365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British: Humphrey Davy

9th January 1816: Humphrey Davy trials his safety lamp at Hebburn Colliery.

When I left school, we still had pits in Nottinghamshire. Five minutes from my house was Moorgreen Colliery, as seen in the picture. When we visited grandparents every other Saturday we drove through the site, over the open railway crossing and underneath pipes and vents and conveyors.

My walk to school took me close to the spoil heap, a lumpen hill formed from the dirt dug beneath our feet by Moorgreen, Underwood and others. Past Eastwood Hall, the National Coal Board offices, where we may or may not have seen Arthur Scargill being helicoptered in for talks during the miner's strike.

So it came a no surprise to find that, as well as reading far too much D H Lawrence, school were keen on sending us off to mining museums. As a treat. Because we didn't seen enough of the industry out of our bedroom windows.

Trips to Chatterley Whitfield and Big Pit taught me three things:

- wearing a hard hat and travelling in a cage is fun. Up to the moment when you're told to turn your lamps off. Dark becomes redefined.

- Welsh ex-miners can have a wicked sense of humour. Let's face it, if you work in a pit that's big and is called Big Pit, you need a few pithy lines to counter sarcastic teenagers.

- the Davy Lamp actually lead to an increase in deaths. And Davy was only one part of the equation. And that's four things. And there's more.

Photo c/o the Shane Phillips collection at Fionn Taylor's website

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365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British: Queen Mary 2

January 8th 2004: RMS Queen Mary 2 is christened and is the largest ocean liner ever built. Still.

Cruises have never appealed to me. There could be endless gourmet food, a microbrewery and Pearl Jam playing an acoustic set in the Tropicana Lounge, I'd still be in a floating retirement home where the bored crew are running out of places to shag. But taking a trip on an ocean liner... that's a journey with purpose. That's crossing the Atlantic. That's waving goodbye to Blighty and running up to the rail as the Statue of Liberty hoves into view.

That's travelling in the wake of history.

And there's really only one way to do that now. RMS Queen Mary 2 is the only transatlantic liner left. There are cruise ships that are taller and longer and wider and larger. But QM2 was designed to move people across the Atlantic - the rough, turbulent Atlantic - at comparative speed.

I rather fancy spending some time in the cigar room or the planetarium. But I'd really love to revel in the pleasure of arriving somewhere that's either the beginning of an adventure or its last chapter.

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365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British: William Dickson

January 7th: William Dickson patents 35mm film.  Apparently.

Whilst developing the Kinetoscope for Edison, Scotsman William Dixon is said to have invented 35mm celluloid film and patented it. And I'm buggered if I can find any internet reference to such a patent.

It's all confused further by the fact that Dixon was credited two days later as the first copyright holder of a motion picture - "The Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze".

Irony alert: my propensity for searching the tinternet any further for patent info is hampered today by my stonking cold. But anyone's got stone-cold evidence of the patent - not a link to another 'on this day' site - do let me know.

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365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British: The Stones roll

January 6th: The Rolling Stones play the first gig of their first headline tour.

Which, according to the Rolling Stones database of Nico Zentgraf was at the Granada Theatre, Harrow-on-the-Hill. And the possible set was Girls/Come On/Mona/You Better Move On/Roll Over Beethoven/I Wanna Be Your Man. And their impact on me was significant.

My Dad is a Stones fan. Some of my earliest memories are listening to the Stones. And not playing with the zip on the Sticky Fingers album. And never wondering why it was called Sticky Fingers. I was probably too busy playing with Some Girls, making the faces change.

He catalogued all the tracks on all the albums into a notebook. A-Z by track, noting on which album, side and track number it could be found. I instantly warmed to this value-added approach to a hobby.

And I've been cataloguing, indexing, cross-referencing and appending ever since.

And I've been dreaming that I can play drums like Charlie Watts ever since.

And I'm still tickled by the fact that I love a band that first headline gigged four years before I was born.



Photo borrowed from LondonJazz, which I try not to read too often as it makes me insanely jealous about what I'm missing.

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365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British: William Smith

January 5th: William Smith discovers the principle of faunal succession. Sort of.

I studied geography. In primary school, I yomped through all the 'Countries Of The World' worksheets so my teacher had to make up more for me to complete. Hence my arcane knowledge of the Gabonese Republic. Who really do have a president called Ali Bongo.

The upside of studying geography was, of course, the field trips. Industrial cider shared with girls who didn't speak your language but understood your intentions. In far-flung places. Like Swansea.

The downside of studying geography? A year of the physical. Standing in freezing rivers with flow meters. Pretending to understand how to use a theodolite. Collecting rocks on a beach that wasn't even fit for naval bombardment. And drawing geological maps. Endless, soul-destroying, pointless geological maps.

Not that I blame the father of English geology, William Smith. Big on fossils, was Smith. On January 5th 1796 he noted "that wonderful order and regularity with which nature has disposed of these singular productions, and assigned to each class its peculiar stratum". Date the fossil, date the layer. Map the layer. And force A-level students to spend sunny Wednesdays slaving over colour-pencil reproductions.

Actually, it was one of our teachers who had taken it upon himself to force us into a syllabus last taught pre-war. He was, I believe, invited to leave the school soon after. Which meant we got a replacement; an ecologically-sound frizzy-haired hotty with an American accent and a dazzling cleavage.

Which taught me a valuable lesson. Don't blame history; just get even with it.

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365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British: Rose Heilbron

January 4th: Rose Heilbron becomes the first female judge to sit at the Old Bailey.

What surprises me more about Rose Heilbron is not what she achieved but how I've never heard of her before. Especially when I'm in Liverpool. Heilbron was born and educated in the city and went on to be a trailblazing female barrister; the first woman to

- lead an English murder trial
- plead a case in the House of Lords,
- act as Recorder.
- preside as judge at the Old Bailey,
- lead the Northern Circuit

Given these achievements, I would have imagined there would be a statue. Or a plaque. Or something. Maybe there is. Maybe I've missed it. Maybe there isn't. In which case, there really ought to be.

And one other thing - Dame Heilbron has another first attributed to her. One that I can't find any corroborating evidence for.

That she was the first woman in Liverpool to wear a calf-length evening dress.

It smacks of urban myth. But, given Heilbron's history, I'd love it to be true.

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365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British: Thatcher and Ice Cream

January 3rd: 1n 1988, Margaret Thatcher becomes the longest-serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century.

Almost.

As Hugo Young has taught me, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, completed his third term of office in 1902 and totalled thirteen years. So Mrs T will have to be content with the title of  'longest-serving Prime Minister first elected in the twentieth century'.

The book goes on to say that "she helped perfect the soft-style ice cream dispensed on tap in ice-cream vans". Indeed; as a research chemist at Lyons she worked on emulsification projects that, basically, involved doubling the amount of air into ice cream without it collapsing. Hence ice cream became cheaper to produce. But could still be sold at the same price as cornets are sold by volume, not weight.

So is it any wonder she snatched my free milk later on in life?

I'm hoping that the Mr Softee link was some influence on Fluck & Law's puppet of the fey-haired Douglas Hurd...

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365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British: Kipling writes 'If'

January 2nd: The Jameson Raid of 1896 fails and later inspires Rudyard Kipling to write 'If', one of the most mawkish poems in English literature.

It graces the likes of over-wrought Powerpoint presentations, sports trailers on TV and the entrance to Centre Court. And it never fails to bring a little bit of sick up into my mouth when I read it.

Victorian spin-poetry at its worst. Jameson made a ballsup of the Transvaal raid yet was venerated as a hero upon his return. And as for rot such as this:

"If you can make one heap of all your winnings 
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss 
And lose, and start again at your beginnings 
And never breathe a word about your loss"

That makes you a problem gambler, not a man.

As an ex-rugger-bugger I've always had a softer spot for Invictus:

"In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed"


After all, there's only one version of 'If' that really resonates. That by Max Boyce.

Well, two other 'If's are rather splendid too. Steve Bell, possibly the best political cartoonist since the days of James Gilray, with his strip for the Grauniad,

and Robert McDowell's cinematic crowing glory. For many reasons, but especially for the line:

" There's only one thing you can do with a girl like this. Walk naked into the sea together as the sun sets. Make love once... Then die".

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365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British: The Union Flag

January 1st: The Union Flag (as we know it today) is first flown.

The Acts of Union passed in 1800 came into effect on January 1st 1801 and so the Union Flag was revised into the form we see today.

I remember little about my junior school education. It was a rather progressive place, stuffed full of slightly hippyish teachers who believed in a child's right to self-expression and the power of play. And learning mathematics via the use of continued use of Cuisenaire rods. And singing Pink Floyd songs at morning assembly (no, I'm not joking).

Because I'd already had a year or two at a decent primary school I'd had some proper eduction knocked into me. So I usually rattled off the hippy  lessons in swift order. But I didn't fancy playing in the sandpit (sorry, 'tactile learning environment in the courtyard') afterwards. So, I drew flags instead.

Which is why, from an early age, I've been one of those annoying sods that points out when a Union Flag is flown upside down. Because the broad white band of the St Andrew's white cross should be above the red band of the St Patrick's cross in the top corner nearest the flagpole.

As this splendid diagram by J.D.A Wiseman illustrates:

So, what else have I learned about Union Jack today?

- the white stripes are examples of fimbriation

- the scientific study of flags is vexillology

- no-one's really sure what happened to Geri 'Ginger Spice' Halliwell's Union Jack dress after it was sold at auction to the owner of Hard Rock Cafe

- that dress was made from a Union Jack tea towel sewn onto a Gucci dress

- Firestone Walker's Union Jack IPA is ranked the 25th best IPA in the world on ratebeer.com. And I still haven't tried it.

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365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British

It's backtrack time.

I've just picked up 365 Reasons To Be Proud To Be British from the library. Mainly because I recently bought another book by the same author, Richard Happer, which has been making me snort hot tea out of my nose on a regular basis.

This one's a little different; more in the QI 'fascinating facts' mould. Each of which inevitably leads me onto the tinternet to find out a little more. So... a master plan was hatched.

If I'm digging up resources linked to the best-of-Britishness featured in the book, why not share them? Every day?

Except for the fact that it's the fourteenth of January already.

Time to get surfing and backdate posts. It's about time this blog had some content anyway...

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