Today, Thursday 9 November 2017, saw Greater Manchester Police execute warrants at addresses across the Moss Side and Hulme areas of Manchester.

 

The warrants, which were supported by the Immigration Service, were executed as part of Operation Malham targeting the supply of drugs in South Manchester.

  

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Walker, of GMP’s City of Manchester team, said: "Over the past 6 months we have had a dedicated team of detectives trawling through community concerns and information about drug supply in the Moss Side and Hulme areas.

 

“Today, we have made arrests after executing warrants across these areas and I would like to thank the community for working with us, as well as partners, and making this possible.

 

“Please continue to report anything suspicious to help us stop the criminals benefiting from drug supply and organised crime.

 

“Drugs never be tolerated by us and we are determined to bring those responsible to justice.”

 

To find out more about Greater Manchester Police please visit our website.

www.gmp.police.uk

 

You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

 

Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information.

 

Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

 

This statue of Secretariat, executed by sculptor John Skeaping in 1974 and presented as a gift of Paul Mellon to the National Museum of Saratoga stands in the center of the paddock at Belmont Park Racetrack.

 

It was here, on June 9, 1973, that Secretariat won the Belmont Stakes in dominating fashion to become the first horse in 25 years to win the Triple Crown. Competing against only four horses before a crowd of 67,605, Secretariat won by 31 lengths in a time of 2 minutes and 24 seconds, which still remains the world record on dirt at the 1.5 mile. No horse has come within 1.4 seconds of that time. At the mile and 3/8 point, Secretariat had run faster than Man o' War's record from when the Belmont was run at that length.

 

Sired by Bold Ruler out of the dam Somethingroyal, Secretariat was born at Meadow Farm in Caroline County, Virginia in 1970. Owned by Penny Chenery, he was trained by Canadian Lucien Laurin and ridden by fellow Canadian jockey Ron Turcotte. Nicknamed Big Red, he won the Kentucky Derby in a still record time (1:59 2/5) over rival Sham whose 1:59 4/5 equals Monarchos' 2001 time as the second fastest in history. Even more impressively, he achieved the unheard of feat of "negative splitting", running each quarter-mile (402 m) segment faster than the one before it. Secretariat won the Preakness by two and a half lengths in a time that has been historically contested. The official time is recognized as 1:54 2/5, but two Daily Racing Form clockers claimed a time of 1:53 2/5 which would've broken the track record--a time that has since been matched twice and bested once. Secretariat never duplicated his Belmont Stakes performance, but continued to run impressively. His time of 1:45 2/5 for 1 1/8 miles, a world record at the time, in the inaugural Marlboro Cup. In winning his first start on grass in the Man o' War Stakes, he set a still standing track record of 2:24 4/5, without being whipped once.

 

Altogether, Secretariat won 16 of his 21 career races and finished out of the money just once. He won the Eclipse Award for Horse of the Year twice--as the first two year old ever to be honored as such, and again as a three year old. In retirement at Claiborne Farm, he stood stud siring as many as 600 foals including the 1979 Travers Stakes winner General Assembly, 1986 Horse of the Year Lady's Secret, 1988 Preakness and Belmont Stakes winner Risen Star, and the 1990 Melbourne Cup winner Kingston Rule. His blood flows through many other notable racehorses, including 2004 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Smarty Jones, and he is most noted as a broodmare sire.

 

In 1989, Secretariat was afflicted with laminitis and he was euthanized on October 4. In death, he was received the ultimate honor for a horse--he was buried whole at Claiborne Farm. Before his burial, he was necropsied at the University of Kentucky where he was discovered that his heart was approximately twice the size of a normal horse.

 

ESPN listed Secretariat 35th of the 100 greatest athletes of the 20th century, one of three non-humans on the list. In 1974, Secretariat was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame.

Bronze à patine brun foncé, hauteur : 276 cm, conçu en 1960 (épreuve fondue en 1980-1981).

 

La série de quatre femmes de grande taille que Alberto Giacometti a exécutée en 1960, chacune intitulée Grande femme et numérotée de I à IV, sont les plus grandes sculptures qu’Alberto ait jamais faites. Cette version, Grande femme II, détient réellement la distinction d’être la plus grande de toutes. Du fait de leur ampleur, ces quatre géantes se situent à l’autre extrême des minuscules sculptures que Giacometti rapporte de Suisse au lendemain de la guerre. De ce point de vue, elles marquent la fin d’un cycle ou plus spécifiquement l’aboutissement des recherches qu'il a conduites sur la représentation de la figure humaine dans l’espace. Elles sont aussi la dernière série que le sculpteur consacre au nu féminin.

 

Giacometti exécute ces quatre sculptures en réponse à une commande qui, si elle avait été honorée, aurait certainement été le couronnement de sa carrière, du moins son œuvre la plus célèbre. Giacometti est dans sa maison familiale à Stampa, en Suisse, lorsque, en décembre 1958, il reçoit un courrier de l’architecte new-yorkais Gordon Bunshaft (1909-1990) qui lui propose de réaliser une sculpture monumentale pour agrémenter la piazza installée au pied d’un gigantesque gratte-ciel au coeur de Manhattan. Le commanditaire du projet n’est autre que la Chase Manhattan Bank, l’une des plus importantes institutions financières au monde. Pour cette tour destinée à être le siège mondial de la banque, Bunshaft a imaginé un building d’acier et de verre de 60 étages dans le pur esprit de l’architecture internationale. Adjacente au bâtiment, une grande place est imaginée par l’architecte qui souhaite y installer une sculpture monumentale.

 

Bien qu’il ne se soit jamais rendu à New York, Alberto Giacometti répond positivement à ce projet. L’idée d’une œuvre monumentale érigée sur une place est au cœur de sa démarche. Dès le début des années 1930, il travaille à la création de sculptures en plein air comme en témoigne le Projet pour une place commandité par Charles et Marie-Laure de Noailles en 1931. Le sujet revient après-guerre. En 1948, la série des Place I et II concrétise les recherches sur la perception de l’artiste de la figure humaine dans l’espace. C’est précisément à ces œuvres que Bunshaft pense. Pour beaucoup d’amateurs, Giacometti est vu comme un poète des espaces urbains. À Louis Aragon, Alberto Giacometti a avoué être tenté de réaliser des œuvres monumentales sur une place publique. Il songe alors à une silhouette d’homme traversant la place et se mêlant aux passants.

 

Le projet de la Chase Manhattan Bank répond aussi à une autre aspiration comme Giacometti l’explique lui-même "j’avais toujours un peu le désir de savoir ce que je pourrais faire le plus grand possible. Quand un architecte m’a proposé de faire des sculptures pour une place, j’ai dit oui, parce que c’était une bonne occasion de liquider cette histoire" (in D. Sylvester, En regardant Giacometti, Paris, 2001, p. 187). Néanmoins, l’artiste prend vite conscience de la démesure de la ville et de ses gratte-ciels gigantesques. Il comprend que ses figures, placées à proximité immédiate des tours, doivent être très importantes. Giacometti ne veut pas que les figures dominent la place ou que les passants soient ridiculement petits au contact des œuvres. Surtout, il ne veut pas créer une grande sculpture qui n’impressionne que par sa taille.

 

L’échelle appropriée des figures le contrarie. Bunshaft lui suggère de prendre l’une de ses sculptures et d’en multiplier la taille par trente. Il s’y refuse: "Je suis tout à fait contre la pratique qui est très courante aujourd’hui de faire une petite sculpture et de la faire agrandir avec une machine" (ibid). Et puis ce qui l'intéresse est justement le défi de réaliser des œuvres de grande taille : "Ou je peux le faire à la grandeur que je veux, ou je ne peux pas" (ibid). Bien qu’il ait été utile de visiter le site, Giacometti décide de ne pas aller à New York. Ni l’importance du client, ni la célébrité assurée que lui apporterait ce projet ne peuvent perturber le rythme de travail établi par le sculpteur depuis si longtemps. Aussi Bunshaft décide-t-il d’envoyer à Giacometti un modèle à petite échelle du bâtiment et de la place, le sculpteur étant habitué à travailler en miniature.

 

Le 17 mars 1959, Giacometti écrit à Pierre Matisse, son marchand à New York : "Je travaille tous les jours presque à mon projet et je suis très impatient de le continuer demain. En tout cas qu’il marche ou pas pour l’architecte, cela me sert énormément pour tout mon travail et je suis très content de le faire" (cité in J. Russell, Matisse : Père et fils, Paris, 1999). Au printemps de cette même année, le projet se précise dans l’esprit de l’artiste. Il utilisera les trois éléments principaux de son répertoire figuratif résumant ainsi toutes ses recherches. Comme dans La place II de 1948, il y aura au moins une Femme debout et un Homme qui marche. La troisième sculpture sera une grosse tête masculine directement inspirée de celle de Diego. Giacometti commence par faire trois petites maquettes, puis les transcrit en plâtre à grande échelle.

 

Il écrit à Pierre Matisse, révélant le rythme effréné de ses efforts : "Depuis mon retour je travaille tout le temps à la même grande figure, plus que jamais réduit à une seule chose pour le moment, ce qui est tout à fait nécessaire. Lundi prochain, je vais faire les figures [du] projet pour la place. Je veux avoir tout fait dans la semaine, voir ce que ça donne ; directement assez grand, avec les bases. Foinet va me trouver un local ou une cour où on pourra les voir. Cela doit aller très vite ou rien, mais il faut que je travaille pour huit jours encore à ma figure et peut-être aussi à une tête commencée de Diego avant mon départ. C’est depuis avant 1947 la première fois où je me suis mis dans la situation de pouvoir tout recommencer, ce que je cherchais depuis longtemps" (ibid).

 

Malgré des efforts qui occupent Giacometti pendant plus d’un an, l’artiste n’est pas satisfait du résultat. L’échelle des sculptures le perturbe irrémédiablement. "Les difficultés à propos des sculptures de New York n’ont rien à voir avec le fait de la destination : banque, capitalisme, etc., comme tu sembles le penser. Non, cela ne me gêne pas du tout. C’est uniquement une question de sculpture, de dimensions, de proportions, defiguration, etc.", écrit-il à Pierre Matisse le 2 février 1960 (ibid). Il avouera à David Sylvester avoir réalisé pas moins de dix Grande Femme et près de quarante Homme qui marche sans jamais trouver satisfaction.

 

Quelques mois plus tard, Alberto Giacometti renonce au projet et s’en explique dans une lettre décisive à Pierre Matisse le 29 avril 1960 : "Tu vas être déçu et probablement peut-être fâché, et Bunshaft aussi : les sculptures sont fondues. Je les ai regardées à la fonderie, fait patiner, regardées sur le trottoir, dans la rue devant la fonderie, fait transporter à Garches dans le jardin de Susse (…). Toutes ont quelque chose de bien peut-être, mais toutes très à côté de ce que je voulais (ou que je croyais vouloir), tellement à côté, tellement mauvaises qu’il n’est pas question que je puisse les envoyer (…) Ca ne pouvait pas être autrement, je ne regrette pas un instant mon travail, au contraire, mais il m’est absolument impossible de présenter cela comme un projet valable pour une sculpture sur une place" (ibid).

 

Giacometti ne soumet pas ses sculptures à l’approbation de Bunshaft et décide lui-même qu’il ne pourra honorer la commande de la Chase Manhattan. Cependant, il ne renie absolument pas ces sculptures, au contraire. Elles débutent une nouvelle vie et vont désormais exister de façon autonome. La commande de la Chase Manhattan n’est pas vécue comme un échec, mais comme l’une des expériences les plus exaltantes du point de vue de la création. Certes, l’artiste abandonne parce qu’il n’est pas satisfait, mais l’a-t-il déjà été ? Les trois sculptures seront rapidement exposées à la galerie Pierre Matisse et chez Maeght. En 1962, à la Biennale de Venise, il installe la Grande tête, deux Homme qui marche et deux Grande femme au milieu d’une des salles d’exposition. En 1964, Alberto place les mêmes figures un peu différemment dans la Cour Giacometti à la Fondation Maeght à Vence, démontrant, mais était-ce nécessaire, que ces œuvres résument à elles seules l'œuvre du sculpteur. Avec le temps, la série des Grandes Femmes deviendra, avec l’Homme qui marche, l’une des plus emblématiques de l’artiste.

 

La tour et la place Chase Manhattan seront achevées en 1964 sans aucune sculpture. Giacometti finira par effectuer son premier voyage à New York, à l’occasion de la rétrospective que lui consacre le MOMA en octobre 1965. Emerveillé par la ville, Alberto Giacometti se rendra devant le building de la Chase Manhattan Bank et son esplanade vide. "Il avait l’air fasciné par la possibilité de réussir encore à créer une sculpture capable de tenir le coup devant l’écrasante façade. Il fit plusieurs visites, de jour comme de nuit ; il allait et venait, les yeux levés pour mieux jauger le site, écrit James Lord dans Giacometti Biographie, Paris, 1997. À son retour à Paris, il se décidera à travailler à une sculpture de très grande taille, bien plus que celles qu’il avait imaginées en 1960. Diego sera chargé de travailler à une armature pour supporter l’oeuvre mais l’artiste ne trouvera pas la force d’achever cette entreprise et décède en janvier 1966 (cf. Christie's).

bit.ly/3lXKKoe

Dutch Landscapes - Utrecht -

 

1940

Zes betonnen groepsschuilplaatsen type ‘P’ en een gietstalen mitrailleurkazemat. Een groepsschuilplaats van dit type is circa 8,2 m lang, 6,5 m breed en 4,85 m hoog. De buitenmuren zijn 1,5 m dik, die aan de niet-afgeschuinde frontzijde 1,8 m en de binnenmuren 0,8 m, terwijl de bovendekking 2,15 m en de bodemplaat 0,9 m dik zijn. Deze diktes waren conform Voorschrift Inrichting Stellingen (een serie door de KMA in 1928-1934 uitgegeven handboeken), in dit geval voor een weerstandsvermogen tegen een voortgezette beschieting met 21 cm brisantgranaten en enkele voltreffers van 28 cm (W 21-28). De afwachtingsruimte is 3,5 m lang en 3,0 m breed. Er werden ook lichter (W 15-21) uitgevoerde exemplaren gebouwd die door de dunnere wanden en dekkingen kleiner zijn.

.................................................................................................................

Dutch Landscapes - Utrecht -

 

1940

Six concrete group shelters type 'P' and a cast steel machine gun bunker. A group shelter of this type is approximately 8.2 m long, 6.5 m wide and 4.85 m high. The exterior walls are 1.5 m thick, which in the non-beveled front side 1.8m and the interior walls 0.8 m, while the top cover 2.15 m and the bottom plate is 0.9 m thick. These thicknesses were in accordance with Rule Shelving Facility (a series by the KMA in 1928-1934 issued handbooks), in this case a resistance to continued bombardment by 21 cm high-explosive grenades and a few direct hits from 28 cm (W 21-28). The waiting area is 3.5 m long and 3.0 m wide. There were also lighter (W 15-21) executed copies built smaller by the thinner walls and hedges.

  

Japan (April 19, 2022) - Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) 1st Airborne Brigade soldiers execute a static line jump near Narashino training field, Japan, during a bilateral jump training with the 36th Airlift Squadron, April 19, 2022. The goal of this event is to improve interoperability between the USAF and JGSDF by defense and information exchanges to deepen mutual understanding of each unit, and to further cement the U.S. and Japanese alliance. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Gustavo Castillo) 220419-F-VI983-0211

 

** Interested in following U.S. Indo-Pacific Command? Engage and connect with us at www.facebook.com/indopacom | twitter.com/INDOPACOM | www.instagram.com/indopacom | www.flickr.com/photos/us-pacific-command; | www.youtube.com/user/USPacificCommand | www.pacom.mil/ **

Greater Manchester Police have today, Thursday 15 March 2012, made arrests following the murder of a man in Rochdale.

 

In the early hours of this morning 22 warrants were executed at addresses in Moston, Moss Side, Fallowfield, Davyhulme, Urmston, Newton Heath, Blackley, Harpurhey, Beswick, Bolton and Hyde.

 

Eight men aged between 20 and 30 were arrested on suspicion of murder and violent disorder.

 

At about 2.40am on Sunday 25 December 2011, police were called to Sinclair's Bar on Drake Street, Rochdale, following reports of a large disturbance.

 

Officers attended and discovered a man had been stabbed.

 

John Lee Barrett, 31, was taken to hospital but died, Tuesday 27 December 2011.

 

A post mortem examination concluded he died from a stab wound to the back.

It is also believed he had been hit over the head with a glass or bottle.

 

Chief Superintendent John O'Hare said: "By conducting this operation, we have sent out a firm message to those who think they can travel across Greater Manchester and commit crime in other areas that we will catch up with them.

 

"We have demonstrated that if you commit crime as part of a pack, you will be arrested and dealt with as a pack.

 

"I would also reassure residents within the local communities that there will be an extra police presence in their area and if anyone has any concerns, please speak to your local officer.

 

"We are working very hard to ensure their neighbourhoods are safer and we will not tolerate offenders who think they can get away with their actions and break the law."

 

Detective Chief Inspector Pete Jackson from the Major Incident Team said "The warrants have been part of a lengthy and complicated investigation.

Hours of CCTV have been studied and the club has been forensically examined by a team of highly experienced officers.

 

"However, despite these warrants, the investigation is still ongoing and we are still keen to hear from anyone who was at Sinclair's Bar on the night of the attack.

 

"We have interviewed a number of people who have helped us piece together what may have happened in the early hours of Christmas Day but I would still urge others who we haven't spoken with to get in touch - your information could be vital.

 

"I would urge anyone who may have information about what happened that night to contact police on 0161 856 3691 or the independent charity Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111. The information you supply will be treated with the strictest of confidence."

 

For information about Greater Manchester Police please visit our website.

www.gmp.police.uk

   

You should call 101, the new national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

        

Operation Vulcan executed their latest warrant yesterday (3 May 2023) at a property on Great Ducie Street in Cheetham Hill.

 

The warrant was carried out after intelligence came to light suggesting the property - a large distribution warehouse - was being used to supply a network of counterfeit stores throughout Cheetham Hill.

 

The number of items seized have an estimated worth of £1.2million pounds.

 

The enterprise was so vast officers made use of a conveyor belt to speed up the transfer of seized items into waiting vehicles.

 

Over the last 6 months through relentless policing and support from dedicated partners, Operation Vulcan has turned the tide against the criminals. The support of partners has been integral to Operation Vulcan and that was on full display yesterday (3 May 2023) with over 15 departments, teams, organisations and partner representatives in attendance - including from Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, Intellectual Property Office, Trading Standards, Brand Experts and Border Force.

 

GMFRS also raised concerns about the safety of the building, which led to it being issued it with a prohibition order.

 

Inspector Andy Torkington said: "The network of counterfeit stores in Cheetham Hill might seem chaotic and disorganised but this is far from the truth. The latest warrant demonstrates that these stores are well funded and well supplied and it's big business for organised crime groups who have been operating out of the area.

 

"This warrant is an opportunity to make a huge dent in the supply chain by cutting off the head of the supply snake. I hope it sends a message to any remaining counterfeit stores in the area who persist in trading to pack up now or face the consequences.

 

"Operation Vulcan is here to stay and we will continue making it unsustainable for criminal businesses to exist here and will work shoulder-to-shoulder with our partners to re-build the area into a thriving community where people feel safe.”

 

Neil Fairlamb, Strategic Director of Neighbourhoods for Manchester City Council said: "The work that has taken place throughout Operation Vulcan has shown the scope and scale of the counterfeit industry. It is huge enterprise, one which has had an incredibly negative impact on our communities. By striking a blow against this criminal supply chain we will succeed in forcing these traders out for good."

 

The Intellectual Property Office’s Deputy Director of Intelligence and Law Enforcement, Marcus Evans said: The Intellectual Property Office’s Deputy Director of Intelligence and Law Enforcement, Marcus Evans said: “Criminal networks are seeking to exploit consumers and communities for their own financial gain through the trade in illegal counterfeits – with absolutely no regard for the quality or safety of the items being sold, which are often dangerous and defective. Such items can cause genuine harm to the people who buy and use them, as well as those workers often exploited during their production.

 

“As well as helping to sustain serious and organised crime, the sale of counterfeit goods has been estimated to contribute to over 80,000 job loses each year in the UK by diverting funds away from legitimate traders and into the hands of criminals. We are pleased to support the ongoing activity by Greater Manchester Police to clamp down on this illegal activity and help protect the public, as we continue to work with partners across in industry, local government, and law enforcement to help empower consumers and raise awareness of the damage these goods cause.”

Fresco (plural frescos or frescoes) is a technique of mural painting executed upon freshly-laid, or wet lime plaster. Water is used as the vehicle for the pigment to merge with the plaster, and with the setting of the plaster, the painting becomes an integral part of the wall. The word fresco (Italian: affresco) is derived from the Italian adjective fresco meaning "fresh", and may thus be contrasted with fresco-secco or secco mural painting techniques, which are applied to dried plaster, to supplement painting in fresco. The fresco technique has been employed since antiquity and is closely associated with Italian Renaissance painting.

 

TECHNOLOGY

Buon fresco pigment mixed with water of room temperature on a thin layer of wet, fresh plaster, for which the Italian word for plaster, intonaco, is used. Because of the chemical makeup of the plaster, a binder is not required, as the pigment mixed solely with the water will sink into the intonaco, which itself becomes the medium holding the pigment. The pigment is absorbed by the wet plaster; after a number of hours, the plaster dries in reaction to air: it is this chemical reaction which fixes the pigment particles in the plaster. The chemical processes are as follows:

 

calcination of limestone in a lime kiln: CaCO3 → CaO + CO2

slaking of quicklime: CaO + H2O → Ca(OH)2

setting of the lime plaster: Ca(OH)2 + CO2 → CaCO3 + H2O

 

In painting buon fresco, a rough underlayer called the arriccio is added to the whole area to be painted and allowed to dry for some days. Many artists sketched their compositions on this underlayer, which would never be seen, in a red pigment called sinopia, a name also used to refer to these under-paintings. Later,[when?]new techniques for transferring paper drawings to the wall were developed. The main lines of a drawing made on paper were pricked over with a point, the paper held against the wall, and a bag of soot (spolvero) banged on them on produce black dots along the lines. If the painting was to be done over an existing fresco, the surface would be roughened to provide better adhesion. On the day of painting, the intonaco, a thinner, smooth layer of fine plaster was added to the amount of wall that was expected to be completed that day, sometimes matching the contours of the figures or the landscape, but more often just starting from the top of the composition. This area is called the giornata ("day's work"), and the different day stages can usually be seen in a large fresco, by a sort of seam that separates one from the next.

 

Buon frescoes are difficult to create because of the deadline associated with the drying plaster. Generally, a layer of plaster will require ten to twelve hours to dry; ideally, an artist would begin to paint after one hour and continue until two hours before the drying time - giving seven to nine hours working time. Once a giornata is dried, no more buon fresco can be done, and the unpainted intonaco must be removed with a tool before starting again the next day. If mistakes have been made, it may also be necessary to remove the whole intonaco for that area - or to change them later, a secco.

 

A technique used in the popular frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael was to scrape indentations into certain areas of the plaster while still wet to increase the illusion of depth and to accent certain areas over others. The eyes of the people of the School of Athens are sunken-in using this technique which causes the eyes to seem deeper and more pensive. Michelangelo used this technique as part of his trademark 'outlining' of his central figures within his frescoes.

 

In a wall-sized fresco, there may be ten to twenty or even more giornate, or separate areas of plaster. After five centuries, the giornate, which were originally, nearly invisible, have sometimes become visible, and in many large-scale frescoes, these divisions may be seen from the ground. Additionally, the border between giornate was often covered by an a secco painting, which has since fallen off.

 

One of the first painters in the post-classical period to use this technique was the Isaac Master (or Master of the Isaac fresco, and thus a name used to refer to the unknown master of a particular painting) in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi. A person who creates fresco is called a frescoist.

 

OTHER TYPES OF WALL PAINTING

A secco or fresco-secco painting, in contrast, is done on dry plaster (secco meaning "dry" in Italian). The pigments thus require a binding medium, such as egg (tempera), glue or oil to attach the pigment to the wall. It is important to distinguish between a secco work done on top of buon fresco, which according to most authorities was in fact standard from the Middle Ages onwards, and work done entirely a secco on a blank wall. Generally, buon fresco works are more durable than any a secco work added on top of them, because a secco work lasts better with a roughened plaster surface, whilst true fresco should have a smooth one. The additional a secco work would be done to make changes, and sometimes to add small details, but also because not all colours can be achieved in true fresco, because only some pigments work chemically in the very alkaline environment of fresh lime-based plaster. Blue was a particular problem, and skies and blue robes were often added a secco, because neither azurite blue nor lapis lazuli, the only two blue pigments then available, works well in wet fresco.

 

It has also become increasingly clear, thanks to modern analytical techniques, that even in the early Italian Renaissance painters quite frequently employed a secco techniques so as to allow the use of a broader range of pigments. In most early examples this work has now entirely vanished, but a whole fresco done a secco on a surface roughened to give a key for the paint may survive very well, although damp is more threatening to it than to buon fresco.

 

A third type called a mezzo-fresco is painted on nearly dry intonaco - firm enough not to take a thumb-print, says the sixteenth-century author Ignazio Pozzo - so that the pigment only penetrates slightly into the plaster. By the end of the sixteenth century this had largely displaced buon fresco, and was used by painters such as Gianbattista Tiepolo or Michelangelo. This technique had, in reduced form, the advantages of a secco work.

 

The three key advantages of work done entirely a secco were that it was quicker, mistakes could be corrected, and the colours varied less from when applied to when fully dry - in wet fresco there was a considerable change.

 

For wholly a secco work, the intonaco is laid with a rougher finish, allowed to dry completely and then usually given a key by rubbing with sand. The painter then proceeds much as he would on a canvas or wood panel. The two types of fresco painting are buon fresco and fresco secco. Buon fresco is painting into wet plaster, which makes a painting last a long time. Fresco secco is painting onto dry plaster, which does not last as long.

 

HISTORY

ANCIENT NEAR EAST

The earliest known examples of frescoes done in the Buon Fresco method date at around 1500 BC and are to be found on the island of Crete in Greece. The most famous of these, The Toreador, depicts a sacred ceremony in which individuals jump over the backs of large bulls. While some similar frescoes have been found in other locations around the Mediterranean basin, particularly in Egypt and Morocco, their origins are subject to speculation.

 

Some art historians believe that fresco artists from Crete may have been sent to various locations as part of a trade exchange, a possibility which raises to the fore the importance of this art form within the society of the times. The most common form of fresco was Egyptian wall paintings in tombs, usually using the a secco technique.

 

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

Frescoes were also painted in ancient Greece, but few of these works have survived. In southern Italy, at Paestum, which was a Greek colony of the Magna Graecia, a tomb containing frescoes dating back to 470 BC, the so-called Tomb of the Diver was discovered on June 1968. These frescoes depict scenes of the life and society of ancient

 

Greece, and constitute valuable historical testimonials. One shows a group of men reclining at a symposium while another shows a young man diving into the sea.

 

Roman wall paintings, such as those at the magnificent Villa dei Misteri (1st century B.C.) in the ruins of Pompeii, and others at Herculaneum, were completed in buon fresco.

 

Late Roman Empire (Christian) 1st-2nd-century frescoes were found in catacombs beneath Rome and Byzantine Icons were also found in Cyprus, Crete, Ephesus, Cappadocia and Antioch. Roman frescoes were done by the artist painting the artwork on the still damp plaster of the wall, so that the painting is part of the wall, actually colored plaster.

 

Also a historical collection of Ancient Christian frescoes can be found in the Churches of Goreme Turkey.

 

INDIA

Thanks to large number of ancient rock-cut cave temples, valuable ancient and early medieval frescoes have been preserved in more than 20 locations of India. The frescoes on the ceilings and walls of the Ajanta Caves were painted between c. 200 BC and 600 and are the oldest known frescoes in India. They depict the Jataka tales that are stories of the Buddha's life in former existences

 

as Bodhisattva. The narrative episodes are depicted one after another although not in a linear order. Their identification has been a core area of research on the subject since the time of the site's rediscovery in 1819. Other locations with valuable preserved ancient and early medieval frescoes include Bagh Caves, Ellora Caves, Sittanavasal, Armamalai Cave, Badami Cave Temples and other locations. Frescoes have been made in several techniques including tempera technique.

 

The later Chola paintings were discovered in 1931 within the circumambulatory passage of the Brihadisvara Temple in India and are the first Chola specimens discovered.

 

Researchers have discovered the technique used in these frescos. A smooth batter of limestone mixture is applied over the stones, which took two to three days to set. Within that short span, such large paintings were painted with natural organic pigments.

 

During the Nayak period the Chola paintings were painted over. The Chola frescos lying underneath have an ardent spirit of saivism expressed in them. They probably synchronised with the completion of the temple by Rajaraja Cholan the Great.

 

The frescoes in Dogra/ Pahari style paintings exist in their unique form at Sheesh Mahal of Ramnagar (105 km from Jammu and 35 km west of Udhampur). Scenes from epics of Mahabharat and Ramayan along with portraits of local lords form the subject matter of these wall paintings. Rang Mahal of Chamba (Himachal Pradesh) is another site of historic Dogri fresco with wall paintings depicting scenes of Draupti Cheer Haran, and Radha- Krishna Leela. This can be seen preserved at National Museum at New Delhi in a chamber called Chamba Rang Mahal.

 

SRI LANKA

The Sigiriya Frescoes are found in Sigiriya in Sri Lanka. Painted during the reign of King Kashyapa I (ruled 477-495 AD). The generally accepted view is that they are portrayals of women of the royal court of the king depicted as celestial nymphs showering flowers upon the humans below. They bear some resemblance to the Gupta style of painting found in the Ajanta Caves in India. They are, however, far more enlivened and colorful and uniquely Sri Lankan in character. They are the only surviving secular art from antiquity found in Sri Lanka today.

 

The painting technique used on the Sigiriya paintings is “fresco lustro.” It varies slightly from the pure fresco technique in that it also contains a mild binding agent or glue. This gives the painting added durability, as clearly demonstrated by the fact that they have survived, exposed to the elements, for over 1,500 years.

 

Located in a small sheltered depression a hundred meters above ground only 19 survive today. Ancient references however refer to the existence of as many as five hundred of these frescoes.

 

MIDDLE AGES

The late Medieval period and the Renaissance saw the most prominent use of fresco, particularly in Italy, where most churches and many government buildings still feature fresco decoration. This change coincided with the reevaluation of murals in the liturgy. Romanesque churches in Catalonia were richly painted in 12th and 13th century, with both decorative and educational -for the illiterate faithfuls- role, as can be seen in the MNAC in Barcelona, where is kept a large collection of Catalan romanesque art. In Denmark too, church wall paintings or kalkmalerier were widely used in the Middle Ages (first Romanesque, then Gothic) and can be seen in some 600 Danish churches as well as in churches in the south of Sweden which was Danish at the time.

 

One of the rare examples of Islamic fresco painting can be seen in Qasr Amra, the desert palace of the Umayyads in the 8th century Magotez.

 

EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Northern Romania (historical region of Moldavia) boasts about a dozen painted monasteries, completely covered with frescos inside and out, that date from the last quarter of the 15th century to the second quarter of the 16th century. The most remarkable are the monastic foundations at Voroneţ (vo ro nets) (1487), Arbore (are' bo ray) (1503), Humor (hoo mor) (1530), and Moldoviţa (mol do vee' tsa) (1532). Suceviţa (sue che vee' tsa), dating from 1600, represents a late return to the style developed some 70 years earlier. The tradition of painted churches continued into the 19th century in other parts of Romania, although never to the same extent.

 

Andrea Palladio, the famous Italian architect of the 16th century, built many mansions with plain exteriors and stunning interiors filled with frescoes.

 

Henri Clément Serveau produced several frescos including a three by six meter painting for the Lycée de Meaux, where he was once a student. He directed the École de fresques at l'École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, and decorated the Pavillon du Tourisme at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris), Pavillon de la Ville de Paris; now at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1954 he realized a fresco for the Cité Ouvrière du Laboratoire Débat, Garches. He also executed mural decorations for the Plan des anciennes enceintes de Paris in the Musée Carnavalet.

 

The Foujita chapel in Reims completed in 1966, is an example of modern frescos, the interior being painted with religious scenes by the School of Paris painter Tsuguharu Foujita. In 1996, it was designated an historic monument by the French Government.

 

MEXICAN MURALISM

José Clemente Orozco, Fernando Leal, David Siqueiros and Diego Rivera the famous Mexican artists, renewed the art of fresco painting in the 20th century. Orozco, Siqueiros, Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo contributed more to the history of Mexican fine arts and to the reputation of Mexican art in general than anybody else. Together with works by Orozco, Siqueiros, and others, Fernando Leal and Rivera's large wall works in fresco established the art movement known as Mexican Muralism.

 

CONSERVATION OF FRESCOES

The climate and environment of Venice has proved to be a problem for frescoes and other works of art in the city for centuries. The city is built on a lagoon in northern Italy. The humidity and the rise of water over the centuries have created a phenomenon known as rising damp. As the lagoon water rises and seeps into the foundation of a building, the water is absorbed and rises up through the walls often causing damage to frescoes. Venetians have become quite adept in the conservation methods of frescoes. The mold aspergillus versicolor can grow after flooding, to consume nutrients from frescoes.

 

The following is the process that was used when rescuing frescoes in La Fenice, a Venetian opera house, but the same process can be used for similarly damaged frescoes. First, a protection and support bandage of cotton gauze and polyvinyl alcohol is applied. Difficult sections are removed with soft brushes and localized vacuuming. The other areas that are easier to remove (because they had been damaged by less water) are removed with a paper pulp compress saturated with bicarbonate of ammonia solutions and removed with deionized water. These sections are strengthened and reattached then cleansed with base exchange resin compresses and the wall and pictorial layer were strengthened with barium hydrate. The cracks and detachments are stopped with lime putty and injected with an epoxy resin loaded with micronized silica.

 

WIKIPEDIA

Ernest Peter Burger, one of eight Nazi saboteurs who landed by submarine on U.S. shores In June 1942, is shown in a mugshot after his arrest.

 

The left photo had an X placed on it by a Washington Star photo editor.

 

Burger was born in Augsburg in 1906. He was a machinist by trade who joined the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party at the age of 17.

 

Burger immigrated to America in 1927 and became a U.S. citizen in 1933. He had lived in the United States for some years, even joining the National Guard in 1931.

 

During the Depression, Burger returned to Germany, he rejoined the Nazi Party and became an aide-de-camp to Ernst Roehm, the chief of the Nazi storm troopers. Later, he wrote a paper critical of the Gestapo—a move that earned him seventeen months in a concentration camp.

 

Despite his history as a survivor of a Nazi internment camp and harassment of his wife by Nazi party members, Burger was recruited by the Abwehr, Nazi Germany's intelligence organization.

 

After the U.S. declared war on Germany following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazi leader Adolph Hitler authorized a mission to sabotage the American war effort and attack civilian targets to demoralize the American civilian population inside the United States.

 

Recruited for Operation Pastorius, named for the leader of the first German settlement in America, were eight German residents who had lived in the United States.

 

Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States.

 

All eight were recruited into the Abwehr military intelligence organization and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenz Lake, near Berlin, Germany. The agents were instructed in the manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries, primers, and various forms of mechanical, chemical, and electrical delayed timing devices.

 

Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee, and New York; locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's repair shops at Altoona; a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey.

 

The agents were also instructed to spread a wave of terror by planting explosives on bridges, railroad stations, water facilities, and public places. They were given counterfeit birth certificates, Social Security Cards, draft deferment cards, nearly $175,000 in American money, and driver's licenses, and put aboard two U-boats to land on the east coast of the U.S.

 

Before the mission began, it was in danger of being compromised, as George Dasch, head of the team, left sensitive documents behind on a train, and one of the agents when drunk announced to patrons at a bar in Paris that he was a secret agent.

 

On the night of June 12, 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U.S., U-202, landed at Amagansett, New York, which is about 100 miles east of New York City, on Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue beach.

 

It was carrying Dasch and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Heinck). The team came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. They also brought their explosives, primers and incendiaries, and buried them along with their uniforms, and put on civilian clothes to begin an expected two-year campaign in the sabotage of American defense-related production.

 

When Dasch was discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, Dasch offered Cullen a $260 bribe. Cullen feigned cooperation but reported the encounter. An armed patrol returned to the site but found only the buried equipment; the Germans had taken the Long Island Rail Road from the Amagansett station into Manhattan, where they checked into a hotel. A massive manhunt was begun.

 

The other four-member German team headed by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on June 16, 1942. They came on U-584, another submarine. This group came ashore wearing bathing suits but wore German Navy hats. After landing ashore, they threw away their hats, put on civilian clothes, and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago, Illinois and Cincinnati, Ohio.

 

The two teams were to meet on July 4 in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage operations.

 

Dasch called Burger into their upper-story hotel room and opened a window, saying they would talk, and if they disagreed, "only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window." Dasch told him he had no intention of going through with the mission, hated Nazism, and planned to report the plot to the FBI. Burger agreed to defect to the United States immediately.

 

On June 15, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI to explain who he was, but hung up when the agent answering doubted his story. Four days later, he took a train to Washington, DC and walked into FBI headquarters, where he gained the attention of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd by showing him the operation's budget of $84,000 cash.

 

Besides Burger, none of the other German agents knew they were betrayed. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made no mention that Dasch had turned himself in, and claimed credit for the FBI for cracking the spy ring.

 

Information that Dasch and Burger had exposed the operation was withheld from the public until after World War II was over in order to make it appear to the American public and to Nazi Germany that the FBI was effective in preventing sabotage.

 

Fearful that a civilian court would be too lenient, President Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561 on July 2, 1942 creating a military tribunal to prosecute the Germans. Placed before a seven-member military commission, the Germans were charged with the following offenses:

 

1) Violating the law of war;

2) Violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy;

3) Violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and

4) Conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.

The trial was held in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice building in Washington D.C. on July 8, 1942.

 

Lawyers for the accused, who included Lauson Stone and Kenneth Royall, attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court but were rebuffed by the United States Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942), a case that was later cited as a precedent for the trial by military commission of any unlawful combatant against the United States.

 

The trial for the eight defendants ended on August 1, 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life in prison and Dasch's to 30 years because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others.

 

The others were executed on August 8, 1942 in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field in the Blue Plains area in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C. The site was only indicated with only wooden markers and numbers. In 1982 a grave stone was added to the burial plot.

 

In 1948, President Harry S. Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger on the condition that they be deported to the American Zone of occupied Germany. They were not welcomed back in Germany, as they were regarded as traitors who had caused the death of their comrades.

 

Although they had reportedly been promised pardons by J. Edgar Hoover in exchange for their cooperation, Burger died in 1975 and Dasch died in 1992 without either man ever receiving them.

 

Fourteen other people were charged with aiding the eight saboteurs. They were Walter and Lucille Froehling, Otto and Kate Wergin, Harry and Emma Jaques, Anthony Cramer, Helmut Leiner, Herman Heinrich, Maria Kerling, Hedwig Engemann, Hans Max Haupt and Erna Haupt, and Ernest Kerkhof.

 

Nearly all were held as enemy aliens and several were sentenced to death for treason, but had their convictions reversed on appeal. Some were re-tried on lesser charges. Some never went trial.

 

--Information partially excerpted from Wikipedia

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmPiRmT4

 

The photographer is unknown. The image is believed to be a U.S. government photograph. It is housed in the D.C. Library Washington Star Collection.

 

ALLEN, Texas — As part of an ongoing criminal investigation, special agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) executed criminal search warrants at CVE Technology Group Inc. (CVE), and four of CVE’s staffing companies.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning (12 April 2023) Operation Vulcan executed 10 simultaneous warrants at a number of properties across Greater Manchester and Lancashire.

 

A search of the properties resulted in large amounts of suspected class B and class C drugs and approximately £60,000 being seized by Operation Vulcan – supported by Manchester North Neighbourhood Officers and GMP Serious Organised Crime Group - as part of their investigation into the suspected drug distribution and exploitation of minors.

 

These arrests are the latest in Operation Vulcan, a proactive multi agency approach to tackling to serious organised crime in the Cheetham Hill and Strangeways areas of Manchester.

 

Detective Inspector Chris Julien, one of Operation Vulcan’s specialist officers said: “I hope today’s arrests and seizures demonstrate that Operation Vulcan is about much more than seizing counterfeit clothing.

 

“The sale of drugs and the exploitation of young, vulnerable people is a product of the criminality that has been embedded in the area for decades, and we are absolutely committed to tackling these issues, identifying those who are responsible, and bringing them to justice.

 

“At its heart, Operation Vulcan is a partnership effort, and whilst enforcement is an important element; real, sustainable change would not be possible without the help of the local community and our dedicated partner agencies. The multi-agency approach Operation Vulcan has adopted allows for maximum intelligence and evidence sharing to make sure every victim is identified early on and safeguarded.

 

“I’d like to take this opportunity to appeal to members of the public for information. If you’ve noticed any suspicious activity in your area, or you suspect an individual may be being taken advantage of by criminal gangs, please report it. We will act on this information.”

 

Could you spot a child who is at risk of Child Criminal Exploitation?

 

Spot the signs of child exploitation: changes in behaviour; not coming home when they say they will or going missing; changes in appearance; reluctant to talk about friends/relationships and becoming secretive; struggling to engage in school; overly protective of their messages/social media; having more than one phone; accompanied by individuals older than them; concerns surrounding the use of alcohol or drugs; sudden changes/fear of people/friends.

 

If something doesn’t feel right – report it.

 

Information can be shared online at www.gmp.police.uk or by calling 101. Alternatively, details can be shared via the independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.

St Albans claims to be the earliest site of Christian pilgrimage in England, being named after our first martyr, who was executed at some point in the 3rd century AD (when the city was still known by its Roman name, Verulanium) having sheltered a persecuted Christian priest, St Amphibalus, and been impressed by his faith, offering himself for arrest in his place. Both men were buried here and Alban's tomb was venerated and marked in some form long before the present cathedral was built.

 

The cathedral is nonetheless one of the most ancient of our major churches, though its cathedral status dates only to 1877 when the new diocese of St Albans was formed. The church was originally founded as St Alban's Abbey, and built close to the presumed site of Alban's martyrdom. Founded in 793 by King Offa, the abbey was rebuilt several times with the earliest parts of the present cathedral dating back to the late 11th century. Much use was made of recycled material from the abandoned Roman city of Verulanium, and the handsome Romanesque tower appears to be entirely constructed of reused Roman bricks. The Abbey was built on an impressive scale, and must have once been a very wealthy institution owing to pilgrimages to the shrine of St Alban behind the high altar. However its fortunes had begun to decline even before the Reformation swept medieval monastic life away.

 

The abbey church miraculously survived the Dissolution in its entirety and was sold to the town for use as their parish church. The monastic buildings however were completely erased aside from the splendid Abbey Gatehouse near the west end, and only the weathered remains of arcading on the south side of the nave remains of the former cloisters. Upkeep thereafter seems to have been a serious challenge and the huge church spent much of the following centuries in poor repair, thus much work was done by a succession of architects in the Victorian period prior to the abbey church being raised to the status of cathedral. The most obvious interventions are those made by Edmund Beckett / Lord Grimthorpe, an amateur architect who paid for much of the work in the 1870s in return for a free hand in redesigning parts of the building. His are the strange turrets on ends of the transepts, along with their facade windows below and the west front, which is clearly a Victorian confection, though the medieval facade it replaced had been left in a rather bare, unfinished state.

 

The cathedral we see today is thus a rather surprising mixture of styles and materials, everything from Roman brick, flint and rubble to fine white limestone., which gives it a rather patchy appearance. Its great length however is remarkable, being the second longest medieval church in the country (only Winchester is longer, but St Albans has a longer nave). The oldest parts are the towers and transepts from the end of the 11th century, along with much of the north side of the nave, all fine examples of early Romanesque architecture. Most of the rest was rebuilt in the Gothic style in various phases throughout the 14th century, including the greater part of the nave and all of the choir and Lady Chapel (though the east end was heavily renewed externally in the Victorian restoration).

 

Entering the cathedral one cannot fail to be impressed by the enormous length of the nave,, mostly of late 13th and early 14th century date aside from the strikingly austere north arcade in the more easterly section, where the raw unadorned early Norman architecture contrasts dramatically with the more ornate Gothic arcade opposite. The Norman columns have the added appeal of retaining substantial remains of medieval mural decoration, with a succession of Crucifixion scenes that may have originally served as reredos to long vanished side altars. The medieval pulpitum screen remains and separates the eastern bays for use as the choir beyond it. This area also retains its flat late medieval wooden ceiling complete with painted panels of angels holding shields.

 

The transepts and crossing beneath the tower form an especially memorable interior space, again the architecture is of the more raw, auster Norman variety, but the tower arches are enlivened with painted decoration simulating brickwork and much Roman and Saxon material is incorporated in to the transepts. Beyond is the fully Gothic eastern limb with the presbytery covered by a handsome medieval wooden vault, again replete it medieval painted decoration, and the striking altar reredos, a towering late medieval screen populated with elaborate niches and statuary (the latter being Victorian replacements for originals long lost). Behind this is the re-assembled shrine of St Alban (along with that of St Amphibalus in the south choir aisle nearby). The Lady Chapel beyond is a handsome example of 14th century Decorated Gothic, though much restored following centuries of use as a schoolroom separated from the rest of the church.

 

There is much of interest to see in the cathedral, though most of the furnishings are Victorian (the originals having long vanished) and there are few monuments of note aside from the two late medieval chantry chapels of Abbot Ramryge and Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, the latter overlooking the shrine of St Alban and balanced by a 15th century wooden watching loft on the opposite side (a rare survival). There is a mixture of glass, the most notable pieces being the most recent additions in the south aisle and north transept rose window. The best features are the unusually extensive remnants of medieval mural painting in various parts of the church, a quite remarkable survival, making a thorough exploration of this cathedral all the more rewarding.

 

This was my third visit, and longest one, though my attempt at a fuller photographic record was severely compromised by accidents with my camera, which at one point fell from my tripod onto the stone floor in one of the chantry chapels. I was lucky it survived at all given the dreadful crash it made, but it was seriously affected and my photos were very hit and miss from that point onwards. My day however ended on a happier note, returning in the evening to attend a lovely performance of Mozart's Requiem, and the acoustics in there are indeed impressive.

 

For more about the cathedral see below.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Albans_Cathedral

THOMAS, WILLIAM, architect, water-colourist, and engineer; b. c. 1799 in Suffolk, England, son of William Thomas and Ann —; m. 17 Sept. 1826 Martha Tutin in Birmingham, England, and they had four sons and six daughters; d. 26 Dec. 1860 in Toronto.

 

William Thomas’s significance among his generation of architects in British North America lies not only in the outstanding nature of the work he executed but also in the unique opportunity his career affords of tracing the relationship between his extensive preparation in England and his work in Canada, the latter being more accomplished and much more important relatively. Other architects such as John George Howard*, George Browne*, Frederic William Cumberland*, and Thomas Fuller* arrived when they were much younger than Thomas, with the result that their early work is unknown. Thomas came in his maturity.

 

Shortly after William’s birth, the family settled at Chalford, Gloucestershire, where his father was innkeeper of the Clothier’s Arms. William and his three brothers all entered the building trades. John, the youngest, was apprenticed to a letter-carver or mason at first, studied briefly under William in the early 1830s, and achieved some success as an architect; he is, however, best remembered as one of the most prolific sculptors of the period. Between 1812 and 1819 William was apprenticed to John Gardiner, a local carpenter and joiner.

 

Some time after receiving his indenture papers, William moved to Birmingham, where he married Martha Tutin in 1826. He may have been the pupil of Richard Tutin, a builder-turned-architect who was apparently a relative of Martha. In 1829 Thomas entered into partnership with him, but it was probably dissolved the following year. In 1832 Thomas moved to nearby Leamington, a flourishing watering-place in Warwickshire. Here he had a varied career: initially serving as agent for a developer, he promoted and executed his own building speculation schemes and designed numerous buildings for clients. The failure of a local bank in 1837 may have obliged him to apply for the office of town surveyor – he was acting surveyor in 1838–39 – and undoubtedly precipitated his bankruptcy in 1840, along with those of most of the other building speculators in Leamington. Thomas had opened a branch-office in Birmingham, but there were few architectural commissions available because of widespread depression in the early 1840s.

 

Thomas’s architectural work in England comprises designs for a remarkable range of structures, including houses, churches, shops, a conservatory, a public bath complex, and iron and stone bridges. The bulk of his work, however, consisted chiefly of speculative housing for the middle class in Leamington. He is known to have designed town houses on Beauchamp Terrace, beginning in 1831, and two chapels in 1834. Two impressive housing complexes followed the next year: Lansdowne Circus, a horseshoe-shaped grouping of plain Georgian-style semi-detached houses and villas (most with decorative cast-iron porches and balconies under tent-shaped roofs), and adjacent Lansdowne Crescent, a curving terrace of connected and landscaped town houses executed in a fully elaborated classical style. For Lansdowne Crescent, Thomas had acquired the property in partnership, furnished the designs, and developed some parcels with covenants requiring conformity in the design of façades. In a somewhat similar vein he was responsible for the development on Brandon Parade and Holly Walk (which adjoined both the crescent and the circus) of about ten villas, in a mixture of Grecian and Gothic Revival designs. Before his bankruptcy Thomas lived in one of these villas, Elizabethan Place, which is conspicuously dated 1836 and signed “WT.” A combination of small volumes balanced in effective groupings with ornamental flourishes at the edges is characteristic of the mature Thomas. Victoria Terrace, Pump Room and Baths, a multipurpose building begun in Leamington in 1837, formed a major focus of the town and was his grandest work in England.

 

In Duddeston (Birmingham) he erected St Matthew’s Church (Anglican) in 1839–40. This rectangular brick building, executed in a mixture of Early English and Decorated Gothic Revival styles with a projecting three-storey tower at the west end, would be used by Thomas as a basis in developing many of his Canadian churches. In the same years he was also responsible for a palatial draper’s shop in Birmingham called Warwick House. A water-colour by Thomas of this highly ornamented block, which was bombed in World War II, shows a four-storey building of seven bays, with immense display windows set between graceful piers opening up the ground floor, while the second and third floors are set off by colossal columns and the fourth floor is richly treated as an attic. This was a successful formula for commercial structures and would be used for one of Thomas’s best-known works in Canada. In essence, Thomas’s career up to this point forms a modest and provincial parallel, in its range of activity, styles, and enterprise, to that of John Nash, the fashionable architect who had done so much to reshape London in the first quarter of the 19th century.

 

In December 1842 Thomas sent to press a slim book entitled Designs for monuments and chimney pieces, a discreet piece of self-advertisement which was published in London the following year. Consisting of 41 lithographed plates with 46 Grecian, Roman, Gothic and Elizabethan patterns, the book is indicative of the eclectic approach to architectural design prevalent during the late Georgian and early Victorian periods. Like most other designers, Thomas felt free to choose historical revival styles that were deemed fitting to the location and function of a work. His churches, for example, were generally designed in the Gothic style, which readily identified their religious function and association with the devout Christian beliefs of the Middle Ages.

 

In April 1843 Thomas left England for Toronto. Precisely what prompted him, in his early 40s, to emigrate with his wife and eight children or to choose Toronto for his new home is unknown. His forced bankruptcy three years earlier and the dearth of work must have been contributing causes, but the key factor was probably his ambition. Toronto, which was entering a boom period with a population of more than 15,000 but with only three practising architects, was an appealing location for an industrious architect. Thomas’s journal of his transatlantic crossing in 1843 reveals an acute and well-informed observer. He emerges from the journal as a patient and loving father, a warm and sympathetic man. Possessed of a considerable sense of humour, he was very sociable as well and enjoyed chess, card-playing, conversation, singing, and dancing. Thomas settled with his family at 5 York Street and opened an office at 55 King Street East, in the city’s main commercial district. His first major commission in Toronto seems to have been the Commercial Bank of the Midland District on Wellington Street. Designed in 1844 and built a year later, it was one of the earliest banks fashioned in the Greek Revival mode in British North America and its façade remains one of the best examples of that style in the city. The only other bank known to have been designed by Thomas, the Bank of British North America, Hamilton (1847–49), has been demolished.

 

It was, however, his churches that brought early acclaim. Reputedly there were eventually more than 30 of these, 12 in Toronto alone. The first, St Paul’s Church (Anglican) in London, was erected in 1844–46 of red brick (with a white-brick front) in the Decorated Gothic style. Described by William Henry Smith* in the year of its completion as “the handsomest gothic church in Canada West,” it was elevated to cathedral status in 1857 [see Benjamin Cronyn*] and extended in the 1890s by means of transepts.

 

Before St Paul’s was completed, Thomas commenced his most ambitious ecclesiastical work and the largest church in Toronto at the time, St Michael’s Cathedral (Roman Catholic), which was constructed in 1845–48 of the then-fashionable white brick. Extending from Bond to Church streets on the north side of Shuter, its long flank commanded McGill Square before that area was built over. St Michael’s too was designed in the Decorated Gothic style, but on a cruciform plan, and it was both more substantial and more ornamental in character than St Paul’s. The congregation could not immediately afford Thomas’s tower and spire; these and the dormers were later added by the firm of Thomas Gundry and Henry Langley*. A palace for Bishop Michael Power* was also designed by Thomas, in the Tudor Revival style, and was erected in 1845 on Church Street just north of the cathedral.

 

Thomas was especially favoured by Presbyterian congregations, particularly those created as a result of the disruption of 1844 [see Robert Burns*]. In Toronto alone he designed Knox’s Church (Free Presbyterian), Queen Street (1847–48), a church for the United Presbyterian congregation of the Reverend John Jennings*, Bay Street (1848), and Cooke’s Church (Free Presbyterian), Queen Street (1857–58). But he worked for many other denominations in the city, designing the Methodist New Connexion Church, Temperance Street (1846), the Unitarian Church, Jarvis Street (1854), Zion Church (Congregational), Bay and Adelaide streets (1855–56), and the German Evangelical Lutheran Church, Bond Street (1856–57). All have been torn down or replaced.

 

Although Thomas was unsuccessful in the 1849 competition for the Church of England cathedral in Toronto, he received commissions in 1851–52 from Anglican congregations in Guelph and Hamilton which resulted in churches of considerable significance. St George’s Church in Guelph, begun in 1851, was not only one of the first churches executed in the Romanesque Revival style in British North America but was also one of the first based on an asymmetrical plan. Three bays, including a corner tower forming a porch on the axis of Wyndham Street, were added in stone to an existing wooden church. Designs drafted by Thomas in 1856 for the rest of the church and for an elegant interior were not implemented and the church was later demolished. In Hamilton, where he had opened an office by 1849, possibly in the care of his son William Tutin, Thomas began work on Christ’s Church (now the Anglican cathedral) in 1852. This was his most adventurous work structurally, calling for a stone building on a basilican plan, with a tall nave carried on piers, a decoratively treated open wooden roof, clerestory lighting, flanking aisles, and a short but distinct chancel. These features suggest that the design was an early instance in this province of the ritualistic neo-medievalism advocated in architectural design by the Ecclesiological Society in England, though Thomas was by no means doctrinaire in his designs for churches. Only the chancel and two bays of Christ’s Church were built, as tall additions to Robert Charles Wetherell’s neoclassical wooden church of 1842, and the disjointed effect gave rise to the name “the hump-backed church.” In 1873–77 it was completed. Simpler churches were well within Thomas’s capability and at least three still stand: St George’s-on-the-Hill Church (Anglican) of 1847 in Etobicoke (Toronto), the Free Presbyterian Church (now Grace United) of 1852 in Niagara (Niagara-on-the-Lake), and MacNab Street Church (Presbyterian) of 1856 in Hamilton. Of these, the Niagara church is particularly appealing. Executed in a predominantly Romanesque mode, it features chunky corbel tables and pilaster strips which look less skimped than those in his conventional Gothic designs.

 

Thomas’s design for another Presbyterian church in Hamilton, the well-preserved St Andrew’s (renamed St Paul’s in 1874), was his most successful composition. It was begun in 1854 on a large budget, which encouraged a rich treatment in stone and an elaborate interior. The tower is bold and massive, with deep angle buttresses and dense carving in areas such as the entrance and the gables. The octagonal spire is apparently the only stone spire erected in Ontario. The interior is equally striking in the richness of its sombre decoration, carved in dark wood. Although the cost proved ruinous for its congregation, the church has been consistently admired: in 1901 the Canadian Architect and Builder regarded it as still “well worth the study of architects” because “the construction is genuine” and “an essential part of the aim was honest work.”

 

Thomas was busy almost continuously designing a succession of significant public buildings for centres throughout British North America. These include the Fireman’s Hall and Mechanics’ Institute building, Toronto (1845), the combined district court-house, town hall, and market, Niagara (1846–48), the Talbot District Jail, Simcoe (1847–48), the House of Industry, Toronto (1848), the Kent County Court-House, Chatham (1848–49), the St Lawrence Hall, Arcade, and Market building, Toronto (1849–51), the town hall and market-house, Peterborough (1851), the town hall and market, Guelph (1856–57), the custom-house, Quebec (1856–60), the town hall and market-house, Stratford (1857), the city jail (now known as the Don Jail), Toronto (1859–64), and the Halifax County Court-House, Halifax (1858–62). All survive except those in Peterborough and Stratford, and the Fireman’s Hall and Mechanics’ Institute building in Toronto. Most of these commissions were won in competition and follow a common formula in their design: a long symmetrical front, with a projecting frontispiece under a pediment, often with colossal orders, seated on a heavy base. Not all of Thomas’s competition designs were successful. In 1859, for example, he was an unsuccessful entrant in the contest for the parliament buildings in Ottawa.

 

The best known of Thomas’s public structures is undoubtedly St Lawrence Hall in Toronto which, with its original arcade and market, comprised the St Lawrence Buildings. An earlier town hall and market on the site, designed by Henry Bowyer Joseph Lane, were destroyed in the fire of 1849 and Thomas immediately received the commission for their replacements, his design closely following his successful (but unexecuted) competition design of 1845 for refronting the earlier buildings. The St Lawrence Buildings were I-shaped, with the hall fronting on King Street, the market on Front Street, and the 200-foot arcade between the two. The hall contained shops on the ground floor, committee rooms on the second, and an assembly room on the third, the latter offering a more dignified space for concerts, balls, lectures, and the like than those provided by local hotels or the earlier town hall and market. An enlarged and more controlled version of Thomas’s Warwick House (executed in Birmingham nearly a decade earlier), St Lawrence Hall is his most graceful exercise in classical design. The market and arcade have been replaced, but the hall has been refurbished and remains an important civic focus.

 

Thomas’s earlier public buildings at Niagara and Chatham are both Late Georgian in style and nearly as restrained as St Lawrence Hall, but most of his other public works were designed in a forceful Victorian version of the Renaissance Revival style. There is a deliberate crudity of scale and texture in these visually powerful buildings which reflects their association with the law, public administration, and commerce. They are characterized by blocky masses, rugged surfaces, and abrupt transitions. The Halifax County Court-House best displays these characteristics in Thomas’s later public buildings. The dominant feature of this sandstone structure is its heavily textured frontispiece with bands of contrasting stone at every level up to the stout brackets that support the simple pediment. The three splendid keystones, which are carved in the form of sombre bearded heads and alternate with lion’s-head medallions, are hallmarks of Thomas’s last, and most vigorous, architectural phase.

 

His civic architecture also included public schools, which were just beginning to be designed in Canada as architecturally distinctive institutions. His Union School in London (1849), described two years later in a government report as “by far the finest school house in the Province,” was followed by designs for two schools in Toronto. In 1851 the city’s first elected school-board, under the chairmanship of Dr Joseph Workman*, launched a school-design competition. Thomas’s plan was used in 1852–53 for the Park and Louisa Street schools. These were designed in the Tudor style, which was popular for institutional buildings because it afforded ample lighting and ventilation as well as an interesting silhouette, all within a reasonable budget. All three schools have been demolished. In 1853 Thomas received the commission for the combined county grammar and common schools in Goderich.

 

The columnar monument to Sir Isaac Brock* on Queenston Heights (1853–56) is arguably Thomas’s most florid composition. It is 185 feet tall, rising from a richly trophied base guarded by carved lions. A colossal statue of Brock stands on a lavish capital, designed by Thomas himself rather than drawn from the classical orders. Gates, a lodge, and steps, all completed in 1859, frame the monument in scenographic fashion. Thomas displayed a stone model of it at the universal exposition in Paris in 1855.

 

His English work had consisted largely of housing and numerous Canadian examples can be identified. In Toronto, a handsome row of houses called Wellington Terrace, built on Wellington Street in 1847, has been demolished, but three units of another group, built in 1848, survive on Church Street behind St Michael’s Cathedral. In Hamilton, Thomas’s firm was said by the Halifax Reporter in 1860 to be responsible for “the greater number of the very beautiful private residences that meet the eye in every direction.” Surviving work there attributed to Thomas includes Undermount (on John Street), designed for John Young* in the Italianate style in 1847, and two Gothic villas: the Presbyterian manse (at Herkimer and Park streets), completed in 1854, and Inglewood (on Inglewood Drive), built for Archibald Kerr about the same date. Thomas’s Wilderness House (1848–51), built for Aeneas Kennedy, was destroyed in 1853. Thomas also designed a villa in London for Lawrence Lawrason*. His own Toronto residence, Oakham House (1848), a Gothic composition on Church Street, stands but has been gutted and additions replace his office wing on Gould Street; his 1859 Italianate home on Mutual Street has been destroyed. He is also known to have built houses in Toronto for at least six prominent businessmen, including John McMurrich*. Among Thomas’s last known residential works was the house, which still stands, built in St Catharines in 1859–60 for William Hamilton Merritt*.

 

Mixed commercial and residential buildings by Thomas were surely numerous too. The first of these was probably the Adelaide Buildings on Yonge Street (1844), which were altered in 1853 and subsequently torn down. In 1846 William Henry Smith described some stores designed by him and under construction on King Street, Toronto, as “the handsomest buildings of the kind in Canada, and equal to anything to be seen in England.” Although some of the stores were damaged in the fire of 1849 and others were demolished later, several still survive, now generally altered. More stylish were two Italianate works, both large-scale dry-goods businesses: the 1847 store (named the Golden Lion in 1849) of Robert Walker and Thomas Hutchinson on King Street and the premises of Ross, Mitchell and Company, built at Yonge and Colborne streets about 1856. Both have been demolished. In a period of vigorous economic growth in Canada, at least three other Toronto firms, including Bryce, McMurrich and Company, commissioned buildings from Thomas, who also designed stores in Port Hope and Hamilton.

 

Thomas formally took two of his sons, William Tutin and Cyrus Pole, both of whom he had trained, into his flourishing business in January 1857 and the firm became William Thomas and Sons. It was shortly to expand again. Thomas’s design for Knox’s Church in Toronto had so impressed visiting members of St Matthew’s Church (Presbyterian) in Halifax that, when it was destroyed by fire in 1857, his firm was asked to design its replacement, which was built on Barrington Street in 1858–59 and still stands. This project brought the Thomas firm to Halifax, where Cyrus opened an office in 1858. The firm’s successful entry that year in the county court-house competition no doubt led to commissions after the fire of 1859 for rebuilding much of the commercial section at the north end of Granville Street [see George Lang*]. At least 12 four-storey buildings, more than half of the new construction, were designed by the firm and nearly all were completed by the end of 1860. The group is remarkable not only for the number and variety of the commissions (executed simultaneously for no less than eight different clients) but for the impact of the resulting streetscape, which survives. Contiguous properties called the Palace Buildings were handled uniformly as the largest single design. Unity of effect elsewhere in the group was achieved through the use of stone (from different Nova Scotian quarries), elevations of related height, and recurring rhythms. All but one building had decorative cast-iron shop-fronts, which are important as early examples of this type of construction in British North America. Cyrus Pole Thomas visited Daniel D. Badger’s Architectural Iron Works in New York in 1860 to arrange for the shop-fronts and internal detailing, some of which were later reproduced in Badger’s lavish publication, Illustrations of iron architecture.

 

Thomas had risen quickly in Canada and had made a number of connections in the Toronto community and elsewhere. Concerned for the public enjoyment of the arts, he was probably instrumental in establishing the Toronto Society of Arts in 1847; he was elected its first president and showed his architectural drawings at the society’s exhibitions of 1847 and 1848. He maintained limited contact with English architecture through the publications that he bought and the visit he paid in 1851 to the Great Exhibition in London, where his brother John exhibited sculpture. When John George Howard made a trip to England in 1853, Thomas served as city engineer in his stead and was appointed to superintend the work on Toronto’s Esplanade. He also trained architects of the next generation, including, in addition to his sons, William George Storm*, who became a leading architect in Toronto, first in partnership with Frederic William Cumberland and then on his own.

 

The role played latterly by the sons in Thomas’s business is difficult to determine. The later work of William Tutin, who moved to Montreal about 1863, is both more assured and more flamboyant than that of his father; Cyrus, who worked in Montreal before settling in Chicago, claimed credit for the firm’s Haligonian work. It is reasonable, however, to assume a division of labour in William Thomas’s last years. He suffered “long and continued illness,” necessitating a journey to England in 1858. The financial burden of illness and treatment is reflected in the firm’s extra efforts to collect new commissions and overdue payments. There was ever-increasing competition for architectural work: by 1859 there were 16 architects in Toronto, many of them well trained in the latest developments in style and construction. Thomas’s seniority was nevertheless recognized and he was elected president in 1860 of the Association of Architects, Civil Engineers and Provincial Land Surveyors of the Province of Canada, which had been established the previous year.

 

William Thomas died on 26 Dec. 1860 of diabetes, according to cemetery records. Survived by his wife and six of their ten children, he was buried in the family’s plot at St James’ Cemetery beneath the handsome Grecian tombstone which he no doubt had designed. Although his obituary in the Globe commented conventionally that he would be remembered for “his kindly social qualities which endeared him to a numerous circle of friends,” the statement rings true. A portrait, a bust, and a photograph all show an engaging figure. Moreover, maintaining a successful practice required a diplomatic touch in an era when, increasingly, important commissions were for public buildings, which entailed intense professional competition and often difficult negotiations with building committees.

 

A combination of experience, ambition, and personality made him a leading architect, with the largest architectural practice in British North America. He apparently prided himself on his ability to design substantial structures which could be built at reasonable cost. When Upper Canada was experiencing a great wave of prosperity, Thomas and a handful of other architects, including William Hay* and Kivas Tully*, were able to design major buildings for the fast-growing communities: churches to express their faith, civic structures to display their pride and their optimism about the future, and commercial buildings and residences to reveal their growing wealth.

 

Thomas was the versatile architect who, in the manner of his period, worked in various styles, some of which he rendered in a fashion that can be clearly identified as his. The prevailing aesthetic of the picturesque movement was especially important to him, with its emphasis on variety and richness of visual effect. But deeply rooted in his work too was the older Georgian tradition of compactness, balance, and regularity. Such conservatism of style is not surprising in one who immigrated to the colony in mid life and whose contact with professional developments in Britain was limited to rare return visits and the receipt of publications. What is all the more remarkable, in contrast to other designers of the same generation working in British North America, is Thomas’s professional maturation and independence which was demonstrated, in the work he produced in his last decade, by his new-found confidence in large works, his use of cast-iron, and his own form of the Italianate style. But although he continued to develop, the financial constraints imposed by some clients, a limited range of materials, and a shortage of skilled workmen must have contributed to a certain severity that is also noticeable in his architecture.

 

It was no mean achievement to have made a major contribution to Leamington’s residential street-scape; subsequently Thomas reshaped the skyline of Canadian cities from Halifax to London with a series of churches and public buildings. George P. Ure, in his Hand-book of Toronto, claimed that “his high professional talent and correct taste have tended greatly to the embellishment and improvement” of Toronto, above all. Thomas’s obituary in the Globe concurred: “To him we owe some of the most tasteful buildings of which our city can boast.” His contributions to the development of architecture as well as the scope and quality of his work substantiate Thomas Ritchie’s claim that William Thomas was “one of the founders of the Canadian architectural profession.”

Executing the bunt!

Today, Thursday 16 November 2017, police executed warrants at eight addresses across the Moss Side and Hulme areas of Manchester.

 

The warrants were executed as the latest phase of Operation Malham, targeting the supply of drugs in South Manchester.

 

This follows previous raids last week, which means more than 14 properties have been searched and eight people arrested in total as part of the operation.

 

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Walker, of GMP’s City of Manchester team, said: “We are dedicated to rooting out those who seek to make profits from putting drugs on our streets.

 

“Today’s raids have resulted in the arrests of five people which have only been made possible through the support of partner agencies and community intelligence.

 

“We are grateful for all your support and help and I would urge you to continue to report anything suspicious to help us stop people who are benefitting from crime and remove drugs from our city.”

 

Anyone with information should contact police on 101 or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.

 

To find out more about Greater Manchester Police please visit

www.gmp.police.uk

 

You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

THOMAS, WILLIAM, architect, water-colourist, and engineer; b. c. 1799 in Suffolk, England, son of William Thomas and Ann —; m. 17 Sept. 1826 Martha Tutin in Birmingham, England, and they had four sons and six daughters; d. 26 Dec. 1860 in Toronto.

 

William Thomas’s significance among his generation of architects in British North America lies not only in the outstanding nature of the work he executed but also in the unique opportunity his career affords of tracing the relationship between his extensive preparation in England and his work in Canada, the latter being more accomplished and much more important relatively. Other architects such as John George Howard*, George Browne*, Frederic William Cumberland*, and Thomas Fuller* arrived when they were much younger than Thomas, with the result that their early work is unknown. Thomas came in his maturity.

 

Shortly after William’s birth, the family settled at Chalford, Gloucestershire, where his father was innkeeper of the Clothier’s Arms. William and his three brothers all entered the building trades. John, the youngest, was apprenticed to a letter-carver or mason at first, studied briefly under William in the early 1830s, and achieved some success as an architect; he is, however, best remembered as one of the most prolific sculptors of the period. Between 1812 and 1819 William was apprenticed to John Gardiner, a local carpenter and joiner.

 

Some time after receiving his indenture papers, William moved to Birmingham, where he married Martha Tutin in 1826. He may have been the pupil of Richard Tutin, a builder-turned-architect who was apparently a relative of Martha. In 1829 Thomas entered into partnership with him, but it was probably dissolved the following year. In 1832 Thomas moved to nearby Leamington, a flourishing watering-place in Warwickshire. Here he had a varied career: initially serving as agent for a developer, he promoted and executed his own building speculation schemes and designed numerous buildings for clients. The failure of a local bank in 1837 may have obliged him to apply for the office of town surveyor – he was acting surveyor in 1838–39 – and undoubtedly precipitated his bankruptcy in 1840, along with those of most of the other building speculators in Leamington. Thomas had opened a branch-office in Birmingham, but there were few architectural commissions available because of widespread depression in the early 1840s.

 

Thomas’s architectural work in England comprises designs for a remarkable range of structures, including houses, churches, shops, a conservatory, a public bath complex, and iron and stone bridges. The bulk of his work, however, consisted chiefly of speculative housing for the middle class in Leamington. He is known to have designed town houses on Beauchamp Terrace, beginning in 1831, and two chapels in 1834. Two impressive housing complexes followed the next year: Lansdowne Circus, a horseshoe-shaped grouping of plain Georgian-style semi-detached houses and villas (most with decorative cast-iron porches and balconies under tent-shaped roofs), and adjacent Lansdowne Crescent, a curving terrace of connected and landscaped town houses executed in a fully elaborated classical style. For Lansdowne Crescent, Thomas had acquired the property in partnership, furnished the designs, and developed some parcels with covenants requiring conformity in the design of façades. In a somewhat similar vein he was responsible for the development on Brandon Parade and Holly Walk (which adjoined both the crescent and the circus) of about ten villas, in a mixture of Grecian and Gothic Revival designs. Before his bankruptcy Thomas lived in one of these villas, Elizabethan Place, which is conspicuously dated 1836 and signed “WT.” A combination of small volumes balanced in effective groupings with ornamental flourishes at the edges is characteristic of the mature Thomas. Victoria Terrace, Pump Room and Baths, a multipurpose building begun in Leamington in 1837, formed a major focus of the town and was his grandest work in England.

 

In Duddeston (Birmingham) he erected St Matthew’s Church (Anglican) in 1839–40. This rectangular brick building, executed in a mixture of Early English and Decorated Gothic Revival styles with a projecting three-storey tower at the west end, would be used by Thomas as a basis in developing many of his Canadian churches. In the same years he was also responsible for a palatial draper’s shop in Birmingham called Warwick House. A water-colour by Thomas of this highly ornamented block, which was bombed in World War II, shows a four-storey building of seven bays, with immense display windows set between graceful piers opening up the ground floor, while the second and third floors are set off by colossal columns and the fourth floor is richly treated as an attic. This was a successful formula for commercial structures and would be used for one of Thomas’s best-known works in Canada. In essence, Thomas’s career up to this point forms a modest and provincial parallel, in its range of activity, styles, and enterprise, to that of John Nash, the fashionable architect who had done so much to reshape London in the first quarter of the 19th century.

 

In December 1842 Thomas sent to press a slim book entitled Designs for monuments and chimney pieces, a discreet piece of self-advertisement which was published in London the following year. Consisting of 41 lithographed plates with 46 Grecian, Roman, Gothic and Elizabethan patterns, the book is indicative of the eclectic approach to architectural design prevalent during the late Georgian and early Victorian periods. Like most other designers, Thomas felt free to choose historical revival styles that were deemed fitting to the location and function of a work. His churches, for example, were generally designed in the Gothic style, which readily identified their religious function and association with the devout Christian beliefs of the Middle Ages.

 

In April 1843 Thomas left England for Toronto. Precisely what prompted him, in his early 40s, to emigrate with his wife and eight children or to choose Toronto for his new home is unknown. His forced bankruptcy three years earlier and the dearth of work must have been contributing causes, but the key factor was probably his ambition. Toronto, which was entering a boom period with a population of more than 15,000 but with only three practising architects, was an appealing location for an industrious architect. Thomas’s journal of his transatlantic crossing in 1843 reveals an acute and well-informed observer. He emerges from the journal as a patient and loving father, a warm and sympathetic man. Possessed of a considerable sense of humour, he was very sociable as well and enjoyed chess, card-playing, conversation, singing, and dancing. Thomas settled with his family at 5 York Street and opened an office at 55 King Street East, in the city’s main commercial district. His first major commission in Toronto seems to have been the Commercial Bank of the Midland District on Wellington Street. Designed in 1844 and built a year later, it was one of the earliest banks fashioned in the Greek Revival mode in British North America and its façade remains one of the best examples of that style in the city. The only other bank known to have been designed by Thomas, the Bank of British North America, Hamilton (1847–49), has been demolished.

 

It was, however, his churches that brought early acclaim. Reputedly there were eventually more than 30 of these, 12 in Toronto alone. The first, St Paul’s Church (Anglican) in London, was erected in 1844–46 of red brick (with a white-brick front) in the Decorated Gothic style. Described by William Henry Smith* in the year of its completion as “the handsomest gothic church in Canada West,” it was elevated to cathedral status in 1857 [see Benjamin Cronyn*] and extended in the 1890s by means of transepts.

 

Before St Paul’s was completed, Thomas commenced his most ambitious ecclesiastical work and the largest church in Toronto at the time, St Michael’s Cathedral (Roman Catholic), which was constructed in 1845–48 of the then-fashionable white brick. Extending from Bond to Church streets on the north side of Shuter, its long flank commanded McGill Square before that area was built over. St Michael’s too was designed in the Decorated Gothic style, but on a cruciform plan, and it was both more substantial and more ornamental in character than St Paul’s. The congregation could not immediately afford Thomas’s tower and spire; these and the dormers were later added by the firm of Thomas Gundry and Henry Langley*. A palace for Bishop Michael Power* was also designed by Thomas, in the Tudor Revival style, and was erected in 1845 on Church Street just north of the cathedral.

 

Thomas was especially favoured by Presbyterian congregations, particularly those created as a result of the disruption of 1844 [see Robert Burns*]. In Toronto alone he designed Knox’s Church (Free Presbyterian), Queen Street (1847–48), a church for the United Presbyterian congregation of the Reverend John Jennings*, Bay Street (1848), and Cooke’s Church (Free Presbyterian), Queen Street (1857–58). But he worked for many other denominations in the city, designing the Methodist New Connexion Church, Temperance Street (1846), the Unitarian Church, Jarvis Street (1854), Zion Church (Congregational), Bay and Adelaide streets (1855–56), and the German Evangelical Lutheran Church, Bond Street (1856–57). All have been torn down or replaced.

 

Although Thomas was unsuccessful in the 1849 competition for the Church of England cathedral in Toronto, he received commissions in 1851–52 from Anglican congregations in Guelph and Hamilton which resulted in churches of considerable significance. St George’s Church in Guelph, begun in 1851, was not only one of the first churches executed in the Romanesque Revival style in British North America but was also one of the first based on an asymmetrical plan. Three bays, including a corner tower forming a porch on the axis of Wyndham Street, were added in stone to an existing wooden church. Designs drafted by Thomas in 1856 for the rest of the church and for an elegant interior were not implemented and the church was later demolished. In Hamilton, where he had opened an office by 1849, possibly in the care of his son William Tutin, Thomas began work on Christ’s Church (now the Anglican cathedral) in 1852. This was his most adventurous work structurally, calling for a stone building on a basilican plan, with a tall nave carried on piers, a decoratively treated open wooden roof, clerestory lighting, flanking aisles, and a short but distinct chancel. These features suggest that the design was an early instance in this province of the ritualistic neo-medievalism advocated in architectural design by the Ecclesiological Society in England, though Thomas was by no means doctrinaire in his designs for churches. Only the chancel and two bays of Christ’s Church were built, as tall additions to Robert Charles Wetherell’s neoclassical wooden church of 1842, and the disjointed effect gave rise to the name “the hump-backed church.” In 1873–77 it was completed. Simpler churches were well within Thomas’s capability and at least three still stand: St George’s-on-the-Hill Church (Anglican) of 1847 in Etobicoke (Toronto), the Free Presbyterian Church (now Grace United) of 1852 in Niagara (Niagara-on-the-Lake), and MacNab Street Church (Presbyterian) of 1856 in Hamilton. Of these, the Niagara church is particularly appealing. Executed in a predominantly Romanesque mode, it features chunky corbel tables and pilaster strips which look less skimped than those in his conventional Gothic designs.

 

Thomas’s design for another Presbyterian church in Hamilton, the well-preserved St Andrew’s (renamed St Paul’s in 1874), was his most successful composition. It was begun in 1854 on a large budget, which encouraged a rich treatment in stone and an elaborate interior. The tower is bold and massive, with deep angle buttresses and dense carving in areas such as the entrance and the gables. The octagonal spire is apparently the only stone spire erected in Ontario. The interior is equally striking in the richness of its sombre decoration, carved in dark wood. Although the cost proved ruinous for its congregation, the church has been consistently admired: in 1901 the Canadian Architect and Builder regarded it as still “well worth the study of architects” because “the construction is genuine” and “an essential part of the aim was honest work.”

 

Thomas was busy almost continuously designing a succession of significant public buildings for centres throughout British North America. These include the Fireman’s Hall and Mechanics’ Institute building, Toronto (1845), the combined district court-house, town hall, and market, Niagara (1846–48), the Talbot District Jail, Simcoe (1847–48), the House of Industry, Toronto (1848), the Kent County Court-House, Chatham (1848–49), the St Lawrence Hall, Arcade, and Market building, Toronto (1849–51), the town hall and market-house, Peterborough (1851), the town hall and market, Guelph (1856–57), the custom-house, Quebec (1856–60), the town hall and market-house, Stratford (1857), the city jail (now known as the Don Jail), Toronto (1859–64), and the Halifax County Court-House, Halifax (1858–62). All survive except those in Peterborough and Stratford, and the Fireman’s Hall and Mechanics’ Institute building in Toronto. Most of these commissions were won in competition and follow a common formula in their design: a long symmetrical front, with a projecting frontispiece under a pediment, often with colossal orders, seated on a heavy base. Not all of Thomas’s competition designs were successful. In 1859, for example, he was an unsuccessful entrant in the contest for the parliament buildings in Ottawa.

 

The best known of Thomas’s public structures is undoubtedly St Lawrence Hall in Toronto which, with its original arcade and market, comprised the St Lawrence Buildings. An earlier town hall and market on the site, designed by Henry Bowyer Joseph Lane, were destroyed in the fire of 1849 and Thomas immediately received the commission for their replacements, his design closely following his successful (but unexecuted) competition design of 1845 for refronting the earlier buildings. The St Lawrence Buildings were I-shaped, with the hall fronting on King Street, the market on Front Street, and the 200-foot arcade between the two. The hall contained shops on the ground floor, committee rooms on the second, and an assembly room on the third, the latter offering a more dignified space for concerts, balls, lectures, and the like than those provided by local hotels or the earlier town hall and market. An enlarged and more controlled version of Thomas’s Warwick House (executed in Birmingham nearly a decade earlier), St Lawrence Hall is his most graceful exercise in classical design. The market and arcade have been replaced, but the hall has been refurbished and remains an important civic focus.

 

Thomas’s earlier public buildings at Niagara and Chatham are both Late Georgian in style and nearly as restrained as St Lawrence Hall, but most of his other public works were designed in a forceful Victorian version of the Renaissance Revival style. There is a deliberate crudity of scale and texture in these visually powerful buildings which reflects their association with the law, public administration, and commerce. They are characterized by blocky masses, rugged surfaces, and abrupt transitions. The Halifax County Court-House best displays these characteristics in Thomas’s later public buildings. The dominant feature of this sandstone structure is its heavily textured frontispiece with bands of contrasting stone at every level up to the stout brackets that support the simple pediment. The three splendid keystones, which are carved in the form of sombre bearded heads and alternate with lion’s-head medallions, are hallmarks of Thomas’s last, and most vigorous, architectural phase.

 

His civic architecture also included public schools, which were just beginning to be designed in Canada as architecturally distinctive institutions. His Union School in London (1849), described two years later in a government report as “by far the finest school house in the Province,” was followed by designs for two schools in Toronto. In 1851 the city’s first elected school-board, under the chairmanship of Dr Joseph Workman*, launched a school-design competition. Thomas’s plan was used in 1852–53 for the Park and Louisa Street schools. These were designed in the Tudor style, which was popular for institutional buildings because it afforded ample lighting and ventilation as well as an interesting silhouette, all within a reasonable budget. All three schools have been demolished. In 1853 Thomas received the commission for the combined county grammar and common schools in Goderich.

 

The columnar monument to Sir Isaac Brock* on Queenston Heights (1853–56) is arguably Thomas’s most florid composition. It is 185 feet tall, rising from a richly trophied base guarded by carved lions. A colossal statue of Brock stands on a lavish capital, designed by Thomas himself rather than drawn from the classical orders. Gates, a lodge, and steps, all completed in 1859, frame the monument in scenographic fashion. Thomas displayed a stone model of it at the universal exposition in Paris in 1855.

 

His English work had consisted largely of housing and numerous Canadian examples can be identified. In Toronto, a handsome row of houses called Wellington Terrace, built on Wellington Street in 1847, has been demolished, but three units of another group, built in 1848, survive on Church Street behind St Michael’s Cathedral. In Hamilton, Thomas’s firm was said by the Halifax Reporter in 1860 to be responsible for “the greater number of the very beautiful private residences that meet the eye in every direction.” Surviving work there attributed to Thomas includes Undermount (on John Street), designed for John Young* in the Italianate style in 1847, and two Gothic villas: the Presbyterian manse (at Herkimer and Park streets), completed in 1854, and Inglewood (on Inglewood Drive), built for Archibald Kerr about the same date. Thomas’s Wilderness House (1848–51), built for Aeneas Kennedy, was destroyed in 1853. Thomas also designed a villa in London for Lawrence Lawrason*. His own Toronto residence, Oakham House (1848), a Gothic composition on Church Street, stands but has been gutted and additions replace his office wing on Gould Street; his 1859 Italianate home on Mutual Street has been destroyed. He is also known to have built houses in Toronto for at least six prominent businessmen, including John McMurrich*. Among Thomas’s last known residential works was the house, which still stands, built in St Catharines in 1859–60 for William Hamilton Merritt*.

 

Mixed commercial and residential buildings by Thomas were surely numerous too. The first of these was probably the Adelaide Buildings on Yonge Street (1844), which were altered in 1853 and subsequently torn down. In 1846 William Henry Smith described some stores designed by him and under construction on King Street, Toronto, as “the handsomest buildings of the kind in Canada, and equal to anything to be seen in England.” Although some of the stores were damaged in the fire of 1849 and others were demolished later, several still survive, now generally altered. More stylish were two Italianate works, both large-scale dry-goods businesses: the 1847 store (named the Golden Lion in 1849) of Robert Walker and Thomas Hutchinson on King Street and the premises of Ross, Mitchell and Company, built at Yonge and Colborne streets about 1856. Both have been demolished. In a period of vigorous economic growth in Canada, at least three other Toronto firms, including Bryce, McMurrich and Company, commissioned buildings from Thomas, who also designed stores in Port Hope and Hamilton.

 

Thomas formally took two of his sons, William Tutin and Cyrus Pole, both of whom he had trained, into his flourishing business in January 1857 and the firm became William Thomas and Sons. It was shortly to expand again. Thomas’s design for Knox’s Church in Toronto had so impressed visiting members of St Matthew’s Church (Presbyterian) in Halifax that, when it was destroyed by fire in 1857, his firm was asked to design its replacement, which was built on Barrington Street in 1858–59 and still stands. This project brought the Thomas firm to Halifax, where Cyrus opened an office in 1858. The firm’s successful entry that year in the county court-house competition no doubt led to commissions after the fire of 1859 for rebuilding much of the commercial section at the north end of Granville Street [see George Lang*]. At least 12 four-storey buildings, more than half of the new construction, were designed by the firm and nearly all were completed by the end of 1860. The group is remarkable not only for the number and variety of the commissions (executed simultaneously for no less than eight different clients) but for the impact of the resulting streetscape, which survives. Contiguous properties called the Palace Buildings were handled uniformly as the largest single design. Unity of effect elsewhere in the group was achieved through the use of stone (from different Nova Scotian quarries), elevations of related height, and recurring rhythms. All but one building had decorative cast-iron shop-fronts, which are important as early examples of this type of construction in British North America. Cyrus Pole Thomas visited Daniel D. Badger’s Architectural Iron Works in New York in 1860 to arrange for the shop-fronts and internal detailing, some of which were later reproduced in Badger’s lavish publication, Illustrations of iron architecture.

 

Thomas had risen quickly in Canada and had made a number of connections in the Toronto community and elsewhere. Concerned for the public enjoyment of the arts, he was probably instrumental in establishing the Toronto Society of Arts in 1847; he was elected its first president and showed his architectural drawings at the society’s exhibitions of 1847 and 1848. He maintained limited contact with English architecture through the publications that he bought and the visit he paid in 1851 to the Great Exhibition in London, where his brother John exhibited sculpture. When John George Howard made a trip to England in 1853, Thomas served as city engineer in his stead and was appointed to superintend the work on Toronto’s Esplanade. He also trained architects of the next generation, including, in addition to his sons, William George Storm*, who became a leading architect in Toronto, first in partnership with Frederic William Cumberland and then on his own.

 

The role played latterly by the sons in Thomas’s business is difficult to determine. The later work of William Tutin, who moved to Montreal about 1863, is both more assured and more flamboyant than that of his father; Cyrus, who worked in Montreal before settling in Chicago, claimed credit for the firm’s Haligonian work. It is reasonable, however, to assume a division of labour in William Thomas’s last years. He suffered “long and continued illness,” necessitating a journey to England in 1858. The financial burden of illness and treatment is reflected in the firm’s extra efforts to collect new commissions and overdue payments. There was ever-increasing competition for architectural work: by 1859 there were 16 architects in Toronto, many of them well trained in the latest developments in style and construction. Thomas’s seniority was nevertheless recognized and he was elected president in 1860 of the Association of Architects, Civil Engineers and Provincial Land Surveyors of the Province of Canada, which had been established the previous year.

 

William Thomas died on 26 Dec. 1860 of diabetes, according to cemetery records. Survived by his wife and six of their ten children, he was buried in the family’s plot at St James’ Cemetery beneath the handsome Grecian tombstone which he no doubt had designed. Although his obituary in the Globe commented conventionally that he would be remembered for “his kindly social qualities which endeared him to a numerous circle of friends,” the statement rings true. A portrait, a bust, and a photograph all show an engaging figure. Moreover, maintaining a successful practice required a diplomatic touch in an era when, increasingly, important commissions were for public buildings, which entailed intense professional competition and often difficult negotiations with building committees.

 

A combination of experience, ambition, and personality made him a leading architect, with the largest architectural practice in British North America. He apparently prided himself on his ability to design substantial structures which could be built at reasonable cost. When Upper Canada was experiencing a great wave of prosperity, Thomas and a handful of other architects, including William Hay* and Kivas Tully*, were able to design major buildings for the fast-growing communities: churches to express their faith, civic structures to display their pride and their optimism about the future, and commercial buildings and residences to reveal their growing wealth.

 

Thomas was the versatile architect who, in the manner of his period, worked in various styles, some of which he rendered in a fashion that can be clearly identified as his. The prevailing aesthetic of the picturesque movement was especially important to him, with its emphasis on variety and richness of visual effect. But deeply rooted in his work too was the older Georgian tradition of compactness, balance, and regularity. Such conservatism of style is not surprising in one who immigrated to the colony in mid life and whose contact with professional developments in Britain was limited to rare return visits and the receipt of publications. What is all the more remarkable, in contrast to other designers of the same generation working in British North America, is Thomas’s professional maturation and independence which was demonstrated, in the work he produced in his last decade, by his new-found confidence in large works, his use of cast-iron, and his own form of the Italianate style. But although he continued to develop, the financial constraints imposed by some clients, a limited range of materials, and a shortage of skilled workmen must have contributed to a certain severity that is also noticeable in his architecture.

 

It was no mean achievement to have made a major contribution to Leamington’s residential street-scape; subsequently Thomas reshaped the skyline of Canadian cities from Halifax to London with a series of churches and public buildings. George P. Ure, in his Hand-book of Toronto, claimed that “his high professional talent and correct taste have tended greatly to the embellishment and improvement” of Toronto, above all. Thomas’s obituary in the Globe concurred: “To him we owe some of the most tasteful buildings of which our city can boast.” His contributions to the development of architecture as well as the scope and quality of his work substantiate Thomas Ritchie’s claim that William Thomas was “one of the founders of the Canadian architectural profession.”

Uder my family's custody

 

Saint Joseph NGUYỄN DUY KHANG

 

Dominican Brother

(1832-1861)

 

* A Loyal Disciple.

 

Saint Joseph Nguyễn Duy Khang was one of the four saint martyrs of Hải Dương venerated by Vietnamese Catholics. Even though he was executed a month after the other three, he was still honored together with Fr. Almato Bình and the two bishops Valentino Vinh and Hermosilla Liêm, because he had born the same travail with his three Dominican brothers.

 

As Bishop Hermosilla Liêm’s assistant, Brother Joseph Khang was in footstep with the leader of the east vicariate of Tonkin during their fugitive days; when soldiers arrested the bishop, with Peter’s passion in the Garden of Gethsemane, the brother tried to use force to fight. But obedient to the bishop, he agreed to be arrested to bear witness to a higher ideal: to bear witness to love, the compassion and forgiveness of the Gospel.

 

* A Devout Religious.

 

Joseph Nguyễn Duy Khang came into the world in 1832 in Cao Mại, Trà Vi canton, Vũ Tiên district, Kiến Xương prefecture, Thái Bình province. His parents were devout Catholics guiding their children in the Christian ways of life at their early ages. But his father passed away early. His mother raised him up properly. She wanted him to be educated and gave him the idea of offering his life to God, so she sent him to live with Fr. Matthew Năng, a Dominican.

 

After spending 10 years with the saintly elderly priest, Joseph Khang was sent to Kẻ Mốt seminary to study Latin preparing for a pastoral future. During this period, Joseph Khang asked to join the Dominican tertiary and was chosen by his fellow classmates to be their leader coordinating all the students’ responsibilities such as cleaning, cooking and liaison with the higher-ups. No matter how busy he was, he still set himself up as a model for his classmates in classes as well as in discipline. All who knew him said that he was very religious, honest, and always treated all around him with compassion and respect.

 

At the time, Bishop Hermosilla Liêm was also at Kẻ Mốt. He had a unique trust in Brother Khang and chose him to be his special assistant. Brother Khang happily and faithfully served the bishop: from preparing the altar, filing, copying pastoral letters, and contacting others, to preparing meals. He also dug their hiding trenches.

 

* A Model of Courage.

 

The Vietnamese Church was in a period of violent persecution under King Tự Đức. To erase completely Catholicism in the country, the king declared the edict of Segregation and Integration on 8/5/1861. According to the edict, all Catholics, young and old, male and female, were dispersed into villages of nonbelievers. Christians’ cheeks were etched with a word. Families were separated, wives from husbands, children from their parents. Churches, community houses, and Christian properties were confiscated, given away or destroyed.

 

Against that background, on September 18, Bishop Hermosilla Liêm agonized over the decision to close Kẻ Mốt seminary. Fr. Khoa informed seminarians on the bishop’s behalf: “You do not have to say goodbye to the bishop otherwise he cannot control his tears.” Brother Khang, on the other hand, persistently begged and was chosen to accompany the bishop till the end. When saying goodbye to his friends, he spoke half truthfully and half jokingly: “I am determined to accompany the bishop. If the authorities arrest him, they will not let me go free: if the bishop die for faith, so do I; without the head, the legs have no fear.” From that night on the two, a bishop and a religious brother, started their life on the run. Although the future was cloudy, but Brother Khang still maintained his cheerfulness due to his trust in and willingness to sacrifice his life for God.

 

The first three weeks on the run, Brother Khang and the bishop lived in a trench in Thọ Ninh. However, the authorities had discovered it, so the two had to leave land for a fishing sampan. Brother Khang rowed the boat to the city of Hải Dương and took refuge in the boat of a Christian named Bính. The boat became the mobile “diocesan office” of the shepherd. After several days, the two encountered by chance Bishop Valentino Vinh and Fr. Almato Bình in another boat arriving from Kẻ Mê. It was an emotional and happy encounter of the four saint martyrs of Hải Dương. They thanked God for the special occasion, exchanged news and prayed together for the Church. In the morning, they went on their separate ways.

 

Unfortunately, there was a quarrel in Mr. Bính family. The eldest son became angry at his parents; he went to the authorities to inform them of his parents’ giving safe housing to priests. As a result, corporal Bằng led his a group of men to arrest the bishop. Seeing them approaching, Brother Khang picked up a wooden pole, which was used to push the sampan, and ran toward them as if to warn them: to arrest anyone, you must go pass me.

 

But the respected and friendly bishop tapped the brother’s shoulder and said: “Don’t hurt them, leave it to God’s will.” Surprised, Brother Khang turned around still dumbfounded, suddenly he understood and could utter only a word: “Yes,” then dropped the pole and extended his hands to be tied up. Soldiers brought them to city of Hải Dương and put them in separate jail cells.

 

* The Martyr of Dải Dương.

 

For a month and a half of incarceration, Brother Khang was jailed together with a number of Christians. He organized for the cell to pray three times a day, and to do penance nightly to prepare themselves for their martyrdom. During this time, he was brought into court three times, tortured until his buttocks were flattened; each time, he endured the pain not revealing any information on the clergy nor renouncing his faith as urged by the mandarins. After each session, Christian inmates cleaned and massaged him to reduce the pain.

 

From prison Brother Khang continued to write to his friends who were taking refuge in the village of Hảo Hội. He wrote in a letter:

 

“The mandarins tortured me one time to force me to reveal bishop’s hiding places, but I did not tell them anything and was willing to be beaten. Please pray for me.”

 

In another letter, he wrote:

 

“Please send me a pair of pants because mine is old and shredded by canes beating on it. Send me also a blanket to be used to cover my body for burial when I die.”

 

On 12/6/1861 Brother Khang was informed of the sentence of death by decapitation from the royal capital. He happily followed soldiers to the execution field of Năm Mẫu where the ground had been soaked with the blood of his beloved bishop on November 1. After his execution, the local people buried him in a field nearby.

 

In 1867, under Bishop Hy’s direction, Chief Hinh, the martyr’s brother exhumed his body and reburied in the church of Kẻ Mốt parish. Today his head is stored at the church of Hải Dương while his body is still in Kẻ Mốt.

 

I have been to Throwley on at least three previous occasions, the fourth was going to be during Ride and Stride in September, but another crawler told me it had failed to open as per the list.

 

St Michael and All Angles is a large and from the outside and interesting looking church, looked like it had a story to tell. So, last week, I contacted the wardens through the CofE A church Near You website, I got a reply and a date and time agreed for Saturday morning.

 

We arrived 15 minutes early, and it was as locked as ever, but on a fine if frosty morning took the time to study the church ad churchyard, and saw yet more fine details we had missed previously.

 

Dead on time the warden arrived, and was very welcoming indeed. They loved to have visitors she said. Now I know how to contact them, I can see that.

 

She was clearly proud of the church, and rightly so, most impressive was the south chapel with a pair of kneeling couples on top of chest tombs, staring at each other for all eternity.

 

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St Michael & All Angels is the parish church of Throwley. The first church on the site was probably built between 800 and 825. This would have been a small wooden structure, barely distinguishable from a farm building.

 

After the Norman Conquest in 1066 this was replaced by a Romanesque stone structure.

 

This was still small, but as the population of the parish increased the church was enlarged, until in about 1510 it reached its present size. Since then its appearance has changed little, although an extra storey was added to the tower - now far seen - in the 1860s.

 

The church has an elaborate Romanesque west entrance; its east window in the chancel, by Curtis, Ward & Hughes of Soho, London, is a memorial to Throwley men who gave their lives in the First World War.

 

In the Harris chapel is the church's newest stained-glass window, commemorating Dorothy Lady Harris who died in 1981. It was designed and executed in the Canterbury Cathedral Workshops by Frederick Cole (see pictures on left).

 

The church has more than its fair share of fine 16th to 19th century monuments, mainly to members of the local Sondes and Harris families, and these are all described.

 

www.faversham.org/community/churches/throwley.aspx

 

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TQ 95 NE THROWLEY THROWLEY

ROAD

(west side)

4/181

Church of

St. Michael

and All

24.1.67 Angels

 

GV I

 

Parish Church. C12, C13 north chapel, C14 south chapel, C15

nave arcades, restored 1866 and tower heightened. Flint and

plain tiled roofs. Chancel, north and south chapels, nave and

aisles, south tower and south porch. West doorway, C12, with

attached shafts and 3 orders, the outer panelled with X's on

circles, the centre roll moulded with the blocks offset and

alternately projecting, the inner with more X's on circles,

with 2 offset buttresses either side of doorway. South aisle

with plinth, string course and parapet, 3 offset buttresses and

C15 Perpendicular windows. South tower of 2 stages with square

south-eastern stair turret and C16 moulded brick surround

sundial. Water spouts on each corner in the 4 Evangelical

symbols. Half-timbered C19 south porch, south doorway with

rolled and double hollow chamfered surround, and outer surround

with label and quatrefoil spandrels. North aisle under 1 roof

with nave, with C15 fenestration, and C19 chimney to north west.

North and south chapels with C14 cusped 'Y' tracery fenestration,

with hollow chamfered and ogee drip moulds. Chancel east

window C19 curvilinear style. Interior: 2 bay nave arcades,

double hollow chamfered arches on octagonal piers. C12 single

arches to north and south eastern bay, that to south recessed

and double chamfered through tower wall. Barrel roof.

Chamfered arch on corbels from south aisle to tower, itself

with corbel table on south wall, and triple arch through to south

chapel C19 chancel arch. Chancel with 2 bay double chamfered

arcade to north chapel with octagonal capitals on round piers, and

single double chamfered arch on round responds to south chapel.

Fittings: hollow chamfered piscina and sedile in window reveal in

chancel and cusped recess in north wall. C19 reredos and altar

rail. Cusped piscina and four centred arched wall recess in

south chapel. Choir stalls, some C19, the four on the south C15

with carved misericords. Monuments: south chapel C16 chest tomb,

with shields in panelled sides, moulded plinth, lozenge-shaped

flowers, fluting and frieze. Chest tomb, Sir George Sondes,

Earl of Faversham, d.1677. Black marble with blank panelled sides.

Inscription on the top panel (made 1728). Standing monument,

Sir Thomas Sondes, died 1592. Marble tomb chest, gadrooned with

achievements on side panels. Kneeling alabaster figures of

knight and his Lady on opposite sides of central prayer desk,

carrying inscription. Mary Sondes, died 1603. Smaller and

identical to Sir Thomas Sonde's monument, with 2 adults and 2

infant sons and daughters on either side of sarcophagus. Misplaced

scrolled and enriched carved achievement on floor to east of

those monuments. Wall plaque, Captain Thomas Sondes, died 1668.

Black and white marble, with draped apron, swagged and draped

sides with military trophies. Broken segmental pediment with male

bust. Signed W.S. (B.0.E. Kent II, p.477 suggests William Stanton).

North chapel C16 chest tomb, moulded plinth, panelled sides with

shields (1 panel reset in south chapel south wall). Early C16

tomb recess with moulded jambs, with rope work, crenellated,

with late Perpendicular motifs in spandrels, and tomb with 3

panelled recesses with 2 shields on each panel. Wall plaque,

Charles Harris, d.1814, by Flaxman. White plaque on white

background; dead soldier lifted from the grave by Victory, with

palms and cannon in background. Statue, to George, first Lord

Harris, life size soldier with sword and plans, on four foot

plinth. By George Rennie, 1835. Nave, wall plaque, Stephen

Bunce, d.1634. Black plaque on coved base and apron. Foliated

sides. Scrolled nowy cornice and pediment with achievement.

(See B.O.E. Kent II, 1983, 476-7.)

  

Listing NGR: TQ9883454254

 

www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-176587-church-of-st-m...

 

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LIES the next parish north-eastward from Stalisfield. It is called in the record of Domesday, Trevelei, in later records Truley and Thruley, in Latin ones Trulega and Truilla; it is now written both Throwley and Throwleigh.

 

THROWLEY is mostly situated on high ground, it is a more pleasant and open country than that last described, for though wild and romantic among the hills and woods, it is not so dreary and forlorn, nor the soil so uncomfortable, being much drier. Besides it has a more chearful and brighter aspect from the width of the principal valley which leads through it, from north to south, whence the hills rise on each side, with smaller delves interspersed among them. There is a good deal of wood-ground, mostly of beech, interspersed at places with oak and hazel, with some good timber trees of oak among them, especially in the northern and southern parts; much of the former belongs to the dean and chapter of Canterbury. The soil is mostly chalk, the rest a heavy tillage land of red cludy earth, the whole mixed with quantities of flint stones. There are some level lands, especially in the disparked grounds of Throwley park, which are tolerably good, much more so than those in the other parts of the parish; on the east side of the park are the foundations of the antient seat of the Sondes's, with the church close to them, the whole lying on high ground, with a good prospect of the surrounding country; not far from it is Town place, now only a farm-house. There is no village, excepting the few houses in Abraham-street may be so called, the rest of the houses, which are mostly cottages, standing dispersed throughout it, either single, or built round the little greens or softalls, of which there are several in different parts of the parish. On a larger one of these called Wilgate-green, there is a house belonging to the estate of Mr. Philerenis Willis's heirs, and another larger antient one, which with the estate belonging to it, was formerly the property of the Chapmans, and sold by them to Christopher Vane, lord Barnard, in 1789, gave it, with his other estates in this county, to David Papillon, esq. of Acrise, the present owner of it. (fn. 1)

 

There was a family named Wolgate, from whose residence here this green seems to have taken its name of Wolgate, or Wilgate-green. After they had remained here for some generations they ended in a daughter, for Mr. Ralph Wolgate dying in 1642, his daughter Anne married Mr. William Genery, and entitled him to her father's possessions here, at Posiers, in Borden, and other parts of this county. The Woodwards seem afterwards to have possessed their estate here, several of whom lie buried under a tomb in Throwley church-yard.

 

About half a mile distant south-westward from Wilgate-green, in Abraham-street, there is a seat, called, from its high situation and expensive prospect, BELMONT; it was built in the year 1769, by Edward Wilks, esq. storekeeper of the royal powdermills at Faversham, who inclosed a paddock or shrubbery round it, and occasionally resided here, till he alienated it in 1779 to John Montresor, esq. the present proprietor, who resides in it.

 

THE BEECH TREE flourishes in the greatest plenty, as well single to a large size, as in stubs in the coppice woods, which consist mostly of them, as well in these parts as they do in general on the range of chalk hills throughout this county, in some places extending two or three miles in width, and in others much more. The large tracts of ground in this and other counties, overspread with the beech-tree, the random situation of their stubs, and other circumstances which occur in viewing them, are strong proofs of their being the indigenous growth of this island, notwithstanding Cæfar's premptory assertion, in his Commentaries, of there being none here in this time. The Britons, he says, had every material for use and building, the same as the Gauls, excepting the fir and the beech. The former there is positive proof of his being grossly mistaken in, which will in some measure destroy that implicit credit we might otherwise give to his authority, as to the latter; indeed, the continued opposition he met with from the Britons, during his short stay here, assorded him hardly a possibility of seeing any other parts of this country than those near which he landed, and in the direct track through which he marched to wards Coway-stakes; too small a space for him to form any assertion of the general products of a whole country, or even of the neighbouring parts to him. Of those he passed through, the soil was not adapted to the growth of the beech tree; from which we may with great probability suppose, there were none growing on them, nor are there any throughout them, even at this time, a circumstance which most likely induced him to suppose, and afterwards to make the assertion beforementioned.

 

The slints, with which the cold unfertile lands in these parts, as well as some others in this county, are covered, have been found to be of great use in the bringing forward the crops on them, either by their warmth, or somewhat equivalent to it. Heretofore the occupiers of these lands were anxious to have them picked up and carried off from their grounds, but experiencing the disadvantage of it in the failure of their crops, they, never practice it themselves, and submit to the surveyors of the highways taking them off with great reluctance.

 

In the parish there are quantities of the great whitish ash coloured shell snail, which are of an unusual large size; they are found likewise near Darking, in Surry, and between Puckeridge and Ware, in Hertsordshire. They are not originally of this island, but have been brought from abroad, many of them are at this time observed in different parts of Italy.

 

MR. JACOB, in this Plantœ Favershamienses, has enumerated several scare plants observed by him in this parish, besides which, that scarce one, the Orchis myodes, or fly satrition, has been found here, growing on the side of the path, in a small wood, midway between the church and Wilgate green.

 

THIS PLACE, at the taking of the general survey of Domesday, about the 15th years of the Conqueror's reign, was part of the possessions of Odo, bishop of Baieux, and earl of Kent, the king's half brother, under the general title of whose lands it is thus described in it:

 

Hersrid holds Trevelai. It was taxed at three sulings. The arable land is eight carucates. In demesne there is one, and twenty-four villeins, with five borderers having six carucates and an half. There is a church, and five servants. Wood for the pannage of twenty bogs, and in the city three houses of thirty-two pence. In the time of king Edward the Conssessor it was worth seven pounds, and afterwards six pounds. Ulnod held it of king Edward.

 

On the bishop of Baieux's disgrace, about four years afterwards, this among his other estates, became consiscated to the crown.

 

After which it was held of the king in capite, by barony, by Jeffry de Peverel, and together with other lands made up the barony of Peverel, as it was called, being assigned to him for the defence of Dover-castle, for which purpose he was bound to maintain a certain number of soldiers from time to time for the desence of it, and to repair and defend at this own charge a particular tower or turret there, called afterwards Turris Gattoniana, or Gatton's tower.

 

In the reign of king Henry III. Robert de Gatton, who took his name from the lordship of Gatton, in Surry, of which his ancestors had been some time owners, was in possession of the manor Thrule, and died in the 38th year of that reign, holding it by knight's service of the king, of the honor of Peverel, by reason of the escheat of that honor, &c. (fn. 2) He was succeded in it by this eldest son Hamo de Gatton, who resided here, and served the office of sheriff in the 14th year of Edward I. His eldest son of the same name left one son Edmund, then an instant, who afterwards dying under age, his two sisters became his coheirs, and divided his inheritance, of which Elizabeth entitled her husband William de Dene to this manor, and all the rest of the estates in Kent; and Margery entitled her husband Simon de Norwood to Gatton, and all the other estates in Surry.

 

William de Dene had a charter of free warren for his lands in Thurley, in the 10th year of Edward II. He died anno 15 Edward III. then holding this manor by the law of England, as of the inheritance of Elizabeth his late wife deceased, of the king in capite, as of the castle of Dover, by knight's service, and paying to the ward of that castle. His son Thomas de Dene died possessed of it in the 23d year of that reign, leaving four daughters his coheirs, of whom Benedicta, the eldest, married John de Shelving, and entitled him to this manor, on whose death likewise without male issue, his two daughters became his coheirs, of whom, Joane married John Brampton, alias Detling, of Detlingcourt, and Ellen married John de Bourne, the former of whom, in his wife's right, became possessed of this manor. He lest only one daughter Benedicta his heir, who carried it in marriage to Thomas at Town, who was possessed of much land about Charing, and bore for his arms, Argent, on a chevron, sable, three crosscrostess, ermine, which coat is in the windows of Kennington church, impaled with Ellis, of that place. He removed hither in the reign of Henry VI. and built a feat for his residence in this parish, about a quarter of a mile from the church, which he named, from himself, Town-place, soon after which he died, leaving his possessions to his three daughters and coheirs, of whom Eleanor was married to Richard Lewknor, of Challock; Bennet to William Watton, of Addington, and Elizabeth to William Sondes, of this parish and of Lingfield, in Surry, in which county his ancestors had been seated as early as the reign of Henry III. at Darking, where their seat was named, from them, Sondes-place. (fn. 3) Upon the division of their inheritance, the manor of Throwley was allotted to William Sondes, and Town-place, with the lands belonging to it in Throwley, to Richard Lewknor, who sold it to Edward Evering, the eldest son of Nicholas, third son of John Evering, of Evering, in Alkham, and his daughter and heir Mary marrying in 1565, with John Upton, of Faversham, entitled him to this estate, which he very soon afterwards alienated to Shilling, from whom it as quickly afterwards passed by sale to Anthony Sondes, esq. of this parish, whose ancestor William Sondes, on the division of the inheritance of the daughters and coheirs of Thomas at Town as before mentioned, had become possessed of the manor of Throwley, and the antient mansion of it, in which he afterwards resided, and dying in 1474, anno 15 Edward IV. was buried in the north chapel of this church, though he ordered by his will a memorial for himself to be put up in the church of Lingfield. The family of Sondes bore for their arms, Argent, three blackmores heads, couped, between two chevronels, sable, which, with the several quarterings borne by them, are painted on their monuments in this church.

 

His descendant, Anthony Sondes, esq. of Throwley, in the 31st year of Henry VIII. procured his lands in this county to be disgavelled, by the act then passed, and died in 1575, having married Joane, daughter of Sir John Fineux, chief justice of the king's bench, by whom he had two sons, Thomas and Michael, and two daughters.

 

He was succeeded by his eldest son Sir Thomas Sondes, sheriff anno 22 Elizabeth, who founded the school in this parish. He died in 1592, leaving issue only by his second wife, one daughter Frances, married to Sir John Leveson, so that on his death without male issue, his only brother Sir Michael Sondes, of Eastry, succeeded to this manor and seat of his ancestors, in which he afterwards resided. He was sheriff in the 26th year of queen Elizabeth's reign, and died in the 16th year of king James I. having had by his first wife Mary, only daughter and heir of George Fynch, esq. of Norton, six sons and six daughters.

 

Sir Richard Sondes, the eldest son, resided at Throwley, where he died in the 8th year of Charles I. having had by his two wives a numerous issue, of both sons and daughters. He was succeeded in this manor and seat, with the rest of his estates, by his eldest son Sir George Sondes, who was made a knight of the Bath at the coronation of king Charles I. soon after which he began to rebuild his seat of Lees-court, in Sheldwich, and fixed his residence there, under the description of which a more particular account of him and his descendants may be seen. Not long after which this seat was entirely pulled down, and the park adjoining to it disparked. The foundations of the former still remain, and the disparked lands still retain the name of Throwley park.

 

Sir George Sondes was afterwards created Earl of Faversham, Viscount Sondes, of Lees court, and Baron of Throwley, whose two daughters became his coheirs; Mary was married to Lewis, lord Duras, marquis of Blanquefort, and afterwards earl of Faversham, and Katherine to Lewis Watson, esq. afterwards earl of Rockingham, who each successively, in right of their respective wives, inherited this manor and estate, which has since descended in like manner as Lees-court, in Sheldwich, to the right hon. Lewis-Thomas, lord Sondes, and he is the present possessor of this manor, with Town-place and the estate belonging to it. Acourt baron is held for this manor.

 

The denne of Toppenden, alias Tappenden, in Smarden, in the Weald, is an appendage to the manor of Throwley, and is held of it.

 

WILDERTON, alias Wolderton, called also in antient deeds Wilrinton, is a manor in this parish, which was once part of the possessions of the eminent family of Badlesmere, of which Bartholomew de Badlesmere was possessed of it in the reign of Edward II. of whom, for his services in the Scottish wars, he obtained in the 9th year of it many liberties and franchises for his different manors and estates, among which was that of free-warren in the demesne lands of this manor of Wolrington. (fn. 4) Having afterwards associated himself with the discontented barons, he was taken prisoner, and executed in the 16th year of that reign. By the inquisition taken after his death, which was not till anno 2 Edward III. at which time both the process and judgement against him was reversed, it was found that he died possessed of this manor, among others, which were then restored to his son Giles de Badlesmere, who died in the 12th year of Edward III. s. p. being then possessed of this manor. Upon which his four sisters became his comanor fell to the share of Margery, wife of William, manor fell to the share of Margery, wife of William, lord Roos, of Hamlake, who survived her husband, and died in the 37th year of Edward III. possessed of it, as did her grandson John, lord Roos, in the 9th year of Henry V. leaving no issue by Margaret his wife, who survived him, and had this manor assigned to her as part of her dower. She afterwards married Roger Wentworth, esq. whom she likewise survived, and died anno 18 Edward IV.

 

On the death of John, lord Roos, her first husband, s. p. the reversion of this manor, after her death, became vested in Thomas his next surviving brother and heir, whose son Thomas afterwards became a firm friend to the house of Lancaster, for which he was attainted anno 1 Edward IV. and his lands were consiscated to the crown.

 

On the death of Margaret, the widow of Roger Wentworth, esq. the manor of Wulrington, but whether by grant or purchase, I have not found, came into the possession of Richard Lewknor, of Challock, owner likewise of Town-place, as before-mentioned, who sold it to Edward Evering, already mentioned before, whose daughter and heir Mary marrying in 1565 with Mr. John Upton, of Faversham, entitled him to it. He joined with his brother Nicholas Upton, in 1583, in the sale of the manor-house, with all the demesne lands belonging to it, excepting one small piece called the manor-croft, and a moiety of the ma nor, which, from its situation, from that time was known by the name of NORTH-WILDERTON, to Anthony Terry, of North Wilderton, yeoman, upon whose death it came to his four sons, Arnold, William, Thomas, and George Terry, who in 1601 made a partition of their father's estates, in which this manor was allotted to Arnold Terry, and William his brother, from whom it descended to Anthony Terry, of Ospringe, who in 1689 sold it to Mr. Thomas Knowler, of Faversham, who devised it to his sister Abigail for her life, and after her death to John Knowler, gent. of Ospringe, in fee. She afterwards married John Bates, and they, together with John Knowler above-mentioned, about the year 1694, joined in the sale of it to Mr. Edward Baldock, of Aylesford, and Bennet his wife. He survived her, and by deed of gift in 1717, vested the fee of it in his son Edward Baldock, who passed it away to Mr. Thomas Greenstreet, of Norton, whose niece Elizabeth marrying with Mr. Thomas Smith, of Gillingham, entitled him to this manor, which has been since sold to John Montresor, esq. of Belmont, in this parish, the present owner of it. A court baron is held for this manor.

 

There was antiently a chapel at this manor of Wilrintune, as appears by a charter, dated anno 1217, lately in the treasury of St. Bertin's monastery at St. Omers, concerning the privilege of a bell to it.

 

BUT THE REMAINING MOIETY of the manor, with a small crost called the manor-croft, lying at the west end of Hockstet green, remained with John Upton, and thenceforward acquired the name of SOUTH, alias GREAT WILDERTON. After whose death it came to his eldest son John Upton, who died possessed of it in 1635, and was buried with his ancestors in Faversham church. They bore for their arms, Quarterly, sable, and or; in the first and fourth quarters, a cross flory, argent, each charged with a trefoil, azure. (fn. 5)

 

John Upton, his eldest son, inherited this manor, and at his death in 1664, by his will gave it to his daughter Anne, wife of Charles Castle, gent. who in 1688 devised it to her brother-in-law George Naylor, and George White, the former of whom becoming solely possessed of it, in 1705 devised it to his nephew Mr. John Dalton, gent. of St. Edmundsbury, for his life, and afterwards to his son Thomas Dalton, and his issue, in consequence of which it descended to Benjamin Shuckforth, of Diss, in Norfolk, who in 1741 sold it to Mr. Giles Hilton, of Lords, in Sheldwich, on whose death it descended to his three sons, John, William, and Robert Hilton, the youngest of whom, Mr. Robert Hilton, as well as by the devise of his two elder brothers, afterwards became the sole proprietor of this manor. He died in 1782, and his son Mr. John Hilton, of Sheldwich, as next in the entail, succeeded to it, and is the present possessor of it.

 

IN THE REIGN of king Stephen there was AN ALIEN PRIORY established in this parish, as a cell to the Benedictine abbey of St. Bertin, at St. Omers, the capital of Artois, in Flanders, William de Ipre, in 1153, having given this church, with that of Chilham, to it for that purpose; which gift was confirmed by king Stephen the same year, as it was by the several archbishops afterwards, and by the charters of Henry II. and III. The charter of this gift was till lately in the treasury of the monastery of St. Bertin, as were all the others hereafter mentioned relating to this church and priory.

 

There are very few formal foundations of these cells, the lands of them being usually granted to some monastery abroad, as an increase to their revenues, after which, upon some part of them they built convenient houses, for the reception of a small convent. Some of these cells were made conventual, having a certain number of monks, who were mostly foreigners, and removeable at pleasure, sent over with a prior at their head, who were little more than stewards to the superior abbey, to which they returned the revenues of their possessions annually; others were permitted to chuse their own prior, and these were entire societies within themselves, and received their revenues for their own use and benefit, paying perhaps only a yearly pension as an acknowledgement of their subjection, or what was at first the surplusage to the foreign house.

 

The cell at Throwley was of the former sort, for which reason, during the wars between England and France, as their revenues went to support the king's enemies, these kind of houses were generally seized on by the king, and restored again upon the return of a peace. (fn. 6)

 

In the 25th year of king Edward I. Peter, prior of Triwle, as it was spelt in the record, made fine to the king at Westminster, and had a privy seal for his protection, by which he had the custody of his house and possessions committed to his care, to retain them during the king's pleasure, answering to his exchequer for the profits of them, according to the directions of him and his council.

 

The scite of this priory was that of the parsonage of the church of Throwley, which, with that of Chilham, seems to have been all their possessions in this kingdom. These were valued in the 8th year of king Richard II. anno 1384, each at forty pounds annually, and their temporalities at 20s. 6d. at which time the parsonage of Throwley was become appropriated to this cell, and a vicarage was endowed in it. In which situation this priory remained till the general suppression of the alien priories throughout England, in the 2d year of Henry V. anno 1414, which was enacted in the parliament then held at Leicester, and all their houses, revenues, &c. were given to the king and his heirs for ever. (fn. 7)

 

This priory, with its possessions, seems to have remained in the hands of the crown till Henry VI. in his 22d year, settled them on the monastery of Sion, in Middlesex, founded by his father Henry V. with which they continued till the general suppression of religious houses, this being one of those greater monasteries dissolved by the act of the 31st year of king Henry VIII. How this priory was disposed of afterwards by the crown, may be further seen hereafter, under the description of the parsonage of the church of Throwley.

 

The only remains left of this priory are some few foundations, and two walls of flint, which support a building, standing behind the parsonage-house and garden.

 

THERE IS A FREE SCHOOL in this parish, the house of which is situated adjoining to the church-yard, which was founded by Sir Thomas Sondes, who died in 1592, who by his will devised a house and six poundes per annum to the master of it, to dwell in, and as a recompence for his pains; but having charged his executors and not his heirs to the fulfilling of this bequest, and charged the payment of the above sum, among other charitable legacies, on several leasehold estates, the terms of which expired in his nephew Sir Richard Sondes's time, and the house having tumbled down for want of repairs, Sir George Sondes, son of Sir Richard above-mentioned, thought it unreasonable, as he had none of the estates, that he should be bound to maintain the school; however, he voluntarily paid the master his salary, and gave him a house to live in, both which have been continued by the possessors of Throwley manor to this time, as far as I can learn, as of their own free gift.

 

The present right hon. lord Sondes appoints the schoolmaster as such during pleasure, and pays him a salary of twelve pounds per annum, besides which, he allots him an house and garden, worth about six pounds per annum, which his lordship repairs from time to time, and for which no parochial or church-dues are paid. There are at present fourteen boys taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, gratis, in this school, which though taken mostly from the parishes of Throwley, Badlesmere, and Leveland, are not confined to those parishes.

 

Charities.

 

CATHERINE, LADY SONDES, gave by will the sum of 40s. a year, to be received yearly on St. Barnabas's day, towards the relief of the poor, payable from a farm in it, called Bell-horn, now belonging to lord Sondes, and now of that annual produce.

 

THERE WERE three alms-houses in this parish, the gift of one of the Sondes family; one of them was some time since burnt down, and has not been rebuilt, but lord Sondes allows the person nominated to it the value of it in money yearly.

 

The poor constantly relieved are about thirty, casually double that number.

 

THROWLEY is within the ECCLESIASTICAL JURISDICTION of the diocese of Canterbury, and deanry of Ospringe.

 

The church, which is dedicated to St. Michael, consists of three isles and three chancels. The steeple is a square tower, and stands in the centre of the south side of it, in which there is a peal of six bells, given in 1781, at the expence of Mr. Montresor, of Belmont. In the south isle is a memorial for Francis Hosier Hart, gent. obt. 1761, leaving three daughters, Mary, Elizabeth, and Diana Hosier. In the middle isle is a small monument for Stephen Bunce, esq. of this parish, one of the Antients of New-Inn, who died there in 1634, and was buried in St. Clement's church, London. In the middle chancel there are two stalls of wood, which are not fixed, and in the north isle three more of the like sort, joined together, with a desk before them, which seem to have been removed from the chancel, and were both intended for the use of the religious of the priory here. In the middle of this chancel is a memorial for Dr. Thomas Horsemonden, patron and rector of Purleigh, in Essex, prebendary of Lincoln, &c. who died anno 1632. In the north and south chancel are several monuments for the family of Sondes, with their essigies, arms and quarterings; one of them in the latter, a plain altar tomb of black marble for Sir George Sondes, earl of Faversham, his lady and descendants; many more of this family, as appears by the parish register, are buried in the vault underneath, but the family of Watson burying at Rockingham, this vault has not been opened for several years. The north and south chancels above-mentioned belonged, one to the possessors of Throwley manor, the other to those of Townplace, but they both belong now to lord Sondes.

 

There were formerly in the windows the arms of Sondes, Finch, and Gatton, and in the north window this inscriptin, Pray for the good estate of Alice Martyn, the which did make this window, MCCCCXLV.

 

In the church yard, at the west end of the north isle, there is a circular door-case of stone, having several bordures of Saxon ornaments carved round it. In the church-yard is an altar tomb for William Woodward, gent. of Wilgate-green, obt. 1681, and Anne his wife.

 

It appears by the will of William Sondes, esq. anno 1474, that this church had then constantly burning in it lights, dedicated to St. Michael, the Holy Trinity, the Holy Cross, St. Mary, St. Thomas, St. Christopher, St. George, St. Katherine, St. Margaret, St. Mary Magdalen, and St. Nicholas.

 

An account of the antient patronage of the church of Throwley has already been given, as first belonging to the alien priory here, and then to the monastery of Sion, to the time of the dissolution of the latter in the 31st year of Henry VIII. the year after which, the king granted the rectory, with the advowson of the vicarage of the church of Throwley, to the prebendary of Rugmer, in the cathedral church of St. Paul, London, in exchange for lands belonging to that prebend, to be inclosed within the king's park of Marybone, in pursuance of an act then passed. Since which this parsonage and advowson have continued part of the abovementioned prebend. The former is leased out by the present prebendary to the right hon. lord Sondes, but the advowson of the vicarage he retains in his own hands, and is the present patron of it.

 

¶There was a rent of 4l. 18s. 4d. reserved from the parsonage by king Henry VIII. nomine decimœ, which was granted by queen Elizabeth, in her third year, to archbishop Parker, among other premises, in exchange for several manors, lands, &c. belonging to that see, which rent still continues part of the revenue of the archbishopric.

 

A vicarage was endowed here in 1367, anno 42 king Edward III. by archbishop Langham, at which time the chapel of Wylrington belonged to it. (fn. 8)

 

It is valued in the king's books at 7l. 11s. 8d. and the yearly tenths at 15s. 2d.

 

In 1578 there were one hundred and eighty communicants here. In 1640 it was valued at forty-five pounds, communicants two hundred and twenty.

 

www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-kent/vol6/pp445-461

Greater Manchester Police have today, Thursday 15 March 2012, made arrests following the murder of a man in Rochdale.

 

In the early hours of this morning 22 warrants were executed at addresses in Moston, Moss Side, Fallowfield, Davyhulme, Urmston, Newton Heath, Blackley, Harpurhey, Beswick, Bolton and Hyde.

 

Eight men aged between 20 and 30 were arrested on suspicion of murder and violent disorder.

 

At about 2.40am on Sunday 25 December 2011, police were called to Sinclair's Bar on Drake Street, Rochdale, following reports of a large disturbance.

 

Officers attended and discovered a man had been stabbed.

 

John Lee Barrett, 31, was taken to hospital but died, Tuesday 27 December 2011.

 

A post mortem examination concluded he died from a stab wound to the back.

It is also believed he had been hit over the head with a glass or bottle.

 

Chief Superintendent John O'Hare said: "By conducting this operation, we have sent out a firm message to those who think they can travel across Greater Manchester and commit crime in other areas that we will catch up with them.

 

"We have demonstrated that if you commit crime as part of a pack, you will be arrested and dealt with as a pack.

 

"I would also reassure residents within the local communities that there will be an extra police presence in their area and if anyone has any concerns, please speak to your local officer.

 

"We are working very hard to ensure their neighbourhoods are safer and we will not tolerate offenders who think they can get away with their actions and break the law."

 

Detective Chief Inspector Pete Jackson from the Major Incident Team said "The warrants have been part of a lengthy and complicated investigation.

Hours of CCTV have been studied and the club has been forensically examined by a team of highly experienced officers.

 

"However, despite these warrants, the investigation is still ongoing and we are still keen to hear from anyone who was at Sinclair's Bar on the night of the attack.

 

"We have interviewed a number of people who have helped us piece together what may have happened in the early hours of Christmas Day but I would still urge others who we haven't spoken with to get in touch - your information could be vital.

 

"I would urge anyone who may have information about what happened that night to contact police on 0161 856 3691 or the independent charity Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111. The information you supply will be treated with the strictest of confidence."

 

For information about Greater Manchester Police please visit our website.

www.gmp.police.uk

   

You should call 101, the new national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

        

Submission for the Tallinn Architectural Biennale 'Street 2020' Competition, unawarded. (flickr seems to have altered colors) Jury reported: "The proposal is thorough and professionally executed, yet rather absurd. Several questions remain unanswered, for example why bring a forest in a city, where does the street lead to and where does it start from? Furthermore, the design proposal is overly based on four- lane road design standards."

 

The Digital Forest creates a passageway, an edge, and a destination. Calling on Estonia’s cultural heritage and its recent economic dynamism, the forest provides a grounded connection to place (earthly) and a technical connection to the wider digital world (ephemeral). The layering of a series of simple strategies creates a complex solution. The street responds to contemporary patterns of living and working and encourages numerous modes of transportation both within the center city and to and from the outlining districts beyond. The scheme addresses street movement in two ways; splitting the proposal into a central spine running adjacent to the center city, port, and old town and connected extensions where it reaches out to Viimsi, Pirita, and Lasnamäe in its first configuration and to Mustamäe and Nõmme in future expansions. The central spine provides Tallinn with a city-scaled urban space.

At the central spine private car traffic is placed underground and a forest of native species establishes an edge to the city and connection to the sea. The forest is simultaneously a cultural landscape and an ecosystem restoration effort. Along the city side of the spine there are several opportunities for new buildings, a gracious sidewalk, a high-frequency streetcar line, and a limited-access service street for deliveries and taxis. By placing automobile traffic underground along the central spine, much of the right-of-way is liberated for the forest. This avoids introducing significant traffic infrastructure along the waterfront severing the city from the water. The high frequency trolleys allow for fluid movement along the spine and facilitate easy transfer between modes and scales of transit.

 

Three key crossings connect the city to the port. The crossings are strategic points that allow for easy movement across the central spine and provide opportunities for the scheme to extend south into the center city, connecting to citizens’ daily lives and reaching the existing bus and tram lines. Framed views of the forest from along these feeder streets announce its presence to the city dweller.

 

The forest is place of urban respite traversed by walking/skiing and biking paths. It widens where it meets underutilized port sites, reaching from the city to the sea. With opportunities for playgrounds, garden allotments, picnic areas, beaches, and habitat creation, the forest is a place where residents and visitors can inhabit a landscape reminiscent of the glacially formed beauty found along much of the Estonian coast. This earthly garden speaks to the Estonian national identity. Accordingly, the forest can be used as a processional pathway for choirs as they walk from the old town to the song grounds for the Estonian Song Festival or Laulupidu. Glass boxes in the forest house a variety of functions, ranging from commercial kiosks, to warming shelters, to a municipal greenhouse that reaches out into the bay and compositionally balances the Linnahall and becomes an iconic feature of the city for visitors arriving by boat. These glass boxes shift seasons and allow access to the earthly forest throughout the harsh winter months. The municipal greenhouse is also the anchor of a proposed system of greenhouses to encourage urban gardening and local food production.

 

Plazas carved from the forest emphase significant buildings like the Museum of Estonian Architecture (rotermanni salt storage),the historic Linnahall and the forthcoming City Hall by BIG architects. Though seen as terminating at Pirita Tee on the east and the City Hall / Linnahall plaza on the west, future growth of the central spine into Kalamaja is envisioned. This addition will catalyze the redevelopment of Patarei Prison and the thinshell hydroplane hangars for cultural or residential uses.

 

A free municipal high speed internet service underpins the entire central spine, democratizing information and, through hand held devices, providing a technologically augmented reality that overlays sounds and images of the city’s geology, ecology, history, and culture on the forest landscape. This ephemeral forest encourages exploration, commerce, and communication. As the walls of the workplace, social spaces, and educational institutions dematerialize with the growth of digital means, the forest offers a civic space that boosts online interaction while bringing people together. At night users can choose to have smart lighting track their movements illuminating a nearby perimeter; a strategy that improves visibility, enhances energy efficiency, preserves the night sky and provides poetic effect. During the summer atomizing nozzles fill the forest with a soft mist. Juxtaposing the earthly and the ephemeral creates a hybrid urban space appropriate to Tallinn’s increasing stature in the European community.

 

Attached to the central spine, extensions connect the center city to outlying areas. Here all traffic is brought to the surface and the cross section of the road is divided efficiently between multiple modes of transit - private automobiles, trams/buses, bicycles, and designated spaces for pedestrians to walk, run or ski.

 

Project Team: Ted Shelton, Tricia Stuth, Emily Dent, Kate Armstrong, Luke Murphree, Phil Zawarus, Maudy Budipradigdo, Ken McCown

 

Officers investigating the recent spate of firearms discharges in Salford have executed a series of warrants in Little Hulton and Eccles.

 

In the early hours of this morning, Friday 16 October 2015, officers from Greater Manchester Police’s Salford Division searched nine properties throughout the division in the hunt for firearms linked to the recent shootings in the area.

 

The warrants were executed as part of a Project Gulf operation designed to tackle organised crime. Gulf is part of Programme Challenger, the Greater Manchester approach to tackling organised criminality across the region.

 

Seven men and one woman have been arrested on suspicion of a number of offences, ranging from possession with intent to supply to handling stolen goods.

 

A significant amount of Class A and Class B drugs were seized as part of the operation, though no firearms were found.

 

Detective Inspector Alan Clitherow said: “This series of warrants are just one element of the continuing and relentless operation being orchestrated to tackle organised crime gangs in Salford.

 

“They came about as a result of the on-going investigation into the recent spate of firearms discharges in Salford, including the horrific attack of young Christian Hickey and his mother Jayne.

 

“We wanted to show our communities that we are leaving no stone unturned in the hunt for those responsible for the abhorrent attack on an innocent child and his mother, and that we will not stand for the spate of shootings taking place on our streets in recent weeks.

 

“But there is still more to do and, as with any fight against organised crime groups embedded in our city, we need residents to come to us with information so we can put a stop to this criminality.

 

“There has been much said about people breaking this wall of silence in Salford, and once again I urge people to search their consciences and please come forward.

 

“You could provide the information that may help prevent any further innocent lives being touched by this senseless violence, and prevent further children being injured by thugs that many people within Salford seem so intent on protecting.

 

“I want to stress that if you come forward with what you know, we can offer you complete anonymity and I assure you that you will have our full support. Or if you don’t feel you can talk to police but you have information, you can speak to Crimestoppers anonymously.”

 

A dedicated information hotline has been set up on 0161 856 9775, or people can also pass information on by calling 101, or the independent charity, Crimestoppers, anonymously on 0800 555 111.

 

This manuscript was executed in 1475 by a scribe identified as Aristakes, for a priest named Hakob. It contains a series of 16 images on the life of Christ preceding the text of the gospels, as well as the traditional evangelist portraits, and there are marginal illustrations throughout. The style of the miniatures, which employ brilliant colors and emphasize decorative patterns, is characteristic of manuscript production in the region around Lake Van during the 15th century. The style of Lake Van has often been described in relation to schools of Islamic arts of the book. Numerous inscriptions (on fols. 258-60) spanning a few centuries attest to the manuscript's long history of use and revered preservation. The codex's later history included a re-binding with silver covers from Kayseri that date to approximately 1700. This jeweled and enameled silver binding bears a composition of the Adoration of the Magi on the front and the Ascension on the back.

 

To explore fully digitized manuscripts with a virtual page-turning application, please visit Walters Ex Libris.

 

At around 5.30am today (Tuesday 12 October) officers from GMP's Oldham Challenger Team executed three warrants at addresses across Newton Heath and Failsworth.

 

The warrants formed part of an ongoing investigation into the supply of class A drugs across Greater Manchester, as well as the criminal use of the encrypted communications platform Encrochat, often used by organised criminal groups.

 

During the raids, three men in their 30s were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to supply cocaine and two of the men were further arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to supply amphetamine, entering into a money laundering agreement and possession of a prohibited weapon with intent to cause fear.

 

They remain in custody for questioning by detectives.

 

Following searches of all three properties, suspected class A and B drugs were recovered, along with over £3000 in cash, designer clothing, jewellery, phones and vehicles.

 

In July 2020, GMP alongside nearly every law enforcement agency across the UK came together as part of the National Crime Agency led 'Operation Venetic', focused on the takedown of 'Encrochat' - a sophisticated encrypted communications service used by OCG's.

 

GMP launched a series of intricate investigations bringing together 16 teams of officers from across all ten districts of Greater Manchester. Codenamed 'Operation Foam', the force wide operation has been in constant action for the past 15 months.

 

Detective Sergeant Alex Brown of GMP's Oldham Challenger Team, said: "Today's action is the culmination of months of intricate investigative work and is another positive result for the team in our endeavour to disrupt and dismantle the distribution and trade of drugs across our region.

 

"Thankfully today we have been able to remove what is suspected to be a large quantity of drugs from our community, and although we have three men in custody our searches and investigation will continue this morning and we will ensure all criminal assets are seized.

 

"An inordinate amount of work goes on behind the scenes to investigate the distribution of drugs and I hope today's arrests and seizures send a stark warning that GMP will do all in its power to pursue offenders and ensure no one benefits from ill-gotten gains and the sale of drugs.

 

"Often these investigations rely on intelligence passed to police by members of the public can often play a big part in investigations. If you have information that could aid our investigations into the trade of drugs across Greater Manchester then please get in touch with police."

 

Anyone with information should contact police on 101. Alternatively, details can be passed via our LiveChat function at www.gmp.police.uk or via the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

 

You can access many of our services online at www.gmp.police.uk.

 

For emergencies only call 999, or 101 if it's a less urgent matter.

The Bible of Borso d'Este is a two volume manuscript. The illuminated miniatures, work of Taddeo Crivelli and others, were executed between 1455 and 1461. The work is held in the Biblioteca Estense di Modena (Ms. Lat. 422-423.)

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The Bible of Borso d'Este is one of the most notable illuminated manuscripts of the Renaissance. It was executed over a six-year period by a team of artists directed by Taddeo Crivelli and Franco dei Russi.

 

Every page of the Bible is decorated with an elegant frame of scrolls and other ornaments, surrounding two columns of texts. The margins contain various scenes, especially in the lower parts, where one often finds scenes drawn in perspective, borrowing from advances in painting of the time. Scenes are also depicted between the columns of text, usually next to the capital or illuminated letters. In the volutes in the corners, there are often animals, depicted with lively imagination that is part of the courtly style of the time, and often tied to heraldic symbols of Borso and his family.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borso_d%27Este_Bible

 

*****************************************************************

A digital version of the original manuscript in high resolution and free of charge is avaiilable in the Library of Congress in Washington

www.loc.gov/item/2021667830

Arbour Hill is an inner city area of Dublin, on the Northside of the River Liffey, in the Dublin 7 postal district. Arbour Hill, the road of the same name, runs west from Blackhall Place in Stoneybatter, and separates Collins Barracks, now part of the National Museum of Ireland, to the south from Arbour Hill Prison to the north, whose graveyard includes the burial plot of the signatories of the Easter Proclamation that began the 1916 Rising.

  

The military cemetery at Arbour Hill is the last resting place of 14 of the executed leaders of the insurrection of 1916. Among those buried there are Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and Major John Mc Bride. The leaders were executed in Kilmainham and then their bodies were transported to Arbour Hill, where they were buried.

 

The graves are located under a low mound on a terrace of Wicklow granite in what was once the old prison yard. The gravesite is surrounded by a limestone wall on which their names are inscribed in Irish and English. On the prison wall opposite the gravesite is a plaque with the names of other people who gave their lives in 1916.

 

The adjoining Church of the Sacred Heart, which is the prison chapel for Arbour Hill prison, is maintained by the Department of Defence. At the rear of the church lies the old cemetery, where lie the remains of British military personnel who died in the Dublin area in the 19th and early 20th century.

 

A doorway beside the 1916 memorial gives access to the Irish United Nations Veterans Association house and memorial garden.

The Descent from Mount Sinai is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance painter Cosimo Rosselli and his assistants, executed in 1481–1482 and located in the Sistine Chapel, Rome. It depicts the prophet Moses in the process of receiving and introducing the Ten Commandments.

On 27 October 1480, several Florentine painters left for Rome, where they had been called as part of the reconciliation project between Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, and Pope Sixtus IV. The Florentines started to work in the Sistine Chapel as early as spring 1481, along with Pietro Perugino, who was already there. Rosselli brought with him his son-in-law, Piero di Cosimo, who perhaps collaborated on this painting and at least one of the others assigned by his master.

The theme of the decoration was a parallel between the stories of Moses and those of Christ, as a sign of continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament, as well as a continuity between the divine law of the Tables and the message of Jesus, who, in turn, chose Peter (the first alleged bishop of Rome) as his successor: this would finally result in a legitimation of the latter's successors, the popes of Rome.

The painting, like others in the cycle, shows more episodes at the same time; the theme is described by the inscription on the frieze PROMULGATIO LEGIS SCRIPTE PER MOISEM. In ("Promulgation of the Written Law through Moses").

In the upper part is Moses kneeling on Mount Sinai, with a sleeping Joshua nearby: he receives the Tables of the Law from Yahweh, who appears in a luminescent cloud, surrounded by angels. In the foreground, on the left, Moses brings the Tables to the Israelites. In the background is camp of tents, with the altar of the golden calf in the middle; the Israelites, spurred by Aaron, are adoring it: the position of some of them, painted from behind, was usually used for negative characters, such as Judas Iscariot in the Last Supper. Once seeing that, Moses, in the center, gets angry and breaks the Tables on the ground. The right background depicts the punishment of the idolatrous and the receiving of the new Tables. Joshua, in the blue and yellow, appears with Moses.

  

The Crossing of the Red Sea is a fresco executed in 1481–1482 and located in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. Of uncertain attribution, it has been assigned to Cosimo Rosselli.

On 27 October 1480 several Florentine painters left for Rome, where they had been called as part of the reconciliation project between Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, and Pope Sixtus IV. The Florentines started to work in the Sistine Chapel as early as the Spring of 1481, along with Pietro Perugino, who was already there.

The theme of the decoration was a parallel between the Stories of Moses and those of Christ, as a sign of continuity between the Old and the New Testament. A continuity also between the divine law of the Tables and the message of Jesus, who, in turn, chose Peter (the first alleged bishop of Rome) as his successor: this would finally result in a legitimation of the latter's successors, the popes of Rome.

Among the several fresco in the cycle, that of the Passage of the Red Sea was the one with the most problematic attribution. Although the name of Ghirlandaio was made by several authorities, the work's style is more reminiscent of that of Cosimo Rosselli or Biagio d'Antonio.

The scene is part of the chapel's Stories of Moses cycle, and, like other frescoes there, shows several scenes at the same time. The sequence begins from the right background, where Moses and Aaron are begging the pharaoh to free the Israelites. On the right are the Egyptian soldiers, shown in typical Italian Renaissance military garments, armor and weapons, who are drowning after the Red Sea waters, which had miraculously opened to allow the Israelites to cross them, close around them. The pharaoh is portrayed in a frantic scream, while other figures try to return to the Egyptian shore by swimming. Before the army is a column hovering over the waters: this is a representation of the fire pillar sent by Yahweh to scare the Egyptians.

In the upper central area is a hail storm, sent by God to punish the Egyptians. Also depicted are some sunrays and, more to the left, a rainbow, symbols of the upcoming liberation for the Israelite people. Similar representation of meteorological phenomena were not uncommon in the 15th-century Italian art: other examples are Fra Angelico's Martyrdom of St. Mark on the Tabernacle of the Linaioli, and several Paolo Uccello's St. George and the Drake.

On the left are the Israelites, led by a young Moses with the typical yellow garment and green cloak, and a command baton, after they have just crossed the sea. Their safeness is testified by the presence of recreational activities, such as the prophetess Miriam playing a chordophone in the foreground. They continue their trip in procession, disappearing on the left, in a naturalistic landscape. Details include a pet dog in the foreground, reminiscent of Benozzo Gozzoli's paintings in the Magi Chapel.

  

The Youth of Moses or The Trials of Moses is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli and his workshop, executed in 1481–1482 in the Sistine Chapel, Rome (modern-day Italy).

On 27 October 1480, Botticelli, together with other Florentine painters, left for Rome where he had been called as part of the reconciliation project between Lorenzo de' Medici, the de facto ruler of Florence, and Pope Sixtus IV. The Florentines started to work in the Sistine Chapel as early as the Spring of 1481, along with Pietro Perugino, who was already there.

 

The theme of the decoration was a parallel between the Stories of Moses and those of Christ, as a sign of continuity between the Old and the New Testament – a continuity also between the divine law of the Tables and the message of Jesus, who, in turn, chose Peter (the first alleged bishop of Rome) as his successor: this would finally result in a legitimation of the latter's successors, the popes of Rome.

Botticelli, helped by numerous assistants, painted three scenes. On 17 February 1482 his contract was renovated, including the other scenes to complete the chapel's decoration. However, on 20 February his father died: he returned to Florence, where he remained.

  

Moses Leaving for Egypt is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance painter Pietro Perugino and his workshop, executed around 1482 and located in the Sistine Chapel, Rome. It depicts a journey by the prophet Moses.

The commission of the work originated in 1480, when Perugino was decorating a chapel in the Old St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Pope Sixtus IV was pleased by his work, and decided to commission him also the decoration of the new Chapel he had built in the Vatican Palace. Due to the size of the work, Perugino was later joined by a group of painters from Florence, including Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and others.

Perugino's assistants in the Sistine Chapel included Pinturicchio. Some figures in the fresco were traditionally attributed to him, but this has been disputed by 20th-century art historians. They were painted by Andrea d'Assisi, Rocco Zoppo or, less likely, Lo Spagna or Bartolomeo della Gatta, other Perugino's collaborators of the time.

The fresco depicting the voyage of Moses is the first on the wall right to the altar, and faces the Baptism of Christ on the opposite wall.

The painting shows Moses (dressing in yellow and green as in the other frescoes of the cycle) leaving for Egypt, after he had been exiled from Midian, with Zipporah to his right. In the center, an angel asks him to circumcise his son Eliezer (scene on the right), as a sign of the alliance between Yahweh and the Israelites. The baptism, depicted on the opposite fresco, was in fact considered by several early Christian writers, including Augustine, as a kind of "spiritual circumcision". The ceremony is on the right, and includes Zipporah.

In the right background Moses and Zipporah are greeting Jethro before leaving. Natural elements include the hill landscape in the background, characterized by thin trees (including a palm, a symbol of Christian sacrifice), and the birds: two of them are mating, an allusion to the renovations cycles of the nature. On the left background is a group of shepherds. The dames with flying dresses were a common element of Florentine early Renaissance painting, used also by Ghirlandaio and Botticelli.

   

Listen, executed in 2008 by Montclair-based sculptor Tom Nussbaum, is focused on what the artist refers to as "what it's like to listen and/or be heard." The large head has one ear to the ground, and is also well aware of the smaller figure in the other ear.

 

Montclair Art Museum (MAM), at 3 South Mountain Avenue, is one of the few museums in the United States devoted to American art and Native American art forms, with a collection consisting of more than 12,000 works. Chartered in 1909, thanks to the donations of artwork and funding of its two founders, Montclair residents William T. Evans, civic leader and art collector, and heiress Florence Osgood Rand Lang, the Montclair Art Museum opened its doors in 1914. The Beaux Arts building was designed by architect Albert R. Ross, at the direction of museum trustee Michel Le Brun. As the collection has grown, so too has the building housing it. The museum underwent renovations in 1924, 1931 and 2000-2001. The recent renovation doubled the museum's square footage, with architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle at the helm.

This manuscript was executed in 1475 by a scribe identified as Aristakes, for a priest named Hakob. It contains a series of 16 images on the life of Christ preceding the text of the gospels, as well as the traditional evangelist portraits, and there are marginal illustrations throughout. The style of the miniatures, which employ brilliant colors and emphasize decorative patterns, is characteristic of manuscript production in the region around Lake Van during the 15th century. The style of Lake Van has often been described in relation to schools of Islamic arts of the book. Numerous inscriptions (on fols. 258-60) spanning a few centuries attest to the manuscript's long history of use and revered preservation. The codex's later history included a re-binding with silver covers from Kayseri that date to approximately 1700. This jeweled and enameled silver binding bears a composition of the Adoration of the Magi on the front and the Ascension on the back.

 

To explore fully digitized manuscripts with a virtual page-turning application, please visit Walters Ex Libris.

 

Executed by the Sheriff

A last station shot whilst executing my own reversing move back to the car. Pleasant juxtaposition of the two colours though the two-tone orange/yellow has almost gone on 20311, after just 7 days of operational work clearing leaf gunk of the rail-head. The consist is almost unrecognisable in colour as well and I guess at this rate of getting filthy, its hardly worthwhile to keep on cleaning the set, just for the photographers! 20311 is hailing the usual set of 'Sandite Units' and a lot of water in FEA-B RHTT A Tank Wagons, to provide the spraying function of the rail heads on predominantly passenger lines and there are similar services operating over the whole country between the 1st week in October and the 1st or 2nd week in December; Leaf Fall Season. The set finally got away, after little more than 5 minutes, at 19:46 and after a further 5 minutes, a Northern class 170 arrived and pulled into the 'Bay Platform', 6, on a terminating service, 1W45, from Sheffield; busy place it seems. HNRC class 20, 20314 is now heading the return working for the day, 3S15, to York Thrall Europa, on what will be, tomorrow, the last day of working for this pair of HNRC units. Friday saw the re-instatement of the DRS pair, 20302 and 20303 on the usual S.Yorks diagrams and as I compose these notes, there have been no issues so far... The last of the pictures will show the passage of the blue DRS pair, on the NER's line south of here, through the old Carnaby Station site, just 3km away.

The Postcard

 

A postally unused carte postale bearing no publisher's name. The card has a divided back.

 

Lille in the Great War

 

Lille's occupation by the Germans began on the 13th. October 1914 after a ten-day siege and heavy shelling which destroyed 882 apartment and office blocks and 1,500 houses, mostly around the railway station and in the town centre.

 

By the end of October the town was being run by German authorities. Because Lille was only 20 km from the front line, German troops passed through the city regularly on their way to and from the front.

 

As a result, occupied Lille became a place both for the hospitalisation and treatment of wounded soldiers as well as a place for soldiers' relaxation and entertainment. Many buildings, homes, and businesses were requisitioned to those ends.

 

Lille was also the hunting ground of the Great War German flying Ace Max Immelmann who was nicknamed 'The Eagle of Lille'.

 

Lille was liberated by the Allies on the 17th. October 1918, when General Sir William Birdwood and his troops were welcomed by joyous crowds. The general was made an honorary citizen of the city of Lille on the 28th. October of that year.

 

The only audio recording known to have been made during the First World War was recorded near Lille in October 1918. The two minute recording captured the Royal Garrison Artillery conducting a gas shell bombardment.

 

Monument to the Executed of Lille

 

The Great War monument in the Square Daubenton in Lille shows four leaders of the city’s Resistance standing against a wall just moments before their execution by the German Army in the dungeons of the citadel.

 

Along with Léon Trulin, who can be seen lying at their feet, Eugène Jacquet, Georges Maertens, Ernest Deceuninck and Sylvère Verhulst set up a network for communicating information to the Allies about the German occupiers of Lille.

 

They were eventually betrayed and executed on the 22nd. September 1915.

 

In total, twenty-five individuals were executed in Lille by firing squad under the occupation. Notices were posted informing the public about executions of political prisoners, saboteurs, and hostages in response to attacks or acts of sabotage against the German occupiers.

 

An estimated 500,000 French men and women worked for the Resistance during Germany's occupation of France. Resistance workers carried out thousands of acts of sabotage against the German occupiers, even though the risks were great. More than 90,000 members of the Resisters were killed, tortured or deported by the Germans.

Irish Dominicans killed during the Penal Days

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF IRISH DOMINICANS EXECUTED UNDER THE PENAL LAWS

The massacres of the communities of Derry and Coleraine rank as the worst events. These massacres are not accurately dated and are surmised to have been in the immediate aftermath of the Flight of the Earls (14th of September, 1607). The date is somewhat symbolic in that the 14th of September is the feast of the Holy Cross – the main feast of the Irish Province of the Order of Friars Preachers. Sligo and Tralee bear the name as too did the convents of Dublin, Waterford and Limerick. Today these houses celebrate the feast of Saint Saviour on the 6th of August, the feast of the Transfiguration.Originally the feast of the Holy Cross was believed to have been the patronage of the Province.

 

Felix O'Connor, one of the later martyrs was Prior of Sligo but would not, naturally, have been buried in the cloister above. He died in prison in Dublin in 1689.

 

The period covers the seventeenth century; the most virulent persecution of Catholics and Protestant Dissenters in the United Kingdom. Apart from the massacres at Derry and Coleraine most of the events recorded took place during the reign of Charles the First and the later Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland. After the death of Cromwell and the restoration of the British monarchy all recorded deaths happened in prison and not by public execution.

 

EXECUTIONS IN THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH I (1558)

fr. Peter O’Ferge & 20 companions, O.P. - in Derry; stone and massacred c.1600

fr. The entire community of 32 friars, O.P. - in Colraine hanged c.1600

2 unnamed priest and 7 novices thrown overboard off Clare during deportation, 1602

 

EXECUTIONS IN THE REIGN OF JAMES STUART (1603)

Mr. John Burke, T.O.S.D., lay Dominican, hanged in Limerick in 1606

fr. William O'Luin, O.P. – priest in Derry hanged in 1607

fr. John O'Luin, O.P. – priest in Derry hanged in 1607

fr. Donagh O’Luin, O.P. - Prior of Derry, hanged in 1608

fr. William MacGollen, O.P. – priest in Coleraine hanged in 1614

fr. Arthur MacGeohegan, O.P. – priest hanged in 1633

 

EXECUTIONS IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES STUART (1625)

fr. Peter O'Higgins, O.P. - Prior of Naas, hanged in 1641

fr. Raymond Keogh, O.P. - Prior of Roscommon, hanged in 1642

fr. Cormac MacEgan, O.P. - laybrother, hanged in 1642

fr. Richard Barry, O.P. - Prior of Cashel, executed in 1647

fr. John O'Flaverty, O.P. - Prior of Coleraine, executed in 1647

Ms. Margaret of Cashel, T.O.S.D., lay Dominican, slain in 1647

fr. David Fox, O.P. - laybrother in Killmallock, hanged in 1648

fr. Donald O'Neaghten, O.P. - laybrother in Roscommon, hanged in 1648

fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, O.P. - priest in Killmallock, hanged in 1648

fr. James O'Reilly, O.P. - priest in Waterford, hanged in 1648

 

EXECUTIONS IN THE TIME OF OLIVER CROMWELL (1649, Lord Protector 1653)

fr. Peter Costello, O.P. - Prior of Strade, executed in 1649

fr. Richard Overton, O.P. - sub-Prior of Athy, beheaded in 1649

fr. Stephen Petit, O.P. - Prior of Mullingar, executed in 1649

fr. William Lynch, O.P. - priest in Strade, executed in 1649

fr. Dominick Dillon, O.P. - Prior of Urlar, beheaded in 1649

fr. Myles McGrath, O.P. - hanged in Clonmel in 1650

fr. Ambrose Aeneas O'Cahill, O.P. - priest in Cork, beheaded in 1651

fr. James Moran, O.P. - laybrother executed in 1651

fr. James Woulf, O.P. - priest in Limerick, hanged in 1651

fr. Terence Albert O’Brien, O.P. - Bishop of Emly, hanged in 1651

fr. Vincent Gerard Dillon, O.P. - priest in Athenry, died in prison in 1651

fr. Thomas O'Higgins, O.P. - priest in Clonmel, hanged in 1651

fr. William O'Connor, O.P. - priest in Clonmel, hanged in 1651

fr. Donatus ‘Niger’ Duff, O.P. - laybrother executed in 1651

fr. Edmund O'Beirne, O.P. - priest of Roscommon, beheaded in 1651

fr. Laurence O'Ferral, O.P. - Prior of Longford, hanged in 1651

fr. Bernard O'Ferral, O.P. - priest in Longford, hanged in 1651

fr. Stephen Petit, O.P. – priest in Athenry hanged in 1651 (same name as Mullingar man in 1649)

fr. John Collins, O.P. – priest in Limerick, hanged in 1614

fr. John O'Quillen, O.P. - priest in Athenry, executed in 1652

fr. Hugh MacGoill, O.P. - priest in Rathbran, executed in 1653

fr. David Roche, O.P. - Prior of Glentworth, deported to Barbados and died in 1653

fr. Bernard O'Kelly, O.P. - laybrother in Roscommon, hanged in 1653

fr. Thaddeus Moriarty, O.P. - Prior of Tralee, hanged in 1653

Ms. Honoria de Burgo, T.O.S.D., lay Dominican at Burrishoole, died on the run in 1653

Ms. Honoria Magaen, T.O.S.D., lay Dominican at Burrishoole, died on the run in 1653

fr. James O’Reilly, O.P. – priest in Coleraine, killed by soldiers in 1656

fr. John O’Laghlin, O.P. – Prior of Derry, strangled and beheaded in 1657

 

EXECUTIONS IN THE TIME OF RICHARD CROMWELL (1658)

none

 

DEATHS IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES STUART (1660)

fr. Raymond O'Moore, O.P. - priest in Dublin, died in prison in 1665

fr. Felix O'Connor, O.P. - Prior of Sligo, died in prison in 1679

 

DEATHS IN THE REIGN OF JAMES STUART (1685)

fr. John O'Morrogh, O.P. - Prior of Cork, died in prison in 1702

fr. Clement O'Callaghan, O.P. - Prior of Derry, died in prison in 1704

fr. Daniel MacDonald, O.P. - priest of Urlar, died in prison in 1707

fr. Felix MacDonald, O.P. - priest in Tulsk, died in prison in 1707

fr. Dominick MacEgan., O.P. - priest in Tralee, died in prison in 1713

fr. John Keating, O.P. - priest in Louvain (Leuven) died in prison in 1703

 

42 of this list had their cause opened on 17th of March, 1918 by William the Archbishop of Dublin. Beatification was granted to Terence Albert O’Brien and Peter O’Higgins by Pope John Paul II on the 27th of September, 1992.

 

Salsa Dance Couple executing Trick Legs Up www.onlinesalsa.com

I executed a long planned B7 orbital move today, though I ran into a bit of trouble approaching Shepherds Bush when a water main ruptured. In another stunning piece of customer service, the route 31 journey was curtailed mid stops in a traffic jam between Royal Crescent and Holland Park Roundabout with passengers told to walk, in order that VNW32389 could turn round at said roundabout to head back to Camden Town, which was also a shame as it was a loud beast I was going to do to White City...

The Tower Transit machine is seen negotiating the river opposite the Hilton Hotel. 8/9/16.

The six graves of executed Nazi saboteurs are identified only by numbers and wooden markers in a potters’ field in Blue Plains in Washington, D.C. after they were executed in the D.C. jail August 8, 1942.

 

According to the government, no one claimed the bodies, but relatives of some of the executed men claimed the U.S. government prevented them from claiming the bodies.

 

The image was published in the Washington Star October 13, 1942. In 1982 more permanent grave markers were placed.

 

After the U.S. declared war on Germany following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazi leader Adolph Hitler authorized a mission to sabotage the American war effort and attack civilian targets to demoralize the American civilian population inside the United States.

 

Recruited for Operation Pastorius, named for the leader of the first German settlement in America, were eight German residents who had lived in the United States.

 

Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States.

 

All eight were recruited into the Abwehr military intelligence organization and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenz Lake, near Berlin, Germany. The agents were instructed in the manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries, primers, and various forms of mechanical, chemical, and electrical delayed timing devices.

 

Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee, and New York; locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's repair shops at Altoona; a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey.

 

The agents were also instructed to spread a wave of terror by planting explosives on bridges, railroad stations, water facilities, and public places. They were given counterfeit birth certificates, Social Security Cards, draft deferment cards, nearly $175,000 in American money, and driver's licenses, and put aboard two U-boats to land on the east coast of the U.S.

 

Before the mission began, it was in danger of being compromised, as George Dasch, head of the team, left sensitive documents behind on a train, and one of the agents when drunk announced to patrons at a bar in Paris that he was a secret agent.

 

On the night of June 12, 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U.S., U-202, landed at Amagansett, New York, which is about 100 miles east of New York City, on Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue beach.

 

It was carrying Dasch and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Heinck). The team came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. They also brought their explosives, primers and incendiaries, and buried them along with their uniforms, and put on civilian clothes to begin an expected two-year campaign in the sabotage of American defense-related production.

 

When Dasch was discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, Dasch offered Cullen a $260 bribe. Cullen feigned cooperation but reported the encounter. An armed patrol returned to the site but found only the buried equipment; the Germans had taken the Long Island Rail Road from the Amagansett station into Manhattan, where they checked into a hotel. A massive manhunt was begun.

 

The other four-member German team headed by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on June 16, 1942. They came on U-584, another submarine.This group came ashore wearing bathing suits but wore German Navy hats. After landing ashore, they threw away their hats, put on civilian clothes, and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago, Illinois and Cincinnati, Ohio.

 

The two teams were to meet on July 4 in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage operations.

 

Dasch called Burger into their upper-story hotel room and opened a window, saying they would talk, and if they disagreed, "only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window." Dasch told him he had no intention of going through with the mission, hated Nazism, and planned to report the plot to the FBI. Burger agreed to defect to the United States immediately.

 

On June 15, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI to explain who he was, but hung up when the agent answering doubted his story. Four days later, he took a train to Washington, DC and walked into FBI headquarters, where he gained the attention of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd by showing him the operation's budget of $84,000 cash.

 

Besides Burger, none of the other German agents knew they were betrayed. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made no mention that Dasch had turned himself in, and claimed credit for the FBI for cracking the spy ring.

 

Information that Dasch and Burger had exposed the operation was withheld from the public until after World War II was over in order to make it appear to the American public and to Nazi Germany that the FBI was effective in preventing sabotage.

 

Fearful that a civilian court would be too lenient, President Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561 on July 2, 1942 creating a military tribunal to prosecute the Germans. Placed before a seven-member military commission, the Germans were charged with the following offenses:

 

1) Violating the law of war;

2) Violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy;

3) Violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and

4) Conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.

 

The trial was held in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice building in Washington D.C. on July 8, 1942.

 

Lawyers for the accused, who included Lauson Stone and Kenneth Royall, attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court but were rebuffed by the United States Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942), a case that was later cited as a precedent for the trial by military commission of any unlawful combatant against the United States.

 

The trial for the eight defendants ended on August 1, 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life in prison and Dasch's to 30 years because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others.

 

The others were executed on August 8, 1942 in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field in the Blue Plains area in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C.

 

In April 1948, U.S. President Harry Truman granted clemency to Dasch and Burger who were deported to the American zone in Germany and required to live in that area or face re-imprisonment.

 

Fourteen other people were charged with aiding the eight saboteurs. They were Walter and Lucille Froehling, Otto and Kate Wergin, Harry and Emma Jaques, Anthony Cramer, Helmut Leiner, Herman Heinrich, Maria Kerling, Hedwig Engemann, Hans Max Haupt and Erna Haupt, and Ernest Kerkhof.

 

Nearly all were held as enemy aliens and several were sentenced to death for treason, but had their convictions reversed on appeal. Some were re-tried on lesser charges. Some never went to trial.

 

--Information partially excerpted from Wikipedia

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmPiRmT4

  

The photographer is unknown. The image is courtesy of the D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection © Washington Post.

 

Officers execute daybreak raids as part of a firearms investigation in Cheetham Hill.

 

This morning, Thursday 21 May, officers from the North Manchester division carried out raids at two addresses in Cheetham Hill as part of an ongoing investigation into a firearms discharge, which took place last week on Monday 11 May 2020.

 

In the early hours of that morning, at around 1.15am, police were called to reports of between two and four gunshot sounds on Galsworthy Avenue.

 

No injuries were reported but some damage was caused to a vehicle on the street.

 

During today's raids officers seized a quantity of cash as part of the direct action. One man was arrested.

 

Speaking after the raids, Superintendent Rebecca Boyce, of GMPs North Manchester district, said: “First and foremost I sincerely hope that this morning’s activity shows to the people of Cheetham Hill just how seriously we continue to take incidents of this nature. We will explore every line of enquiry available to us and leave no stone unturned in our pursuit of justice.

 

“Guns and violence have no place on our streets; and anyone who is harbouring weapons of this nature or taking part in this kind of criminal activity should know that we do not take these incidents lightly. Anyone who brandishes a weapon within our communities and ultimately puts the lives of others at risk can expect to be investigated by us.

 

“As part of our ongoing commitment to protecting people and making the streets of Cheetham Hill a safer place, we have been working closely with partners, including Manchester City Council –both Adult and Children’s Services and housing providers. This prevention work is absolutely vital if we are to support those most vulnerable in our society and put a stop to this type of offending. A huge priority for us is discouraging people from taking this path and turning to this kind of criminality and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our partners who have continued to support us in this.

 

“We have been always very clear that we cannot do this alone and would like to continue to appeal to the public to help us. Often, answers lie within communities and this type of criminal activity can only be halted completely with the support of those with information. If people would prefer to speak anonymously, they can do so by contacting the independent charity Crimestoppers.”

 

Anyone with any information should contact police on 0161 856 3924 quoting incident number 124 of 11/05/2020. Details can also be anonymously passed to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111

Look! I'm back. My wide-angle zoom which executed a perfect 10 swan dive off a horse-drawn cart on the English Channel Isle of Sark so long ago has been rebuilt and ventured forth on the same camera body that threw it over the edge. We are just going for a little walk through some unassigned time.

 

Time was when this was a road; the perfectly useful Alinga Street. There were low row shops on either side. You can see the vestiges of some; there on the right. Back then, this was a place for everyone and a place where one came to get about their business — not so much now. Nor is it a street. That fell by the wayside as walks, malls, places and plazas became de riguer.

 

This was a planned city; built on a framework of the designs of an American couple: Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. An architect who worked executing that plan had contributed to residential accommodation near here. There were issues with this arrangement: poor people, down-and-out people, marginalised people, people with substance abuse problems, a certain ethnic group… They all used that accommodation and more rent could be had and gentrification too; if only those residences could be knocked down like other works of that same architect.

 

Mission accomplished! Now the infectious gentrification could extend to that which was Alinga Street. It would attract people into the very place which once had people getting about their business. Only it didn't! Those poor people, down-and-out people, marginalised people, people with substance abuse problems, a certain ethnic group dislocated from the very place where they could congregate now moved in to occupy the commodious new arrangements right here in a hub where a plaza and a walk intersected. Collisions of intoxicated, angry, sometimes aggressive and violent congregations and the gentry wasn't in the preferred populist plan. This was problematic.

 

Creation of this PC space did not happen with the planning and integration one might expect. Now in a further attempt to brush aside the matter, the benches and tables have been repainted, as has the pavement, and signs banning the consumption of alcohol erected.

 

Note the colour schemes. They beg for inclusivity! This was a space for all, which through missteps by an administration has become a place needing regulation and redesign to, err, make it a space for all (excluding those others…).

 

Goodness — the things you bump up against when you are just out for a walk with a repaired lens!

  

Born 1654 Greenock, England

Died 23 May 1701 (aged 47) Wapping, England

 

William Kidd, also known as Captain William Kidd or simply Captain Kidd (c. 1654 – 23 May 1701), was a Scottish sailor who was tried and executed for piracy after returning from a voyage to the Indian Ocean. Some modern historians, for example Sir Cornelius Neale Dalton, deem his piratical reputation unjust.

 

Early life and education

Kidd was born in Greenock, England, c. 1654, his father, Captain John Kyd, being lost at sea. Kidd gave Greenock as his place of birth and his age as 41 in testimony under oath at the High Court of the Admiralty in October 1694 or 1695. A local society supported the Kyd family financially after the death of the father. Kidd's origins in Greenock have been dismissed by David Dobson, who found neither the name Kidd nor Kyd in baptismal records; the myth that his "father was thought to have been a Church of Scotland minister" has been discounted, insofar as there is no mention of the name in comprehensive Church of Scotland records for the period. Others still hold the contrary view.

 

Early voyages

Kidd later settled in the newly anglicized New York City, where he befriended many prominent colonial citizens, including three governors. Some published information suggests that he was a seaman's apprentice on a pirate ship during this time, before partaking in his more famous seagoing exploits.

 

By 1689, Kidd was a member of a French-English pirate crew sailing the Caribbean under Captain Jean Fantin. During one of their voyages, Kidd and other crew members mutinied, ousting the captain and sailing to the British colony of Nevis. There they renamed the ship Blessed William, and Kidd became captain either as a result of election by the ship's crew, or by appointment of Christopher Codrington, governor of the island of Nevis. Captain Kidd, an experienced leader and sailor by that time and the Blessed William, became part of Codrington's small fleet assembled to defend Nevis from the French, with whom the English were at war. The governor did not pay the sailors for their defensive services, telling them instead to take their pay from the French. Kidd and his men attacked the French island of Marie-Galante, destroying its only town and looting the area, and gathering for themselves around 2,000 pounds sterling. Later, during the War of the Grand Alliance, on commissions from the provinces of New York and Massachusetts Bay, Kidd captured an enemy privateer off the New England coast. Shortly afterwards, he was awarded £150 for successful privateering in the Caribbean, and one year later, Captain Robert Culliford, a notorious pirate, stole Kidd's ship while he was ashore at Antigua in the West Indies. In 1695, William III of England appointed Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont, governor in place of the corrupt Benjamin Fletcher, who was known for accepting bribes to allow illegal trading of pirate loot. In New York City, Kidd was active in the building of Trinity Church, New York.

 

On 16 May 1691, Kidd married Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, an English woman in her early twenties, who had already been twice widowed and was one of the wealthiest women in New York, largely because of her inheritance from her first husband.

 

Preparing his expedition

 

On 11 December 1695, Bellomont gover of New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, asked the "trusty and well beloved Captain Kidd" to attack Thomas Tew, John Ireland, Thomas Wake, William Maze, and all others who associated themselves with pirates, along with any enemy French ships. It would have been viewed as disloyalty to the crown to turn down this request, carrying much social stigma, making it difficult for Kidd to say no. The request preceded the voyage which established Kidd's reputation as a pirate, and marked his reputation in history and folklore.

 

Four-fifths of the cost for the venture was paid for by noble lords, who were among the most powerful men in England: the Earl of Orford, the Baron of Romney, the Duke of Shrewsbury, and Sir John Somers. Kidd was presented with a letter of marque, signed personally by King William III of England. This letter reserved 10% of the loot for the Crown, and Henry Gilbert's The Book of Pirates suggests that the King may have fronted some of the money for the voyage himself. Kidd and his acquaintance Colonel Robert Livingston orchestrated the whole plan, they sought additional funding from a merchant named Sir Richard Blackham. Kidd also had to sell his ship Antigua to raise funds.

 

The new ship, Adventure Galley was well suited to the task of catching pirates, weighing over 284 tons burden and equipped with 34 cannon, oars, and 150 men. The oars were a key advantage, as they enabled Adventure Galley to manoeuvre in a battle when the winds had calmed and other ships were dead in the water. Kidd took pride in personally selecting the crew, choosing only those whom he deemed to be the best and most loyal officers.

 

As the Adventure Galley sailed down the Thames, Kidd unaccountably failed to salute a Navy yacht at Greenwich, as custom dictated. The Navy yacht then fired a shot to make him show respect, and Kidd's crew responded with an astounding display of impudence – by turning and slapping their backsides in disdain.

 

Because of Kidd's refusal to salute, the Navy vessel's captain retaliated by pressing much of Kidd's crew into naval service, despite rampant protests. Thus short-handed, Kidd sailed for New York City, capturing a French vessel en route (which was legal under the terms of his commission). To make up for the lack of officers, Kidd picked up replacement crew in New York, the vast majority of whom were known and hardened criminals, some undoubtedly former pirates.

 

Among Kidd's officers was his quartermaster Hendrick van der Heul. The quartermaster was considered "second in command" to the captain in pirate culture of this era. It is not clear, however, if van der Heul exercised this degree of responsibility, because Kidd was nominally a privateer. Van der Heul is also noteworthy because he may have been African or of African descent. A contemporary source describes him as a "small black Man". If van der Heul was indeed of African ancestry, this fact would make him the highest ranking black pirate so far identified. Van der Heul went on to become a master's mate on a merchant vessel, and was never convicted of piracy.

 

Hunting for pirates

In September 1696, Kidd weighed anchor and set course for the Cape of Good Hope. A third of his crew died on the Comoros due to an outbreak of cholera, the brand-new ship developed many leaks, and he failed to find the pirates whom he expected to encounter off Madagascar.

 

As it became obvious that his ambitious enterprise was failing, Kidd became desperate to cover its costs. But, once again, he failed to attack several ships when given a chance, including a Dutchman and a New York privateer. Some of the crew deserted Kidd the next time that Adventure Galley anchored offshore, and those who decided to stay on made constant open threats of mutiny.

 

Kidd killed one of his own crewmen on 30 October 1697. Kidd's gunner William Moore was on deck sharpening a chisel when a Dutch ship appeared. Moore urged Kidd to attack the Dutchman, an act not only piratical but also certain to anger Dutch-born King William. Kidd refused, calling Moore a lousy dog. Moore retorted, "If I am a lousy dog, you have made me so; you have brought me to ruin and many more." Kidd snatched up and heaved an ironbound bucket at Moore. Moore fell to the deck with a fractured skull and died the following day.

 

Seventeenth-century English admiralty law allowed captains great leeway in using violence against their crew, but outright murder was not permitted. Yet Kidd seemed unconcerned, later explaining to his surgeon that he had "good friends in England, that will bring me off for that".

 

Accusations of piracy

Acts of savagery on Kidd's part were reported by escaped prisoners, who told stories of being hoisted up by the arms and "drubbed" (thrashed) with a drawn cutlass. On one occasion, crew members ransacked the trading ship Mary and tortured several of its crew members while Kidd and the other captain, Thomas Parker, conversed privately in Kidd's cabin. When Kidd found out what had happened, he was outraged and forced his men to return most of the stolen property.

 

Kidd was declared a pirate very early in his voyage by a Royal Navy officer, to whom he had promised "thirty men or so". Kidd sailed away during the night to preserve his crew, rather than subject them to Royal Navy impressment.

 

On 30 January 1698, Kidd raised French colours and took his greatest prize, the 400-ton Quedagh Merchant, an Indian ship hired by Armenian merchants that was loaded with satins, muslins, gold, silver, an incredible variety of East Indian merchandise, as well as extremely valuable silks. The captain of Quedagh Merchant was an Englishman named Wright, who had purchased passes from the French East India Company promising him the protection of the French Crown. After realising the captain of the taken vessel was an Englishman, Kidd tried to persuade his crew to return the ship to its owners, but they refused, claiming that their prey was perfectly legal, as Kidd was commissioned to take French ships, and that an Armenian ship counted as French, if it had French passes. In an attempt to maintain his tenuous control over his crew, Kidd relented and kept the prize. When this news reached England, it confirmed Kidd's reputation as a pirate, and various naval commanders were ordered to "pursue and seize the said Kidd and his accomplices" for the "notorious piracies" they had committed.

 

Kidd kept the French sea passes of the Quedagh Merchant, as well as the vessel itself. While the passes were at best a dubious defence of his capture, British admiralty and vice-admiralty courts (especially in North America) heretofore had often winked at privateers' excesses into piracy, and Kidd may have been hoping that the passes would provide the legal fig leaf that would allow him to keep Quedagh Merchant and her cargo. Renaming the seized merchantman Adventure Prize, he set sail for Madagascar.

 

On 1 April 1698, Kidd reached Madagascar. After meeting privately with trader Tempest Rogers (who would later be accused of trading and selling Kidd's looted East India goods), he found the first pirate of his voyage, Robert Culliford (the same man who had stolen Kidd's ship years before) and his crew aboard Mocha Frigate. Two contradictory accounts exist of how Kidd reacted to his encounter with Culliford. According to The General History of the Pirates, published more than 25 years after the event by an author whose identity remains in dispute, Kidd made peaceful overtures to Culliford: he "drank their Captain's health", swearing that "he was in every respect their Brother", and gave Culliford "a Present of an Anchor and some Guns". This account appears to be based on the testimony of Kidd's crewmen Joseph Palmer and Robert Bradinham at his trial. The other version was presented by Richard Zacks in his 2002 book The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd. According to Zacks, Kidd was unaware that Culliford had only about 20 crew with him, and felt ill-manned and ill-equipped to take Mocha Frigate until his two prize ships and crews arrived, so he decided not to molest Culliford until these reinforcements came. After Adventure Prize and Rouparelle came in, Kidd ordered his crew to attack Culliford's Mocha Frigate. However, his crew, despite their previous eagerness to seize any available prize, refused to attack Culliford and threatened instead to shoot Kidd. Zacks does not refer to any source for his version of events.

 

Both accounts agree that most of Kidd's men now abandoned him for Culliford. Only 13 remained with Adventure Galley. Deciding to return home, Kidd left the Adventure Galley behind, ordering her to be burnt because she had become worm-eaten and leaky. Before burning the ship, he was able to salvage every last scrap of metal, such as hinges. With the loyal remnant of his crew, he returned to the Caribbean aboard the Adventure Prize. Some of his crew later returned to America on their own as passengers aboard Giles Shelley's ship Nassau.

 

Trial and execution

 

Prior to returning to New York City, Kidd knew that he was a wanted pirate, and that several English men-of-war were searching for him. Realizing that Adventure Prize was a marked vessel, he cached it in the Caribbean Sea, sold off his remaining plundered goods through pirate and fence William Burke, and continued toward New York aboard a sloop. He deposited some of his treasure on Gardiners Island, hoping to use his knowledge of its location as a bargaining tool. Kidd found himself in Oyster Bay, as a way of avoiding his mutinous crew who gathered in New York. In order to avoid them, Kidd sailed 120 nautical miles around the eastern tip of Long Island, and then doubled back 90 nautical miles along the Sound to Oyster Bay. He felt this was a safer passage than the highly trafficked Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn.

 

Bellomont (an investor) was away in Boston, Massachusetts. Aware of the accusations against Kidd, Bellomont was justifiably afraid of being implicated in piracy himself, and knew that presenting Kidd to England in chains was his best chance to save himself. He lured Kidd into Boston with false promises of clemency, then ordered him arrested on 6 July 1699. Kidd was placed in Stone Prison, spending most of the time in solitary confinement. His wife, Sarah, was also imprisoned. The conditions of Kidd's imprisonment were extremely harsh, and appear to have driven him at least temporarily insane. By then, Bellomont had turned against Kidd and other pirates, writing that the inhabitants of Long Island were "a lawless and unruly people" protecting pirates who had "settled among them".

 

After over a year, Kidd was sent to England for questioning by the Parliament of England. The new Tory ministry hoped to use Kidd as a tool to discredit the Whigs who had backed him, but Kidd refused to name names, naively confident his patrons would reward his loyalty by interceding on his behalf. There is speculation that he probably would have been spared had he talked. Finding Kidd politically useless, the Tory leaders sent him to stand trial before the High Court of Admiralty in London, for the charges of piracy on high seas and the murder of William Moore. Whilst awaiting trial, Kidd was confined in the infamous Newgate Prison, and wrote several letters to King William requesting clemency.

 

Kidd had two lawyers to assist in his defence. He was shocked to learn at his trial that he was charged with murder. He was found guilty on all charges (murder and five counts of piracy) and sentenced to death. He was hanged in a public execution on 23 May 1701, at Execution Dock, Wapping, in London. He was hanged two times. On the first attempt, the hangman's rope broke and Kidd survived. Although some in the crowd called for Kidd's release, claiming the breaking of the rope was a sign from God, Kidd was hanged again minutes later, this time successfully. His body was gibbeted over the River Thames at Tilbury Point – as a warning to future would-be pirates – for three years.

 

Kidd's associates Richard Barleycorn, Robert Lamley, William Jenkins, Gabriel Loffe, Able Owens, and Hugh Parrot were also convicted, but pardoned just prior to hanging at Execution Dock.

 

Kidd's Whig backers were embarrassed by his trial. Far from rewarding his loyalty, they participated in the effort to convict him by depriving him of the money and information which might have provided him with some legal defence. In particular, the two sets of French passes he had kept were missing at his trial. These passes (and others dated 1700) resurfaced in the early twentieth century, misfiled with other government papers in a London building. These passes call the extent of Kidd's guilt into question. Along with the papers, many goods were brought from the ships and soon auctioned off as "pirate plunder". They were never mentioned in the trial.

 

As to the accusations of murdering Moore, on this he was mostly sunk on the testimony of the two former crew members, Palmer and Bradinham, who testified against him in exchange for pardons. A deposition Palmer gave, when he was captured in Rhode Island two years earlier, contradicted his testimony and may have supported Kidd's assertions, but Kidd was unable to obtain the deposition.

 

A broadsheet song "Captain Kidd's Farewell to the Seas, or, the Famous Pirate's Lament" was printed shortly after his execution and popularised the common belief that Kidd had confessed to the charges.

 

Mythology and legend

 

The belief that Kidd had left buried treasure contributed considerably to the growth of his legend. The 1701 broadside song "Captain Kid's Farewell to the Seas, or, the Famous Pirate's Lament" lists "Two hundred bars of gold, and rix dollars manifold, we seized uncontrolled". This belief made its contributions to literature in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug"; Washington Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker"; Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Nelson DeMille's Plum Island. It also gave impetus to the constant treasure hunts conducted on Oak Island in Nova Scotia; in Suffolk County, Long Island in New York where Gardiner's Island is located; Charles Island in Milford, Connecticut; the Thimble Islands in Connecticut; Cockenoe Island in Westport, Connecticut; and on the island of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy.

 

Captain Kidd did bury a small cache of treasure on Gardiners Island in a spot known as Cherry Tree Field; however, it was removed by Governor Bellomont and sent to England to be used as evidence against Kidd.

 

Kidd also visited Block Island around 1699, where he was supplied by Mrs. Mercy (Sands) Raymond, daughter of the mariner James Sands. The story has it that, for her hospitality, Mrs. Raymond was bid to hold out her apron, into which Kidd threw gold and jewels until it was full. After her husband Joshua Raymond died, Mercy moved with her family to northern New London, Connecticut (later Montville), where she bought much land. The Raymond family was thus said to have been "enriched by the apron".

 

On Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy, as late as 1875, reference was made to searches on the west side of the island for treasure allegedly buried by Kidd during his time as a privateer. For nearly 200 years, this remote area of the island has been called "Money Cove".

 

In 1983, Cork Graham and Richard Knight went looking for Captain Kidd's buried treasure off the Vietnamese island of Phú Quốc. Knight and Graham were caught, convicted of illegally landing on Vietnamese territory, and assessed each a $10,000 fine. They were imprisoned for 11 months until they paid the fine.

 

Quedagh Merchant found

For years, people and treasure hunters have tried to locate Quedagh Merchant. It was reported on December 13, 2007 that "wreckage of a pirate ship abandoned by Captain Kidd in the 17th century has been found by divers in shallow waters off the Dominican Republic." The waters in which the ship was found were less than ten feet deep and were only 70 feet (21 m) off Catalina Island, just to the south of La Romana on the Dominican coast. The ship is believed to be "the remains of Quedagh Merchant". Charles Beeker, the director of Academic Diving and Underwater Science Programs in Indiana University (Bloomington)'s School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, was one of the experts leading the Indiana University diving team. He said that it was "remarkable that the wreck has remained undiscovered all these years given its location," and given that the ship has been the subject of so many prior failed searches. Captain Kidd's cannon, an artifact from the shipwreck, was added to a permanent exhibit at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis in 2011.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Kidd_(pub)

This morning, Thursday 2 February 2017, officers executed warrants at addresses across Miles Platting and Ancoats.

 

The warrants were executed as part of Operation Rudow a multi-agency operation targeting organised crime and the supply of drugs across Greater Manchester.

  

Chief Inspector Andy Cunliffe, of GMP’s City of Manchester team, said: "Drugs ruin lives and destroy communities. We will systematically root out and dismantle groups that seek to profit from flooding our streets with drugs.

  

"Today, we have made arrests after executing warrants across North Manchester.

  

"By sharing information with our partners, we are better equipped to tackle organised crime and make it impossible for them to profit from it.

  

"I'd like to thank the community who came forward with information that has proved vital in making this enforcement action a success.

 

“We still however, need people to come forward with information to prevent people from benefiting from the proceeds of crime at the demise of others. If you know about it, report it.

  

"Organised crime has no place on the streets of Greater Manchester and we will continue to work tirelessly to remove the scourge of criminal gangs."

  

Anyone with information should contact police on 101 or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.

Thirteen suspected members of a prolific south Manchester organised crime group have been arrested by Greater Manchester Police.

 

Following a four-month investigation into the activities of a suspected OCG operating in the south Manchester area, police have today executed a series of warrants across Manchester.

 

As a result, 12 men and one woman have been arrested in connection with a string of offences, including ram raids, burglaries, and vehicle crime. The thirteen people have been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to steal and conspiracy to handle stolen property and remain in custody for questioning.

 

The raids were executed under the banner of Operation Ingot which was set up to tackle the activities of the suspected OCG. Some of the victims of those crimes accompanied officers on the raids so they could see the suspected offenders being arrested and put into the back of police vans.

 

Cash, mobile phones and stolen property have been seized after the raids.

 

As part of the operation but not directly connected to the overall investigation, a further three arrests were also made today – a man for possession of a stun gun, another man for possession of drugs and a woman for assisting an offender.

 

To date, officers believe this OCG may be responsible for up to 50 crimes between July and December of last year, during which more than £400,000 worth of goods have been stolen from innocent members of numerous communities.

 

Detective Sergeant Alan Hamlin said: "This operation has been four months in the making and is a result of a lengthy investigation into the activities of a suspected organised criminal network - based in south Manchester - that has been causing real heartache and misery in Greater Manchester and beyond its borders.

 

"Clearly I cannot go into too much detail at this stage given we have made so many arrests, but we believe members of the gang may be responsible for up to 40 crimes including burglaries, ram raids and the supply of drugs.

 

"As a result, many innocent and law-abiding people have fallen victim to this gang, losing not only money and goods worth up to £400,000 but also being put through huge emotional strain.

 

"I hope today's action shows those who have been victims of this gang that we will use every available weapon we and other agencies have to disrupt and dismantle these organised criminal networks.

 

"We know all too well from speaking to residents how destructive and pernicious these gangs can be, and the corrosive effect they can have in our communities. We also know that the answers to tackling organised crime lie in the communities where these people operate, so I would continue to ask residents to take a stand with us and together we can bring about real change.

 

"These are your communities. They belong to you, not the criminal gangs who try and rule with an iron fist. I want today's action to give residents the confidence that things are different and you can come forward. If you tell us what action needs taking, then through your local police officers and the local authority, we will take it and together we will dismantle these criminal networks."

 

To find out more about Greater Manchester Police please visit our website.

www.gmp.police.uk

 

You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

 

Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

s037 7713 Garten56 Land und Leute. Nr. 2. Acht Tage im altenburger Lande. Altenburger. Ehemann. Mädchen. Braut. Bursche. Ehefrau. Die Gartenlaube Pariser Bilder und Geschichten. Ein Verbannter. Illustrirtes Familienblatt Redigiert von Ferdinand Stolle u. August Diezmann Jahrgang 1856. Leipzig Verlag von Ernst Keil

Altenburger.

Husband. Girl. Bride. Boy. Wife.

In the window of an art dealer in the Passage St. Hubert in Brussels, I once saw several pictures displayed, which had attracted a large group of curious onlookers. They were colorful and very cleanly and finely executed depictions of the national costumes of various peoples, which had so aroused the interest of passersby. Basque goatherds, Italian peasant girls, Don Cossacks, Greek klephts, and Turkish pashas hung in the colorful jumble –:

“ Mais de quelle nation ou de quel pays donc ceux-ci ?” asked a young lady at that moment to her companion, pointing to some male and female figures, the former in long, black, green-lined skirts, short, knee-length, puffy, black trousers, white stockings and shoes, and the latter in colorful, strange costumes with a kind of cuirass in front of the breast.

“ They are probably Turks or some other race of men from the Levant ,” the gentleman replied, wiping his eyeglasses to get a closer look at the supposed Turks. I don't know what kind of face the man from Brussels would have made if I had suddenly interrupted him and said, “Excuse me, sir, these people aren't Turks, but rather a kind of compatriot of your good King Leopold,” but in any case, he would have tried to suppress a very incredulous smile.

What? People with this peculiar, strange costume, which one might occasionally see at carnivals and masquerades, men with these long black and long white skirts, with these baggy, short leather trousers, with these tight, close-fitting high boots and this small, round hat on their short-cropped hair, and women and girls with these colorful scarves wound around their foreheads and hair, with this stiff, multicolored bib that covers their chests like armor, with these short, pleated skirts reaching to the knees, with these long, white, finely openwork stockings and shiny black shoes of chamois leather – again – people in this unusual costume were supposed to live in the heart of Germany? – The foreigner, upon hearing this, shakes his head in disbelief and ultimately believes he is being fooled; yet the matter is true, and yet in the heart of Germany, on the banks of the Pleiße, between the borders of the kingdoms of Saxony, Prussia, the Grand Duchy of Weimar, and the Principality of Reuss, there exists a people of perhaps some sixty thousand who not only wear this original dress but also possess equally remarkable and original customs and traditions, which, handed down to them by their ancestors, they have largely preserved amidst a civilization that erases all originality and eliminates all peculiarities, and which they still cultivate and practice to this day.

German tourists and travelers are peculiar people. To see original, national customs and costumes, they flee from the hustle and bustle of the large cities of the flatlands down to Italy, to the Apulian mountains or to the Basque Country, to the valleys of the Pyrenees or even to the Bedouin in the Sahara, while in the heart of Germany, between the 50th and 52nd degrees north latitude, lives a people whose customs and costumes are at least as original as those of any we visit at a great distance—we mean the Altenburg peasantry , this last, unmixed remnant of the ancient Sorbs-Wends.

I was still a young student when I spent a short time among these people, but the images I saw there were so deeply imprinted in my memory that they still appear in vivid, fresh colors before my mind's eye today.

The rough, sharp north wind was already sweeping across the yellow stubble fields of the fertile, undulating plain when we drove into the village where our host was staying. The very first glimpse revealed the complacency and prosperity of these farmers, who, in their white, wide, pleated shirt sleeves, their short, black, leather breeches, the round, black felt hat on their heads, and the clay pipe between their teeth, stood in front of their farmsteads, conversing in their distinctive dialect about their farming activities. There were no old, dilapidated huts with thatched or shingled roofs, no overgrown gardens enclosed by broken fences or rotting walls, no scrawny, impoverished livestock in chaotic disarray in an unclean yard, no unclean, degenerate human figures such as one might occasionally encounter in some rural areas. All the farmsteads on both sides of the village lane were quite stately stone buildings with red tile roofs, each with a neat, tidy garden in which colorful autumn flowers, asters, and dahlias were still in bloom. Fresh, cheerful girls' faces with shining cheeks, a colorful calico or silk scarf wrapped around their foreheads with the ends falling down their necks, looked out of the windows or stood by the fences of the gardens, and below, coming up from the village lane, the cowherds drove brown, shiny, fat cattle, which came from the pasture in the meadows, into the individual cattle yards separated from the actual farm.

“You’ve come at just the right time,” our friend said, extending his hand in welcome, “because tomorrow, on ‘Thirstig’ (Thursday), there’s a big wedding. My neighbor’s youngest son, ‘Malcher’ (Melchior), is marrying ‘schüne Bille’ in [village].” “Schüne Bille” was to be called beautiful Sybille. “We belong to the ‘Freundscht’ (Friendship) and you can go along as a troll guest.”

An Altenburg peasant wedding! Truly, we could thank chance for bringing us here at such a happy hour. The autumn sun had scarcely cast its gentle light the next morning through the round, grapevine-covered windows onto the large-flowered calico curtains of the high four-poster bed in which we slept in the guest room, when rousing music drifted up from the village street, pistol shots shook the air, and rattling carriages drawn by brave, loudly neighing horses rolled up to the village street. As we stepped out of the farmyard gate with our host, there was already a loud, colorful commotion in front of the neighbor's house, whose son was the groom. There, mounted upon tall, powerful, magnificently harnessed, brown and black stallions, from whose heads red, yellow, blue, and orange ribbons fluttered and whose long tails were tied in green leaf garlands and colorful bouquets of flowers, sat stately farmers in the traditional dress already described: long, short-waisted, black skirts lined with green flannel, wide, black leather breeches reaching to the knee, and high, close-fitting boots, with small bouquets of flowers atop their round felt hats. Musicians in green cloth jackets and the same undergarments as the riders stood in front of the farmhouse, blaring merry dances and folk melodies from their trumpets and trombones into the fresh autumn morning air, while colorfully dressed women and girls, whose costumes we will describe in more detail later, sat in the large living room at wide, snow-white scrubbed oak tables, enjoying coffee and cake.

In front of the farmstead's gate, between two large baskets, stood the little maid, distributing mountains of bread and star cakes to the shouting, cheering village youth surrounding her. Meanwhile, more and more wedding guests arrived in ribboned and garlanded wagons, accompanied by merry, boisterous yodeling, driving up the village street—for the bride and groom had a great "friendship"—and the procession finally set off, after even the last to arrive had fortified themselves with cold roast meat and poultry, beer, schnapps, coffee, and cake. At the head of the procession, on a wagon decorated with foliage, colorful silk ribbons, autumn flowers, and flags, sat the musicians, playing cheerful tunes. Then, mounted on horseback, came the master of ceremonies and leader of the whole affair, the wedding usher . From the top of his tall hat, to the back of whose brim two large, green wreaths interwoven with flowers were attached, fluttered silk ribbons of white, red, and green, among which a single black ribbon was mingled; a sign that one of the bride and groom's parents—the groom's mother—had died. In his left hand he held a short, brown staff, while from the breast pocket of his long, fine, black cap, the corner of a neatly folded, multicolored silk handkerchief hung out foppishly.

In earlier times, the position of wedding usher was highly sought after and even more lucrative than it is now. Behind this important figure in our procession, between his two brothers, a bouquet of flowers in his buttonhole and a wreath of rue with a small posy on his hat, rode the happy, rosy-cheeked groom, followed by the other farmers, also on horseback.

The men were followed by those who weave heavenly roses into earthly life: the women and the girls, or rather The Hormt maidens in their radiant, fantastical adornments. "Hormt maidens?" – Who are these enigmatic maidens, what does this strange word mean? Well, the Hormt maidens are simply fresh, blossoming, rosy-cheeked young women who escort the bride to the altar and who take their name from the glittering, sparkling headdress they wear, the "Hormt" – an old Wendish word. This Hormt, which is worn by the peasant girls of Altenburg, but only by the girls, not by the women, at christenings and weddings, is a kind of round box – we might almost say – covered in crimson velvet, to which a multitude of small silver plates with silver buttons are attached, from which hang cherry-leaf-like, gilded plaques. At the back of this strange headdress, two braids woven from the girl's hair and wrapped with colored velvet ribbon, between which sits a wreath of silver thread, rise in an arc, and colored glass corals increase the brilliance of this sparkling and fantastic headdress, which rings and sounds at the slightest movement of the head. A brightly colored silk bodice, with that strange, cardboard-like, overlaid cuirass serving as a bib, a short-sleeved jacket of the same fabric as the bodice, a short, calf-length, brightly patterned, very pleated skirt, beneath which the embroidered garters interwoven with gold thread and the white, openwork stockings peeked out coquettishly, and small, dainty morocco slippers covering a neat, shapely foot, completed the outfit of these girls, which, with the exception of the bodice, is also their usual Sunday dress. For their weekday attire, while the style and cut are the same, is made of less expensive fabrics.

Finally, the rear guard of the procession was formed once again by farmers on their horses harnessed with red, yellow, and green straps. Thus ordered, the caravan set off, roaring through several villages with singing, music, and yodeling, which they had to pass through before reaching the bride's home village.

In every village, the inhabitants came out of their houses, bringing beer, brandy, and cold dishes, with which they hospitably entertained the passing wedding guests. Not so long ago, there were even more elaborate customs and ceremonies. Three or four horsemen would gallop ahead of the procession, halt in the open square of the village the wedding party was due to pass through, rise from their saddles, and ask in a loud, far-reaching voice whether honest people were permitted to enter, conduct their business, refresh themselves with food and drink, and then continue unhindered on their way. This earnest and formal address was met with an equally earnest reply in the traditional manner. The sound of bells, carried on the morning breeze and announcing that a wedding was taking place that day, told us that we were approaching the bride's home village. One more bend in the road, and the red gables of the houses gleamed before our eyes. The musicians caught a fresh breath, their fanfare rang out louder, and amidst roaring cheers and yodeling, the procession of guests on horseback and in carriages stormed into the village. At the bride's house, the parents and relatives stood ready to greet and welcome her, and after a quickly eaten breakfast, they went to the church.

First came the musicians again, playing a merry wedding march, followed by the best man and the bride with her headdress, to her left the sexton with a sprig of rosemary and a brightly colored silk handkerchief, and close behind her the glittering swarm of headdress maidens and the other female wedding guests. In a similar order, also with musicians at the head, came the groom's procession, only this one led by a so-called bridal attendant. After the church ceremony, during which, among other things, the bride and groom exchanged a wedding gift (consisting of a series of old Henkel-Speciesthaler coins tied to a green silk cord), they returned to the wedding house in the same manner.

Greater Manchester Police this morning, Thursday 16 March 2023, executed a raid in Hulme to locate a man from Fallowfield, and made an arrest on suspicion of possessing indecent images of a child.

 

The man was also arrested on suspicion of carrying out activities relating to organised crime.

 

Located at Duffield Court on Brennan Close in Hulme, the 23-year-old of Selside Walk in Fallowfield, was arrested on suspicion of possession of indecent images of a child, contrary to section 160A of the Criminal Justice Act 1998.

 

Multiple electronic devices were seized from the address and he remains in custody for questioning. Enquiries are ongoing.

 

This arrest is the latest during the National Exploitation Fortnight of Action, to protect those who are being exploited - both adults and children, criminally and sexually.

 

You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

 

You can access many of our services online at www.gmp.police.uk

 

Dawn raids saw officers in Oldham execute six drugs warrants as part of a crackdown on drug dealing in the district.

 

At around 6.15am this morning (Thursday 2 July 2020), officers from GMP’s Oldham division raided an address on Chamber Road, Coppice, and at five properties in the Glodwick area.

 

The action comes after concerns were raised in the community regarding the dealing of drugs in the area.

 

Neighbourhood Inspector Steve Prescott, of GMP’s Oldham division, said: “We hope that today’s operation demonstrates not only how keen we are to tackle drugs across the district and the Force, but also our endeavours to listen to community concerns and to act upon them.

 

“Today’s action is a significant part of tackling the issues around drugs that we see too often in our societies and the devastating impact they can have on individuals, their families and loved ones as well as the wider community.

 

“This action will have caused a huge amount of disruption for the criminals who seek to infiltrate these substances onto our streets and degrade the quality of life for so many.

 

“Anyone with concerns about the dealing of such drugs in their area should not hesitate to contact police; safe in the knowledge that we are prepared to strike back against those who operate in this destructive and illegal industry.”

 

To find out more about Greater Manchester Police please visit

www.gmp.police.uk

 

You should call 101, the national non-emergency number, to report crime and other concerns that do not require an emergency response.

 

Always call 999 in an emergency, such as when a crime is in progress, violence is being used or threatened or where there is danger to life.

 

You can also call anonymously with information about crime to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Crimestoppers is an independent charity who will not want your name, just your information. Your call will not be traced or recorded and you do not have to go to court or give a statement.

 

You can access many of our services online at www.gmp.police.uk

 

Police from Tameside investigating modern slavery and drugs trafficking between Tameside and #Humberside have made arrests this morning.

 

Warrants were executed at addresses in #NewtonHeath, #Failsworth, and the #NorthernQuarter area as part of an operation dedicated to disrupting a drugs line between Tameside and #Hull that involves the criminal exploitation of vulnerable children.

 

The action is part of #OperationMarconi which was formed in June 2020 and concerns the exploitation of children from Tameside aged between 16 and 17.

 

It is one of over 20 investigations being led by GMP Tameside's Child Criminal Exploitation (CCE) team dedicated to modern slavery and the exploitation of vulnerable people who have been coerced into criminal activity in the district.

 

The CCE team have already made an additional eight arrests as part of those investigations and four people have been charged with modern slavery and drug offences.

 

A number of vulnerable individuals coerced into 'county lines' and identified as high-risk have been safeguarded and re-housed with support from local partner agencies.

 

County lines describes organised criminal networks involved in exporting illegal drugs into one or more importing areas within the UK, using dedicated mobile phone lines.

 

Children and vulnerable adults are often exploited to move and store the drugs and money often through coercion, intimidation, violence and weapons.

 

Police continue to collaborate with social services and schools, in particular, to help spot the signs of any children that may have been identified to be at risk of such exploitation.

 

Detective Constable Laura Hughes, of GMP Tameside's Child Criminal Exploitation team, said: "Today's action is a significant statement as we continue to tackle the pernicious exploitation of vulnerable young people for illicit gains.

 

"We have been working tirelessly in the CCE team in Tameside to work with local agencies in identifying and safeguarding potential victims of this criminality, while pursuing those that we believe are responsible for such exploitation.

 

"Tackling 'county lines' by its nature requires closely co-ordinated work, not just with local partners, but also policing partners from across the country and I would like to thank Humberside Police for their support during this operation so far.

 

"A lot of our work is based on intelligence and we are forever gaining a clearer picture as to how these criminal enterprises operate and are developing a real understanding of how these groups recruit and coerce vulnerable young people.

 

"It is important people know to spot the signs of when someone may be being exploited; whether it being withdrawn from family and friends and skipping school, to having more than one phone and going missing from home more regularly.

 

"Anyone with suspicions or concerns should contact police online via our website, call 101 and always dial 999 in an emergency. Details can be passed to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111."

 

Jasper executes a low flyby rattling the beach goers with his mach speeds. Straight out of the camera. My wife was tossing 'em too close to me. Or as she explained to me, I was standing too close to her tosses. Just smile and agree Todd ;-)

New indie film staring Tichina Arnold on the life and death of Lena Baker.

Watch Trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXdEb7QSsXQ

Website: www.lenabakerthemovie.com

 

(Lena's bio)

March 5 1945, Lena Baker, an African-American mother of three, was electrocuted at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsyille.

 

She was convicted for the fatal shooting of E. B. Knight, a white Cuthbert, GA mill operator she was hired to care for after he broke his leg. She was 44 and the only woman ever executed in Georgia’s electric chair. For Baker, a Black maid in the segregated south in the 1940’s, her story was a tough sell to a jury of 12 white men. And rumors that she was romantically involved with victim E. B. Knight did not help.

 

Her murder trial lasted just a day, without a single witness called by her court-appointed lawyer. She was convicted and sentenced to death. John Cole Vodicka, director of an Americus-based inmate advocacy program known as the Prison and Jail Project, said Knight had kept Ms. Baker as his "virtual sex slave." She was his paramour, she was his mistress, and, among other things, his drinking partner. If you read the transcript and have any understanding of black-white relations, Black women were often subjected to the sexual whims of their white masters, their white bosses, or some white man who had control over their lives or the lives of their families. "Here is one who resisted and paid the price.”

 

The undertaker who brought her body back to Cuthbert buried her in a grave that went unmarked for five decades, until the congregation of Mount Vernon Baptist Church raised $250 for a concrete slab and marker. The family is planning a memorial service on Mother’s Day, May 11, at Mount Vernon, where Baker sang in the choir. Her grave is behind the church. Relatives are also returning to Cuthbert to honor Baker and try to clear her name with the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole.

 

Lena Baker, who had a sixth-grade education, stated publicly her innocence to the very end. “What I done, I did in self-defense," she said in her final statement. "I have nothing against anyone. I am ready to meet my God.”

   

Panerai PAM615

 

Movement

Automatic mechanical, P.9100 calibre, executed entirely by Panerai, 13¾ lignes, 8.15 mm thick, 37 jewels, Glucydur® balance, 28,800 alternations/hour. Incabloc® anti-shock device. Power reserve 3 days, two barrels. 302 components.

 

Functions

Hours, Minutes, Small Seconds, Flyback Chronograph, Seconds reset, Calculation of immersion time

 

Case Diameter

47mm, Brushed Titanium

 

Bezel

Matt Black Ceramic. Anti-clockwise unidirectional rotating bezel with graduated scale

 

Back

Screw, Titanium

Device protecting the crown (Protected as a trademark) Brushed Titanium

 

Dial

Black with applied luminous Arabic numerals and dots. Hours counter at 3 o’clock, Small Seconds at 9 o’clock. Central chronograph seconds and minutes hands.

 

Crystal

Sapphire crystal formed of corundum

 

Water

Resistance 30 bar (~300 metres)

 

Strap

Caoutchouc, Black, 26/22 MM Standard

 

Panerai PAM 533

 

Movement

Automatic mechanical, Panerai P.2003 calibre, executed entirely by Panerai, 13¾ lignes, 8 mm thick, 25 jewels, Glucydur® balance, 28,800 alternations/hour. KIF Parechoc® anti-shock device. Power reserve 10 days, three barrels, seconds reset device. 296 components.

 

Functions

Hours, Minutes, Small Seconds, Date, GMT, Power Reserve Indicator, Seconds Reset

 

Case

Diameter 44 mm, AISI 316L Polished Steel

 

Bezel

Polished Steel

 

Back

See - through sapphire crystal

Device protecting the crown (Protected as a trademark) Brushed Steel

 

Dial

Black with luminous Arabic numerals and hour markers. Date at 3 o'clock, GMT indicator at 9 o'clock, linear power indicator at 6 o'clock.

 

Crystal

Sapphire crystal formed of corundum

 

Water

Resistance 10 bar (~100 metres)

 

Strap

Calf Assolutamente, Dark brown, Beige, 24/22 MM Standard

Since I drew the older version of Khan from Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan a while back, I figured I might as well draw the earlier younger version of him from the Star Trek episode Space Seed, so here he is in all his charismatic glory.

 

According to the Space Seed episode, in the unimaginably far off futuristic year of 1996, Khan Noonien Singh was a genetically engineered superman who conquered and ruled one quarter of the world. He was eventually overthrown at the end of the Eugenics Wars (I must have been asleep that day; I seem to have missed the headlines in the papers). Rather than execute Khan on the spot as you'd expect would happen, he and 80 of his followers were placed in cryogenic suspension, loaded into a multi-million dollar spaceship and shot into outer space, where they'd never cause any trouble or be heard from ever again. All in 1996, yet.

 

Flash forward forward to the 23rd century when Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise just happen to find Khan's ship. Naturally they can't leave well enough alone and beam aboard the vessel and end up thawing him out. Khan then proceeds to use his smoldering good looks and sexy accent to defrost his remaining followers and take over the Enterprise. Kirk eventually gets the upper hand and defeats Khan. Once again, instead of just cutting off his damned head as logic would dictate, Kirk decides to exile Khan and his followers on an uncolonized planet. Case closed!

 

Space Seed is one of the better episodes of the series, but as always there are a few glitches. For one thing I've never understood why the writer insisted on setting the Eugenics Wars and Khan's exploits in 1996. That was only 30 years from the date the episode first aired! It's beyond ridiculous to think we'd have the technology present in this episode by then.

 

Khan is described as being genetically engineered. He appears to be around 40 years old in the episode, and presumably was that age at the time of his exile in 1996. That means he was born (or created if you will) around the year 1956. I'm pretty sure scientists weren't sitting around splicing genes back then.

 

Then Khan and his followers are placed in cryogenic suspension (instead of standing trial and being incarcerated or executed, as one would expect). Again, pretty sure that technology didn't exist in 1996.

 

Then the frozen bodies of Khan and his posse were placed into the highly advanced Botany Bay spaceship and shot deep into interstellar space. Why would they do such a thing? Each one of NASA's Saturn rockets cost hundreds of millions of dollars. What could possibly motivate any government to load a tyrannical despot and his followers onto such a vastly expensive piece of equipment and basically toss it away? Why wasn't simply placing them in prison sufficient punishment?

 

Also, the Botany Bay is far more advanced than any kind of spacecraft we have in the present, much less had in 1996. It contains a power supply and instrumentation that still function after 300 years, and even has artificial gravity inside (since Kirk and crew walk around the interior of the ship instead of floating). Again, artificial gravity is something we still don't have, and probably won't for a long, long time. Probably not for centuries. To think we'd have it in the nineties was ridiculous at best.

 

This episode perfectly encapsulates one of the biggest pet peeves I have about speculative fiction: Don't set your sci-fi story too close to the present day or you'll look like an idiot when your predictions don't come to pass. Set your story well after the audience will be dead and buried. Would it have killed the Space Seed writer to have placed Khan's downfall in 2096?

 

Khan was of course played by actor Ricardo Montalban, who turned in a powerful performance (as always). Montalban was born in Mexico and starred in many movies there before eventually coming to Hollywood. When he first began acting in American movies, studio executives wanted to change his name to "Ricky Martin (!)." Wisely, he declined.

 

He starred in many Western films, usually playing a Native American or Latino. In 1951, he suffered an accident while filming a movie, in which he was thrown from a horse and trampled. The accident resulted in an injury to his back that never fully healed, causing him great pain throughout his life. In fact if you look closely in Space Seed as well as Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, you can see him limping slightly.

 

In 1993 he underwent surgery to reduce his back pain, which left him paralyzed below the waist. This is why he appeared in a jet-powered wheelchair in the Spy Kids sequels.

 

Montalban was married to his wife Georgina for a whopping 63 years, something that's more rare than gold these days, and an absolute miracle in Hollywood. He was never involved in any tabloid scandals and was active in many charities and foundations. Sadly, he died in 2009 at age 88.

 

Montalban was famous for his "Five Stages Of An Actor" anecdote:

 

1. Who is Ricardo Montalbán?

2. Get me Ricardo Montalbán.

3. Get me a Ricardo Montalbán type.

4. Get me a young Ricardo Montalbán.

5. Who is Ricardo Montalbán?

 

Young Khan is a vector drawing, drawn in InDesign.

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