Modern History 2 (From 1500)

This group started in Oct 2015
Venue Lovedean Village Hall (see map)	Meeting Time First & Third Tuesday 2pm - 4pm
Group Co-ordinators Peter Causley & Paul Tavener	Contact Via Email: groups@waterloovilleu3a.org.uk or use our contacts page

 

We are friendly and enthusiastic group, who enjoy learning more about things we know and finding out a lot of things we don't!
For most meetings members prepare a brief talk to open a discussion on a topic of their own choice. At other meetings we have short talks of about ten minutes. Topics are usually themes from the fifteen hundreds to the present day.
If you wish to join us don't panic! You will not be expected to give a talk at the next meeting! See below for the wide range of topics we have covered so far!

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APRIL 2020 - JULY 2021

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MARCH 2020

Sue gave a talk on Joseph Paxton, gardener and architect, best known for designing the Crystal Palace, where the Great Exhibition of 1850 was held.

FEBRUARY 2020

David gave his second talk on the early days of the Postal Service.

JANUARY 2020

Kay gave a talk on Joseph Lister, pioneer of anti-septic surgery.
Several members gave short talks on a topic of their choice:
• The Goldsboro Incident
• The HMS Berkenhead Drill
• History of Women’s Toilets

DECEMBER 2019

Paul gave a talk on the Crimean War, including some of the people involved.
We were invited to join Modern History 1 for their annual Christmas meal.

NOVEMBER 2019

Peter C gave a talk on the British in India, including the personal lives of the people who lived through it.

OCTOBER 2019

Tom gave a talk on the Gordon Riots including the political situation, Catholic Suppression and conditions at the time.
Tim gave a talk on Flying in the 19th Century, focusing on several of the pioneers and their machines.

SEPTEMBER 2019

John gave a talk on Fake News – The Real Wild West, the truth behind the legends.
Peter A gave a talk on Wentworth House, focussing on some of the people who lived there.

AUGUST 2019

Kathy gave a talk on Dr James Lind and scurvy, including the causes, symptoms and cure of the disease.
Paul gave a talk on the Gold Standard, what it is, why it was first introduced and its history.

JULY 2019

Peter C gave a talk on the history of Railway Inspectors and safety on the Railways.
David gave a talk on the early days of postal services, from a single messenger to the founding of the first General Post Office.

JUNE 2019

Tim gave a talk on the growth of tourism, from the first British tourists to package holidays.
We joined Modern History 1 for a visit to the D-Day Story Museum in Southsea.

MAY 2019

John gave a talk on the Peterloo Massacre, including the events leading up to it and the aftermath.
We were joined by Modern History 1 for a visit to the Weald and Downland Living Museum in Singleton.

APRIL 2019

Tom gave a talk on the history of the Carlisle to Settle railway. Built in 1868, it is still open and survived two attempts to close it.
Kay gave a talk on Jesse Boot. He transferred the Boots Company into a National Retailer.

MARCH 2019

Several members gave short talks on a topic of their choice:

• First Flight of the Spitfire
• The Berners Street Hoax
• Brendan Bracken Biography
• Sheffield Memorial to a crashed American Bomber

Peter A gave a talk called ‘Unchaining the Insane’, the history and treatment of mental illness on Britain.

FEBRUARY 2019

Sue gave a talk on the Frictionless Match
Paul gave a talk on Elon Musk, the technology entrepreneur, inventor and engineer.

JANUARY 2019

Several members of the group gave short talks on a topic of their choice:
• Sir Henry Tate
• Wentworth House
• The early life of Emma Hamilton
• Gerard Mercator

DECEMBER 2018

We were invited to join Modern History 1 for their annual Christmas meal.

Several members of the group gave short talks on a topic of their choice:
• Russia in the Space Race
• The Great Dance Epidemic of 1518
• The Bevin Boys
• Gutta-Percha

NOVEMBER 2018

David gave a talk on Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492.
Tim gave a talk on the Darien Project, an unsuccessful attempt to found a colony at the Isthmus of Panama.

OCTOBER 2018

No Meetings this month

SEPTEMBER 2018

Kay gave a talk on Aletta Jacobs, Dutch physician and suffrage activist.
Peter gave a talk entitled ‘From Woman Healer to revered Matron.’

AUGUST 2018

John gave a talk on Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the English mechanical and civil engineer.
Tom gave a talk on William Roy, the Scottish military engineer and surveyor, whose leadership led to the creation of the Ordnance Survey in 1791.

JULY 2018

David gave a talk on Alex Dumas, the father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas. He was the son of an aristocrat and a black slave. Known as the Black Count, Alex was a hero in the Napoleon Wars.
Paul gave a talk on Hernan Cortes, the Spanish Conquistador who led the expedition to the New World that caused the fall of the Aztec empire.

JUNE 2018

Tom gave a talk on Winston Churchill’s finances 1937-1945, from the book ‘No More Champagne: Churchill and his Money’ by David Lough.
Sue gave a talk on Mary Anning, the fossil collector who made important finds in Jurassic marine fossil beds around Lyme Regis. These contributed to important changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life.

MAY 2018

Tom gave a talk on one of the early sugar pioneers, James Drax, and his role in how Barbados became the richest Colony of England.

APRIL 2018

John gave a talk on the rise of the Quaker families of Cadbury, Rountree and Fry and their role in cocoa refining and the development into the Companies we know today.

MARCH 2018

The group visited the Mary Rose in Portsmouth Dockyard, Henry VIII’s flagship that sank in the Solent in 1545.
Sandra gave a talk on Lord Woolton, the successful Department store Manager who became Minister of Food in the Second World War with the task of feeding the Empire.

FEBRUARY 2018

Several members each gave a short talk on a topic of their choice: Personal experiences of the first day of World War 2. Constance Georgina Markievicz, the first woman to be elected as a member of Parliament. Tony Blair's speech to the Labour Party Conference in 1999. The Mary Rose and the Cowdrey engravings.
Earlier this month David and Sandra gave a joint talk on how the news of the victory at Waterloo was brought back to London.

JANUARY 2018

Ken gave a talk on the Battle of Trafalgar, including life at the time in Nelson's Navy.
Paul gave a talk on Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain in 1940 that never was.

DECEMBER 2017

Tim gave a talk on the Peace of Westphalia. It included the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire, the rise of Protestantism and World Order from 1648.
Later in the month we were invited to join Modern History 1 for their annual Christmas meal.

NOVEMBER 2017

Sue gave a talk on Japanese immigration to America from 1901, including the treatment of Japanese-Americans in the Second World War.

Earlier in the month we each gave a short talk on a topic around the Millennium:
• The Queen Mother’s one hundredth birthday in July 2000
• The aim to Eradicate Polio by the year 2000
• The opening of Tate Modern in 2000
• The evolution of our Calendar
• A personal view of the Y2K bug
• The Air Force Concorde crash in 2000
• The eclipse of the sun in July 2000
• The Weald and Downland Gridshell building

OCTOBER 2017

Tom gave a talk on the Lancashire Cotton Famine 1861-65. This was a depression in the textile industry in North West England.
Kay gave a talk on the Irish Potato Famine 1845-1851. It was a period of mass starvation, disease and immigration.

SEPTEMBER 2017

David gave a talk on the building of the Panama Canal. The idea for a canal dates back to the 1513 discovery of the Isthmus by Vasco Núñez de Balboa. It was finally completed in 1914!
For our second meeting this month Sandra gave a talk on Jesse James. He was an American outlaw, bank and train robber, guerrilla, and leader of the James–Younger Gang.

AUGUST 2O17

Malcolm gave a talk on the Ragged Schools. These were charitable organisations dedicated to the free education of destitute children in nineteenth-century Britain.

JULY 2017

John gave a talk on the circumstances leading up to the Russian Revolution, the pair of revolutions in 1917 which led to the rise of the Soviet Union, along with the major events of that year.

JUNE 2017

Ken gave a talk on the life of the Royal Navy diver Buster Crabbe, and the events leading to his mysterious disappearance during a dive in Portsmouth Harbour in 1956.

MAY 2017

Sue gave a talk on the effects of the Great Plague in 1665 and 1666 on two very different locations, the City of London and the village of Eyam in Derbyshire, where the villagers chose to isolate themselves rather than let the infection spread.

For our second talk this month Sandra continued her talk on Joseph Banks. He held the position of President of the Royal Society for over 41 years and advised King George III on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. By sending botanists around the world to collect plants, he made Kew the world's leading botanical gardens. Banks advocated British settlement in New South Wales and colonization of Australia, as well as the establishment of Botany Bay as a place for the reception of convicts.

APRIL 2017

Kay gave a talk on Granville Sharp, who was one of the first English campaigners for the abolition of the slave trade. In the mid-1780s, he became a supporter of the Sierra Leone resettlement project, which encouraged former slaves, first from Britain and then from Canada, to settle in West Africa.

MARCH 2017

David continued the life of Peter the Great. It included his Great Embassy to Europe and his subsequent reforms of Russia including the notorious beard tax!

MARCH 2017

David continued the life of Peter the Great. It included his Great Embassy to Europe and his subsequent reforms of Russia including the notorious beard tax!

FEBRUARY 2017

Tom gave a talk on a short history of the computer. It included the contributions of Blaise Pascal, Charles Babbage, Tommy Flowers and Steve Wozniak.

JANUARY 2017

For our first meeting this year each of us presented a short talk on 'Influential Women'.
Marie Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant palaeontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. She was better known for setting up Birth Control clinics.
Mary Seacole was a Jamaican woman who set up the British Hotel behind the lines during the Crimean War. She described this as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers", and provided succour for wounded servicemen on the battlefield.
Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral. In 1944, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and invented the first compiler for a computer programming language.
Emily Pankhurst was a British political activist and leader of the British suffragette movement who helped women win the right to vote.
Gladys May Aylward (24 February 1902 – 3 January 1970) was a British evangelical Christian missionary to China, whose story was told in the book The Small Woman, by Alan Burgess, published in 1957, and made into the film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman, in 1958.
Sacajawea was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition achieve each of its chartered mission objectives exploring the Louisiana Purchase. With the expedition, between 1804 and 1806, she travelled thousands of miles from North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean, established cultural contacts with Native American populations, and researched natural history.
Cynthia Ann Parker was an American of European descent who was kidnapped in 1836, at the age of about ten by a Comanche war band, who had massacred her family's settlement. She was adopted by the Comanche and lived with them for 24 years, completely forgetting her American ways. She was recaptured by the Texas Rangers, but spent the remaining ten years of her life refusing to adjust to life in white society.
Barbara Scott Young is a Labour member of the House of Lords. She was created a life peer in 1997 as Baroness Young of Old Scone. She spent her whole life working in administration, at first with the NHS. She became CEO of the RSPB in 1991 and modernised the organisation, opening their first cafe at Pulborough Brooks, a radical move at the time.
For our second meeting this month Malcolm gave us a talk on the Iron Curtain, with some personal experiences of people who had been on both sides of the divide. These included an Air Traffic Controller in West Germany 1957-59 and a woman who attempted to visit her husband’s grave from the West and was arrested and sent to a Siberian Labour Camp. She was later released and had a guided tour of Moscow!

DECEMBER 2016

Ken gave a talk on a history of the suffragettes, members of women's organizations in the late-19th and early-20th centuries which advocated the extension of the right to vote in public elections to women.
Later in December we were invited to join Modern History 1 for their annual Christmas meal.

NOVEMBER 2016

Sandra gave a talk on the early life of Joseph Banks who joined Captain Cook and discovered Australia.
For our second meeting John gave a talk on the social conditions in Georgian society in the 1780s that led to the policy of transportation of convicts to Australia.

OCTOBER 2016

David gave a talk on the eventful early life of Peter the Great of Russia. It included the Moscow uprising of 1682, his time as joint Czar with his half-brother Ivan and the Regency of his half-sister Sophia. Peter became sole Czar at the age of 25.

SEPTEMBER 2016

For this meeting we each gave a short talk on an event in our lifetime, and how it affected us.
We discussed:
• Conscription
• The Millennium
• The Fall of the Berlin Wall
• The 2012 Olympics
• Decimalisation
• The new polymer £5 note

AUGUST 2016

Ken gave us the second part of his talk on T E Lawrence. It covered Lawrence’s time in the RAF to his untimely death in a motorcycle accident.

JULY 2016

Sue gave a talk on the life of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. The talk included her work as a statistician and tireless social reformer.

JUNE 2016

Ken gave a talk on the early life of T E Lawrence, the British author, military officer and diplomat. Lawrence was renowned for his liaison role during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.

MAY 2016

No meeting.

APRIL 2016

Malcolm gave a talk on the Abdication Crisis of 1936, when King Edward VIII proposed to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite who was divorced from her first husband and was pursuing a divorce of her second.

MARCH 2016

We had a talk on the Great Exhibition of 1851. The ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations' was instigated by Prince Albert, designed by Joseph Paxton and attracted some six million people.

FEBRUARY 2016

John gave an introduction to the history of terrorism, looking at both modern and early terrorists. This prompted a lively discussion across many areas including could terrorists change and become statesmen, could terrorist acts ever be justified and whether anti-government agitators were terrorists.

JANUARY 2016

David gave a talk on the Turnpike trusts. These were bodies set up by individual acts of Parliament, with powers to collect road tolls for maintaining the principal roads in Britain from the 17th but especially during the 18th and 19th centuries. At their peak, in the 1830s, over 1,000 trusts administered around 30,000 miles (48,000 km) of turnpike road in England and Wales, taking tolls at almost 8,000 toll-gates.

NOVEMBER 2015

At our first meeting we each gave a short talk on an historic event in our lifetime that we found interesting and/or which had affected our lives.

We discussed:
Decimalisation
The Abolition of Capital Punishment
The Falklands War
The start of Comprehensive Schools
The fall of the Berlin Wall
and
The (unsolved) mystery of the tin coffin!

Not bad going for the first meeting!