Anne Walks…

City of London Green Badge Guide. Highlights of the City, Women and working-class and industrial history, East End

[Anne Walks… @WalkWithAnne]

@CapelLofft Anthony Andrews is the only Steerforth for me.

[HistoryandHeritageYorkshire @GenealogyBeech]

The last of the posts on Victorian bereavement and funeral custom. The image shows the 1872 oil on canvas painting "I am the resurrection and the life (A Village Funeral)" by British social realist artist Frank Holl. The original painting is in the collection of Leeds Art Gallery

[Richard Morris @ahistoryinart]

'Kensington Interior,' (1912) depicts the hallway of 67 Ladbroke Grove, London, W.11, the house which belonged to Frank Emanuel's parents and where he lived from about 1890 until around 1920.

[Black Journals @blackJournals01]

Every time your phone tells you where you are, it is using a mathematical model of the shape of the Earth.

A Black woman from rural Virginia spent decades building that model by hand, and almost nobody knew her name until she was in her eighties.

Gladys West. She grew up in a sharecropping family in Dinwiddie County and understood early that the alternatives were the tobacco fields or the factory. She finished top of her high school class, which came with a scholarship, and took it.

Her work was satellite geodesy: taking the raw data coming down from orbit and using it to compute, correction by correction, the true irregular shape of the Earth. Not a sphere. Not even a neat ellipsoid. A lumpy thing with gravitational highs and lows.

That model is the foundation the Global Positioning System sits on. You cannot locate a point on a surface until you know precisely what the surface is.

She did this for decades, largely unremarked, and retired in 1998.

She was recognised in 2018, when her sorority mentioned her biography at a function and someone realised what was in it.

The Air Force inducted her into its Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame. She earned a PhD in her seventies.

[Tessa Sanderson CBE @tessasanderson]

There will only ever be ONE Daley..great guy was an extraordinary athlete... incredible human being....x

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

Still British record holder after nearly 50yrs. But also a loyal friend. A fact few know; during Covid he had his closed gym (silly move, hope we learn lessons) which cost him financially very dearly, he paid self employed personal trainers to paint it, so they had some money coming in. Well over due to be Sir Daley Thompson

[Caroline Palmer @CanaryCaroline]

An excellent piece saying just what the whole Bayeux Tapestry debacle was like. @EllenFWalker @wmarybeard amongst many others.

[Quite Interesting @qikipedia]

Cock ale was a popular drink in the 17th and 18th centuries, combining the flavours of beer and chicken soup. The recipe called for ‘ten gallons of ale and a large cock, the older the better’.

[Londonist @Londonist]

If you could rebuild just one lost London building, which would it be? We asked Londonist readers, and you came back with an eye-openingly eclectic gamut of answers. Let's dig into the results. https://t.co/BleG3IurkP

[Amelia @amelia_tweetz]

The disappearance of places where you’re allowed to just exist without spending money deserves way more attention.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The free bottle of milk on every British school desk was put there by a 4ft 10 redhead from a Manchester slum, who was dead within 6 months of doing it.

Ellen Wilkinson grew up in Ardwick in the 1890s, in a house with no bath, and caught every illness going. She got out on scholarships. By 1935 she was MP for Jarrow, a shipbuilding town where the yard had shut and 7 men in 10 had no work.

She had seen what that did to the children. They were small, bow-legged and grey. In 1936 she walked with 200 of their fathers from Jarrow to London, nearly 300 miles, to hand in a petition. The Prime Minister would not see them.

In 1945 she was made Minister of Education. She had one thing she wanted above the rest. The Treasury told her the country was bankrupt and it could not be afforded.

In August 1946 a third of a pint of full cream milk became free for every schoolchild in Britain, every day, whatever their parents earned.

That winter was the worst of the century. Her ministry had no coal. She worked in her overcoat with bronchitis, and on 6 February 1947 she was found dead in her flat, aged 55.

She never saw a single class of those children grow up. They turned out the tallest and straightest generation the country had ever produced.

If you drank it, warm, through a paper straw, you were her life's work.

[Emily Sheffield @emilysheffield]

Absolutely ditto from me. The British Musuem is backed by tax payers money. Thanks to Tony Blair we don’t charge for entry to tourists to our great institutions of which millions arrive to visit every year. In Europe we get charged through the nose. And so with a British blockbuster like this the British pubic get totally fleeced because the BM needs the money. My tickets to see Bayeux (the day after the nice corporate event I am luckily attending) are at 4.30pm - £27 each. I’ll be interested to see whether I even get in. Or how long I get to view for.
I have always backed we charge tourists for our galleries and museums. It doesn’t have to be extortionate. But I don’t believe we have to be a European outlier on this when so many need real cash coming in.

[Fesshole🧻 @fesshole]

I used to enjoy going to Gail's bakery. But someone described Gail's as 'Gregg's for Tories', and I've not been since.

[Quite Interesting @qikipedia]

In 1887, Susanna M. Salter's name was put on the Kansas mayoral election ballot by a group of men hoping to humiliate her and discourage women from entering politics. She won two thirds of the vote and became the US's first female mayor.

[Andrew Connell 🇺🇦 @andrewpconnell]

So @George_Osborne was there, @holland_tom @wmarybeard @Dannythefink . He *may* not have known how paying visitors were being treated. But if he did, or does not now denounce that and demand action, do you really feel you can have confidence in him as chair of trustees?

[Dr. Ellen Walker @EllenFWalker]

Waited since I was 7 years old to see the Bayeux Tapestry. Got in an hour-long online queue to spend £50 on tickets. Got there ahead of time. Stood in a queue for 20 minutes. Then was told halfway through the queue that the gallery was closing.

The @britishmuseum stinks 😭

[Chapps @chapps]

I cannot even get my head around the #BritishMuseum closing and cancelling tickets people held for the Bayeux Tapestry for a damned politician’s dinner. ‘Just get another ticket’ is not the right answer, considering many have waited months and traveled far to attend. Grotesque.

[Aria Keys @KeysGlobetrot]

This breaks my heart. People save up and travel for months for this, some have waited since childhood. Fifty pounds, an hour in an online queue, then turned away at the door. The museum owes every one of them a proper rebooking 😢

[mary beard @wmarybeard]

The Latin on the Bayeux Tapestry is wonderfully easy, even if you know no Latin. Honestly! On Instant Classics we give it a go here! https://t.co/hasjHnuwCp

[𝕯𝖞𝖑𝖆𝖓™ @Dylanszn01]

Please stop comparing dying from poverty to Darwin’s “survival of the fittest.” Poverty is a social construct driven by wealth hoarding in the post industrial age, not by any natural shortage of resources.