Top Tweets for #BePROUD

🇬🇧 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. 🙏🇬🇧

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧 The man who first lit a house died 7 years before Edison was even born. One house in Cornwall glowed after dark in 1792. No candles. No oil. Light, burning out of pipes. The first house on Earth lit this way. The man inside was a Scot. William Murdoch, a millwright's son from Ayrshire, walked more than 300 miles to Birmingham in 1777 to ask the great firm of Boulton and Watt for work. ⚙️ Matthew Boulton noticed his hat. It was wood, turned on a lathe the young Scot designed himself. The hat got him the job. The firm sent him to Cornwall to keep its mine engines running. But the nights were his own. In 1784 a model steam carriage ran across his living room floor, under its own power. The first machine in Britain recorded doing it. Then he sealed coal in iron, heated it, caught the gas that came off and piped it through his own house. He put a flame to the end of the pipe. 🔥 And the dark went out of his parlour. By 1805 he had lit a Salford cotton mill end to end: over 900 steady flames where candles had guttered and smoked. In 1807 the first gas lamps rose in Pall Mall. Murdoch did not put them there. A promoter called Frederick Winsor had run ahead with the idea. Companies were chartered and fortunes made, in pounds sterling. Murdoch had never patented gas light, and the fortune was never his. What he got instead was the Royal Society's Rumford Gold Medal in 1808, stamped in Latin: out of smoke, light. 🏛️ You were taught the man who beat the darkness was Edison. Murdoch was 7 years dead before Edison was even born. By 1839, gaslight stood over London, Manchester and Glasgow. Britain lit the night first, and the world followed. 🇬🇧 Today he stands in gold in Birmingham beside Boulton and Watt, and every June the town of Redruth holds a festival in his name. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ His real monument comes on at dusk, in every British street. A gift from a millwright's son. Never signed. Still burning. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it. If you can afford to support our mission: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

Everyone knew how old the Earth was. About 6,000 years, counted from the Bible. Then a Scottish farmer rowed out to a cliff and proved it was older than the human mind could hold. 🇬🇧 His name was James Hutton. A farmer in Berwickshire, trained as a doctor, made rich from a soot factory. For years he watched his own fields wear away in the rain and rebuild downstream. Rock turned to soil, soil washed to sea, and something deep and hot pushed it all back up. Slowly. Endlessly. If that was true, the world was not thousands of years old. It was older than anyone could reckon. He needed proof a person could stand in front of. He found it at Siccar Point, where flat red sandstone sits on top of older rock stood bone upright, two whole worlds of time in one cliff. One laid down, lifted, tilted on its end and worn flat, before the other had even begun. The man beside him said the mind grew giddy looking so far back into the abyss of time. Hutton put no number on it. He simply wrote that he could find no vestige of a beginning, and no prospect of an end. Every time you hear the Earth is billions of years old, you are hearing a Scottish farmer who taught himself to read time in a cliff. That is a Briton to be proud of. We exist to remind the world we should be proud to be British. The stories of our past. Funded by our present. Saved for our future. https://t.co/rih7iKwVkN Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧