Poundbury, 1015
-You wake up
-Gnaw on scavenged, stale bread
-Mourn your family, slaughtered by the war Danes when their silver prowed ships arrived on Wessex shores
-You retreat east, following a limping thegn
-The soot from villages put to the torch mingles with your tears

Winston Churchill refused a knighthood in 1945.

He eventually accepted one in 1953. So he fought all those elections as Mr Churchill.

I generally was beaten when I happened to be too late; & when I got up in the morning the apprehension of that was so great, that I used to run, & cry all the way as I went to the mill

Matthew Crabtree, a former child factory worker, interviewed in the Sadler Report, 1832

80 years ago, today in 1944, King George VI, Winston Churchill and General Eisenhower watched Exercise Smash, a rehearsal for D-day, off the coast of Dorset. Seven Valentine DD tanks sank in heavy seas.
I've dived on one of them.

“The Germans have received… that measure of fire & steel which they have so often meted out to others.
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.'
Churchill, after Alamein

Podcast:

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Ben Franklin died today in 1790. The only man to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris and the Constitution.
His last public act was to urge abolition. Congress ignored him

She was appointed by a hereditary monarch without recourse to a general election.

Culloden.
Today 1746. The last pitched battle on British soil. A bloody end to our last civil war.

🔥Divisive head of state faces criminal trial🔥

Charged with “wicked designs…evil practices …for the advancement of a personal of will, power… against the public interest.. liberty & justice”

Charles I. 1649

Podcast with Suzannah Lipscomb here:

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