. And every time they did, they changed what it meant to be human.

This is who we are. This is what we're capable of.

Now it's our turn.

Find each other. Stand together. The next chapter is ours to write.

Your support pays for the research, the production, and the hours it takes to get it right. Stories like these don't find themselves.

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

Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

Today is St George's Day. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Your patron saint wasn't English. Your flag wasn't English either.

Here's why we claimed them both. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

He was from Cappadocia. Modern Turkey.

A Roman soldier. The Praetorian Guard. Diocletian's personal bodyguard.

303 AD. The Emperor orders him to persecute Christians.

He refuses. Walks into the throne room. Tells the Emperor his order is cruel.

They offer him his life back. Gold. Land. His old command.

He refuses again.

23rd of April, 303. They behead him.

1,723 years ago today.

The flag was Genoese. 1099. Their navy was so feared that Barbary pirates turned home at the sight of it.

In 1190, Richard the Lionheart signed a treaty. English ships could fly the cross for protection.

We flew it so long we forgot it wasn't ours.

In 2018, the Mayor of Genoa wrote to the Queen asking for 247 years of back rent.

She didn't reply.

Edward III makes George our patron saint.

Henry V cries his name at Agincourt.

A Roman soldier from Cappadocia became the name Englishmen died for.

We didn't inherit our patron saint. We chose him. And we chose a soldier who refused.

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. 🙏🇬🇧

[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.

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[Classic Ads @ClassicAdvertz]

This is exactly what AI was made for 😂

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

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.

Nobody is coming to queue for you. Britain's story needs people to show up.

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.

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[Matt Casey 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 @MattCas04807118]

1968 - A knocker upper was still a real thing.❤️

Miners’ houses had a piece of slate on the wall by the front door, there you wrote your shift starting times so the knocker would know when to wake you.

Some had long sticks and banged on bedroom windows, others had pea shooters.❤️

[Quantum Tech ⚛ @QuantumTech_X]

Here’s what would happen if the Earth suddenly stopped spinning hypothetically, It’s disastrous.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

In 1871 a man sat at a desk and wrote fifteen letters. ⚽🇬🇧

Nobody knew what those letters would become.

His name was Charles Alcock. Secretary of the Football Association. Former pupil at Harrow School. He remembered something from his schooldays. A knockout competition between houses. Every team plays. The losers go home. One winner.

He thought: what if we did that. But for the whole country.

So he wrote fifteen letters.

The clubs that wrote back:

Barnes. Civil Service. Clapham Rovers. Crystal Palace. Donington School. Hampstead Heathens. Harrow Chequers. Hitchin. Maidenhead. Marlow. Queen's Park of Glasgow. Royal Engineers. Upton Park. Wanderers.

Fifteen clubs. Out of fifty who were eligible. Most of them thought it was a nice idea. Some of them didn't bother replying at all.

Three withdrew before they even played a match.

Twelve clubs actually competed. Thirteen games in total. The whole thing played out across a few months in the winter and spring of 1871 to 1872.

The final was held on 16 March 1872 at the Kennington Oval. A cricket ground. There were no stands. Two thousand people stood around a rope in the cold March afternoon light to watch.

The Royal Engineers were overwhelming favourites. Physically imposing. Tactically advanced. 7-4 on to win.

Ten minutes in... One of their players broke his collarbone.

No substitutes existed. They played on with ten men.

Wanderers scored. One nil. Final score.

The man who invented the competition played in it. He captained the winning team. He lifted the cup he had created.

Charles Alcock. The only man in history to invent a competition, play in its first final, and win it. 🏆

That competition still runs today. One hundred and fifty five years later. The semi-final draw was made just days ago... Manchester City vs Southampton. Chelsea vs Leeds.

The oldest national football competition on earth.

And every football cup competition that followed, every domestic cup in every country, follows the same format. The knockout bracket. Every team plays. The losers go home. One winner.

Britain invented that. In fifteen letters. From one desk. In 1871. 🇬🇧

Every story on this channel is available in full at https://t.co/wN9S2gRUuR

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

Be Part Of Us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

They didn't wait for the government. They didn't wait for anyone. 🍺🇬🇧

Centuries before the NHS, ordinary British working people built their own system.

In secret. In pubs.

Every week they pooled their pennies.

If you fell ill, they paid your rent. 🏠 If you died, they buried you. ⚰️ If your family starved, they fed them. 🍞

No government. No institution. Just British working people looking after each other.

By 1800. Four million members. 🇬🇧

They called them Friendly Societies.

The NHS. The trade unions. The co-operative movement. All of them started the same way. In rooms like this. With people like these.

And almost nobody knows this happened.

Britain lost its story. We're taking it back. Story by story. Name by name.

Nobody is coming to do this for us.

If you want to be part of making sure this country remembers who it is: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be Part Of Us.

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Why is there no bridge in New Zealand between the two islands?

[🎞️ sumitandkajal]

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

The Queen banned them. 50,000 people rioted anyway. 🍞👑

In 1592 Queen Elizabeth I banned the sale of spiced buns. You could only buy one on Good Friday. Christmas. Or at a funeral.

So every Good Friday the Chelsea Bun House opened at 3 in the morning. And the crowds came. George II came. George III came. Queen Charlotte turned up and gave the baker a silver mug containing five guineas as a thank you. 👑

In 1792 the crowd got so out of hand that the baker Mrs Hand publicly announced there would be NO hot cross buns the following year.

She changed her mind.

In 1839, the last year of the Bun House, they sold 240,000 hot cross buns. In one day. 🇬🇧

The nursery rhyme dates to 1733. You are still eating them today.

This channel exists because people like you chose to make it happen. Thousands of stories like this one are waiting to be told. Battles won. Names forgotten. History that belongs to all of us but gets told to none of us.

If you want to be part of keeping it alive: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be Part Of Us.

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Mark Gadala-Maria @markgadala]

I'm obsessed with fan made AI Star Wars Chapters.

Darth Vader visits Padme's grave.

Credit: Lost Holocrons on YT

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

Parliament once called it the most brilliant invention ever produced. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

It was invented by a man who fixed potholes for a living.

On a foggy night in Yorkshire.

Because of a cat.

Percy Shaw was born in Halifax in 1890. One of ten children. Left school at thirteen. Fixed roads for a living.

One foggy night in 1934 he was driving home on a stretch of road he called the death drop. The fog was so thick he couldn’t see the edge. Then two points of light. A cat on a fence. Its eyes reflecting his headlights back through the fog.

He didn’t drive off the edge.

The next morning he started building.

A glass bead in a rubber casing. Set into a cast iron base. When a car drove over it the rubber pressed down and rainwater washed the glass clean.

He patented it in 1934.

Nobody was interested.

Then the war came. Britain switched off every streetlight in the country. The whole country went dark.

Percy Shaw’s cat’s eyes were the only thing keeping people on the roads.

Parliament called it the most brilliant invention ever produced in the interests of road safety.

Orders came in at 40,000 a week.

Percy Shaw became a millionaire. Kept living in his terraced house in Halifax. Removed the carpets. Kept four televisions on in the same room with the sound down. Every Friday friends came round with ale and crisps.

OBE. 1965.

A road mender from Halifax.

Britain has never run out of extraordinary people. It just ran out of people willing to help tell their stories.

This is where they gather.
https://t.co/rih7iKwVkN
Be Part Of Us.

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

Alex Newman breaks down the climate agenda in 90 seconds.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

Wilberforce got the statue.

This man got the mud.

Thirty-five thousand miles of it.

His name was Thomas Clarkson. Born in England. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Cambridgeshire. 1760.

He was twenty-four years old when Cambridge set him an essay question.

"Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?"

He knew nothing about slavery. So he started reading.

Two months later he couldn't stop. He won the prize and rode home to London with something nobody had given him. A conscience he couldn't put down.

Halfway there, on a quiet country road, he stopped his horse.

Sat in the silence of the English countryside.

The trade was real. He had just proved it. And somebody had to stop it.

So he gave up the church and got to work.

Bristol. Liverpool. Every slave port in Britain. Into the taverns, the back rooms, the ships. Asking sailors what they had seen below decks. Men who had been there. Who knew what happened on the Middle Passage.

Some refused. Some were threatened. Some were bought.

Clarkson kept riding.

Thirty-five thousand miles. Ten years. Every testimony written down in longhand on the road.

All of it handed to a young MP named William Wilberforce.

Wilberforce went to Parliament and gave the speeches.

Clarkson saddled up and went back out.

In 1792 they put a petition together. Not from London. Not from the powerful. From ordinary men and women. Market towns, village squares, chapel steps across England.

Four hundred thousand signatures. The largest petition in British parliamentary history.

Parliament voted it down.

So they went again. And again. Eighteen years of going again.

25 March 1807. The Slave Trade Act passed. Britain outlawed the trade and turned the Royal Navy loose to hunt the ships.

History gave Wilberforce the statue. Coleridge called Clarkson the moral steam engine of the abolition movement.

Clarkson lived to see slavery abolished completely in 1833. An old man of seventy-three, who had started this at twenty-four. He died in 1846. The last surviving founder of the original committee.

He never held office. Never gave the famous speeches.

He just got back on the horse.

For sixty years.

Did they teach you his name?

Together we keep our history alive.
https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us.

Be Proud Of Us. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

[Road To Success @_RoadToSuccess_]

This is how crude oil processed‼️‼️

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

They said a steamship couldn’t cross the Atlantic. 🌊

He built one anyway.

They said the tunnel couldn’t be dug.

He dug it anyway.

They said the ship was too big to ever be built.

692 feet. Launched 1858. Biggest ship on earth for 40 years. 🚢

His name was Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

He built the longest railway tunnel in the world. The widest tracks. Paddington Station. The Clifton Suspension Bridge. Designed at 24.

When the two crews boring Box Tunnel from opposite ends finally met in the middle, they were one and a quarter inches out of alignment. Over two miles of rock. 🎯

He worked 20-hour days. Smoked 40 cigars. Died at 53.

In 2002 the BBC asked the nation to vote for the greatest Briton of all time.

He came second. 🇬🇧

Be part of us - https://t.co/rih7iKwVkN

Be Proud Of Us 🙏🇬🇧

[Matt Casey 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 @MattCas04807118]

We were brilliant for the world.👏👏

Our little island ruled the waves.❤️❤️❤️

Another brilliant video from @ProudofusUK