St Davids Cathedral is situated in St Davids, Britain's smallest city, in the county of Pembrokeshire, near the most westerly point of Wales.

 

The monastic community was founded by Saint David, Abbot of Menevia, who died in 589. Between 645 and 1097, the community was attacked many times by raiders, including the Vikings; however it was of such note as both a religious and an intellectual centre that King Alfred summoned help from the monastic community at St Davids in rebuilding the intellectual life of the Kingdom of Wessex. Many of the bishops were murdered by raiders and marauders, including Bishop Moregenau in 999 and Bishop Abraham in 1080. The stone that marked his grave, known as the "Abraham Stone", is intricately carved with early Celtic symbols and is now on permanent display within the Cathedral Exhibition at Porth-y-Tŵr.

 

In 1081, William the Conqueror visited St Davids to pray, and thus recognised it as a holy and respected place. In 1089, the shrine of David was vandalised and stripped of its precious metals. In 1090, the Welsh scholar Rhigyfarch wrote his Latin Life of David, highlighting David's sanctity, thus beginning the almost cult-like status he achieved.

 

In 1115, with the area under Norman control, King Henry I of England appointed Bishop Bernard as Bishop of St Davids. He began to improve life within the community, and commenced construction of a new cathedral. In 1123, Pope Calixtus II granted Bishop Bernard's request to bestow a papal privilege upon St Davids, making it a centre of pilgrimage for the Western world; the Pope decreed that "Two pilgrimages to St Davids is equal to one to Rome, and three pilgrimages to one to Jerusalem". The new cathedral was quickly constructed and Bishop Bernard consecrated it in 1131. Henry II of England's visit in 1171 saw the following of David increase and the need for a larger cathedral.

 

The present cathedral was begun in 1181 and completed not long after. Problems beset the new building and the community in its infancy: the collapse of the new tower in 1220 and earthquake damage in 1247/48.

  

Bishops Palace as it appears today

Under Bishop Gower (1328–1347) the cathedral was modified further, with the rood screen and the Bishops Palace intended as permanent reminders of his episcopacy; the palace is now a picturesque ruin.

 

In 1365, Bishop Adam Houghton and John of Gaunt began to build St Mary's College and a chantry. He later added the cloister, which connects it to the cathedral.

 

The episcopacy of Edward Vaughan (1509–1522) saw the building of the Holy Trinity chapel, with its fan vaulting which some[who?] say inspired the roof of King's College, Cambridge. This period also saw great developments for the nave, whose roof and Irish oak ceiling were constructed between 1530 and 1540. Bishop Barlow, unlike his predecessor as bishop, wished to suppress the following of David, and stripped St David's shrine of its jewels and confiscated the relics of St David and St Justinian in order to counteract "superstition" in 1538. In 1540, the body of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond and father of Henry VII, was brought to be entombed in front of the high altar from the dissolved Greyfriars' Priory in Carmarthen.

 

The establishment of the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell greatly affected many cathedrals and churches, and was particularly felt in St Davids. The cathedral was all but destroyed by Cromwell's forces and the lead was stripped from the Bishops Palace roof.

 

There is a pronounced slope to the floor of the cathedral, amounting to a height difference of nearly four metres between the east and west ends, and the building is still shifting minutely.

 

The Welsh architect John Nash was commissioned to restore the west front in 1793 to repair the damage done two hundred years previously. Eclectic in style (with Gothic and Perpendicular characteristics – the latter attributed partly to his destruction of the windows of the chapel of St Mary's College in order to reuse that tracery for his west front), his work soon proved to be substandard (as had his previous work on the chapter house). Within a century the Nash west front had become unstable and the whole building was restored by George Gilbert Scott between 1862 and 1870. The lady chapel was restored by public subscription in 1901 and the eastern chapels were restored through a legacy of the Countess of Maidstone, granddaughter of Bishop John Jenkinson, between 1901 and 1910.

 

The cathedral suffered the pains of disestablishment in 1923, as did the whole Church in Wales. The diocese was made smaller by the removal of the Archdeaconry of Brecon to form the new Diocese of Swansea and Brecon. However, this left a large area as a diocese to govern and St Davids began to deteriorate as the centre of the diocese, being nowhere near the centre – the bishop's residence had been at Carmarthen since the 16th century, but administration and the focus moved from the cathedral to the diocese's now largest town.

 

The 1950s saw the appointment of the Reverend Carl Witton-Davies as dean; appointed in his thirties, his driving vision and energy was short-lived as he was offered what some was believed as a preferment as Archdeacon of Oxford, but did not leave that position for the rest of his service in the church. The cathedral began to have life again and the famous Welsh Youth Pilgrimages to St Davids (Cymry'r Groes) led many to a life of service in the church and provided the Church in Wales with inspired clergy for a decade following. It was Grade I-listed by Cadw in 1951.

 

The 1960s saw the restoration of St Mary's College as the cathedral hall, for the use of the cathedral parish and for use as an area for art exhibitions and poetry readings. It was dedicated by Archbishop Edwin Morris in 1966 and the inaugural event was a poetry reading by the poet R. S. Thomas, who served as a vicar in the Bangor diocese.

 

During the 1980s a number of official events in cathedral life took place: in 1981, Charles, Prince of Wales, visited to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the consecration of the cathedral; and on Maundy Thursday 1982, Queen Elizabeth II distributed the Royal Maundy at the cathedral. This was the first occasion that the ceremony had taken place outside England. In 1989–90, the 1,400th anniversary of the death of St David was presided over by the Archbishop of Wales, George Noakes, who was also diocesan Bishop of St Davids.

 

The decades leading to and immediately following the year 2000 have been the most notable in the cathedral's history since its construction. First, the British Government decided to reinstate the title of "city" to St Davids and this was formally conferred by Queen Elizabeth II on 1 June 1995. The task that lay before the dean, the Very Reverend Wyn Evans, on his appointment in 1994 was huge: a new organ was badly needed and the west front needed extensive restoration. It was also thought to be time for the cathedral to invest in its future by creating a visitor centre within the bell tower, enlarging the peal of bells from eight to ten and by the "reconstruction", or completion, of the cathedral cloisters to house the cathedral choir, vestries, an education suite, rooms for parish use and a refectory as a reminder of the monastic beginnings. The first project was the restoration of the west front, with the original quarry that was used for stone at Caerbwdi Bay being reopened. This phase was completed in 1998, in time for the organ to be dismantled and rebuilt by the organ builders Harrison and Harrison of Durham. The organ was completed in the middle months of 2000 and dedicated on 15 October that year.

 

The ring of bells was cast by Whitechapel Bell Foundry of London and presented as a gift by the American Friends of St Davids Cathedral. The substantial task of rebuilding the cloisters as an education centre and refectory began in 2003 and was completed in May 2007. The translation of Wyn Evans from dean to bishop led to the appointment of Jonathan Lean as dean in 2009.

 

The bells are not hung in the central tower of the cathedral but in the old gatehouse, Porth y Twr. There are 10 bells, with the heaviest weighing 24 long cwt 3 qr 25 lb (2,797 lb or 1,269 kg) in D. The back eight bells were cast in 1928 by Mears & Stainbank, London and two trebles added in 2000 cast by Whitechapel Bell Foundry, London. Details of the bells:

 

The restored Shrine of St David was unveiled and re-dedicated by the Right Reverend Wyn Evans, Bishop of St Davids, at a Choral Eucharist on St Davids Day 2012.

 

There are at least three services said or sung per day, each week, with sung services on five out of seven days.

 

The cathedral choir at St Davids was the first cathedral choir in the United Kingdom to use girls and men as the main choir, rather than boys and men. (Salisbury Cathedral introduced boys and girls earlier on an equal basis, whereas St Davids uses girls as their "main" cathedral choristers.) There is also a boys' choir whose weekly Evensong is a major event within the cathedral week. They sing with the vicars choral regularly.

 

The St Davids Cathedral Festival runs through the Whitsun school holiday each year and showcases some of the world's best performers. The week sees performers, both professional and young, play in front of thousands. The cathedral choir serve as a highlight each year, being a very popular concert, as well as the Festival Chorus and Orchestra who perform a major work on the final night of the festival.

 

Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) in the 13th century relates the strange story of a marble footbridge leading from the church over the Alun rivulet in St Davids. The marble stone was called "Llechllafar" ("the talking stone") because it once spoke when a corpse was carried over it to the cemetery for interment. The effort of speech had caused it to break, despite its size of ten feet in length, six in breadth and one in thickness. This bridge was worn smooth due to its age and the thousands of people who had walked over it, however the superstition was so great that corpses were no longer carried over it. This ancient bridge was replaced in the 16th century and its present whereabouts is not known.

 

Another legend is that Merlin had prophesied the death on Llechllafar of an English king, conqueror of Ireland, who had been injured by a man with a red hand. King Henry II, whilst on a pilgrimage to Saint Davids, having come over from Ireland, heard of the prophecy and crossed Llechllafar without ill effect. He boasted that Merlin was a liar, to which a bystander replied that the King would not conquer Ireland and was therefore not the king of the prophecy. This turned out to be true, for Henry never did conquer the whole of Ireland.

 

The cathedral's exterior and overall design were used as the basis of the fictional Nemeton monastery in the video game Koudelka and its sequels Shadow Hearts and Shadow Hearts: Covenant.

 

Pembrokeshire is a county in the south-west of Wales. It is bordered by Carmarthenshire to the east, Ceredigion to the northeast, and is otherwise surrounded by the sea. Haverfordwest is the largest town and administrative headquarters of Pembrokeshire County Council.

 

The county is generally sparsely populated and rural, with an area of 200 square miles (520 km2) and a population of 123,400. After Haverfordwest, the largest settlements are Milford Haven (13,907), Pembroke Dock (9,753), and Pembroke (7,552). St Davids (1,841) is a city, the smallest by population in the UK. Welsh is spoken by 17.2 percent of the population, and for historic reasons is more widely spoken in the north of the county than in the south.

 

Pembrokeshire's coast is its most dramatic geographic feature, created by the complex geology of the area. It is a varied landscape which includes high sea cliffs, wide sandy beaches, the large natural harbour of Milford Haven, and several offshore islands which are home to seabird colonies. Most of it is protected by Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, and can be hiked on the 190-mile (310 km) Pembrokeshire Coast Path. The interior of Pembrokeshire is relatively flat and gently undulating, with the exception of the Preseli Mountains in the north.

 

There are many prehistoric sites in Pembrokeshire, particularly in the Preseli Mountains. During the Middle Ages several castles were built by the Normans, such as Pembroke and Cilgerran, and St David's Cathedral became an important pilgrimage site. During the Industrial Revolution the county remained relatively rural, with the exception of Milford Haven, which was developed as a port and Royal Navy dockyard. It is now the UK's third-largest port, primarily because of its two liquefied natural gas terminals. The economy of the county is now focused on agriculture, oil and gas, and tourism.

 

Human habitation of the region that is now Pembrokeshire extends back to between 125,000 and 70,000 years  and there are numerous prehistoric sites such as Pentre Ifan, and neolithic remains (12,000 to 6,500 years ago), more of which were revealed in an aerial survey during the 2018 heatwave; in the same year, a 1st-century Celtic chariot burial was discovered, the first such find in Wales. There may have been dairy farming in Neolithic times.

 

There is little evidence of Roman occupation in what is now Pembrokeshire. Ptolemy's Geography, written c. 150, mentioned some coastal places, two of which have been identified as the River Teifi and what is now St Davids Head, but most Roman writers did not mention the area; there may have been a Roman settlement near St Davids and a road from Bath, but this comes from a 14th-century writer. Any evidence for villas or Roman building materials reported by mediaeval or later writers has not been verified, though some remains near Dale were tentatively identified as Roman in character by topographer Richard Fenton in his Historical Tour of 1810. Fenton stated that he had "...reason to be of opinion that they had not colonized Pembrokeshire till near the decline of their empire in Britain".

 

Part of a possible Roman road is noted by CADW near Llanddewi Velfrey, and another near Wiston. Wiston is also the location of the first Roman fort discovered in Pembrokeshire, investigated in 2013.

 

Some artefacts, including coins and weapons, have been found, but it is not clear whether these belonged to Romans or to a Romanised population. Welsh tradition has it that Magnus Maximus founded Haverfordwest, and took a large force of local men on campaign in Gaul in 383 which, together with the reduction of Roman forces in south Wales, left a defensive vacuum which was filled by incomers from Ireland.

 

Between 350 and 400, an Irish tribe known as the Déisi settled in the region known to the Romans as Demetae.  The Déisi merged with the local Welsh, with the regional name underlying Demetae evolving into Dyfed, which existed as an independent petty kingdom from the 5th century.  In 904, Hywel Dda married Elen (died 943), daughter of the king of Dyfed Llywarch ap Hyfaidd, and merged Dyfed with his own maternal inheritance of Seisyllwg, forming the new realm of Deheubarth ("southern district"). Between the Roman and Norman periods, the region was subjected to raids from Vikings, who established settlements and trading posts at Haverfordwest, Fishguard, Caldey Island and elsewhere.

 

Dyfed remained an integral province of Deheubarth, but this was contested by invading Normans and Flemings who arrived between 1067 and 1111.  The region became known as Pembroke (sometimes archaic "Penbroke":), after the Norman castle built in the cantref of Penfro. In 1136, Prince Owain Gwynedd at Crug Mawr near Cardigan met and destroyed a 3,000-strong Norman/Flemish army and incorporated Deheubarth into Gwynedd.  Norman/Flemish influence never fully recovered in West Wales.  In 1138, the county of Pembrokeshire was named as a county palatine. Rhys ap Gruffydd, the son of Owain Gwynedd's daughter Gwenllian, re-established Welsh control over much of the region and threatened to retake all of Pembrokeshire, but died in 1197. After Deheubarth was split by a dynastic feud, Llywelyn the Great almost succeeded in retaking the region of Pembroke between 1216 and his death in 1240.  In 1284 the Statute of Rhuddlan was enacted to introduce the English common law system to Wales, heralding 100 years of peace, but had little effect on those areas already established under the Marcher Lords, such as Cemais in the north of the county.

 

Henry Tudor, born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, landed an army in Pembrokeshire in 1485 and marched to Cardigan.  Rallying support, he continued to Leicestershire and defeated the larger army of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. As Henry VII, he became the first monarch of the House of Tudor, which ruled England until 1603.

 

The Laws in Wales Act 1535 effectively abolished the powers of the Marcher Lords and divided the county into seven hundreds, roughly corresponding to the seven pre-Norman cantrefi of Dyfed. The hundreds were (clockwise from the northeast): Cilgerran, Cemais, Dewisland, Roose, Castlemartin, Narberth and Dungleddy and each was divided into civil parishes; a 1578 map in the British Library is the earliest known to show parishes and chapelries in Pembrokeshire. The Elizabethan era brought renewed prosperity to the county through an opening up of rural industries, including agriculture, mining and fishing, with exports to England and Ireland, though the formerly staple woollen industry had all but disappeared. 

 

During the First English Civil War (1642–1646) the county gave strong support to the Roundheads (Parliamentarians), in contrast to the rest of Wales, which was staunchly Royalist. In spite of this, an incident in Pembrokeshire triggered the opening shots of the Second English Civil War when local units of the New Model Army mutinied. Oliver Cromwell defeated the uprising at the Siege of Pembroke in July 1648.  On 13 August 1649, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland began when New Model Army forces sailed from Milford Haven.

 

In 1720, Emmanuel Bowen described Pembrokeshire as having five market towns, 45 parishes and about 4,329 houses, with an area of 420,000 acres (1,700 km2). In 1791 a petition was presented to the House of Commons concerning the poor state of many of the county's roads, pointing out that repairs could not be made compulsory by the law as it stood. The petition was referred to committee.  People applying for poor relief were often put to work mending roads. Workhouses were poorly documented. Under the Poor Laws, costs and provisions were kept to a minimum, but the emphasis was often on helping people to be self-employed. While the Poor Laws provided a significant means of support, there were many charitable and benefit societies. After the Battle of Fishguard, the failed French invasion of 1797, 500 French prisoners were held at Golden Hill Farm, Pembroke. From 1820 to 1878 one of the county's prisons, with a capacity of 86, was in the grounds of Haverfordwest Castle. In 1831, the area of the county was calculated to be 345,600 acres (1,399 km2) with a population of 81,424.

 

It was not until nearly the end of the 19th century that mains water was provided to rural south Pembrokeshire by means of a reservoir at Rosebush and cast iron water pipes throughout the district.

 

Throughout much of the 20th century (1911 to 1961) the population density in the county remained stable while it rose in England and Wales as a whole. There was considerable military activity in Pembrokeshire and offshore in the 20th century: a naval base at Milford Haven because German U-boats were active off the coast in World War I and, in World War II, military exercises in the Preseli Mountains and a number of military airfields. The wartime increase in air activity saw a number of aircraft accidents and fatalities, often due to unfamiliarity with the terrain. From 1943 to 1944, 5,000 soldiers from the United States Army's 110th Infantry Regiment were based in the county, preparing for D-Day. Military and industrial targets in the county were subjected to bombing during World War II. After the end of the war, German prisoners of war were accommodated in Pembrokeshire, the largest prison being at Haverfordwest, housing 600. The County of Pembroke War Memorial in Haverfordwest carries the names of 1,200 of those that perished in World War I.

 

In 1972, a second reservoir for south Pembrokeshire, at Llys y Fran, was completed.

 

Pembrokeshire's tourism portal is Visit Pembrokeshire, run by Pembrokeshire County Council. In 2015 4.3 million tourists visited the county, staying for an average of 5.24 days, spending £585 million; the tourism industry supported 11,834 jobs. Many of Pembrokeshire's beaches have won awards, including Poppit Sands and Newport Sands. In 2018, Pembrokeshire received the most coast awards in Wales, with 56 Blue Flag, Green Coast or Seaside Awards. In the 2019 Wales Coast Awards, 39 Pembrokeshire beaches were recognised, including 11 awarded Blue Flag status.

 

The Pembrokeshire coastline is a major draw to tourists; in 2011 National Geographic Traveller magazine voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the second best in the world and in 2015 the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park was listed among the top five parks in the world by a travel writer for the Huffington Post. Countryfile Magazine readers voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the top UK holiday destination in 2018, and in 2019 Consumers' Association members placed Tenby and St Davids in the top three best value beach destinations in Britain. With few large urban areas, Pembrokeshire is a "dark sky" destination. The many wrecks off the Pembrokeshire coast attract divers. The decade from 2012 saw significant, increasing numbers of Atlantic bluefin tuna, not seen since the 1960s, and now seen by some as an opportunity to encourage tourist sport fishing.

 

The county has a number of theme and animal parks (examples are Folly Farm Adventure Park and Zoo, Manor House Wildlife Park, Blue Lagoon Water Park and Oakwood Theme Park), museums and other visitor attractions including Castell Henllys reconstructed Iron Age fort, Tenby Lifeboat Station and Milford Haven's Torch Theatre. There are 21 marked cycle trails around the county.

 

Pembrokeshire Destination Management Plan for 2020 to 2025 sets out the scope and priorities to grow tourism in Pembrokeshire by increasing its value by 10 per cent in the five years, and to make Pembrokeshire a top five UK destination.

 

As the national sport of Wales, rugby union is widely played throughout the county at both town and village level. Haverfordwest RFC, founded in 1875, is a feeder club for Llanelli Scarlets. Village team Crymych RFC in 2014 plays in WRU Division One West. There are numerous football clubs in the county, playing in five leagues with Haverfordwest County A.F.C. competing in the Cymru Premier.

 

Triathlon event Ironman Wales has been held in Pembrokeshire since 2011, contributing £3.7 million to the local economy, and the county committed in 2017 to host the event for a further five years. Ras Beca, a mixed road, fell and cross country race attracting UK-wide competitors, has been held in the Preselis annually since 1977. The record of 32 minutes 5 seconds has stood since 1995. Pembrokeshire Harriers athletics club was formed in 2001 by the amalgamation of Cleddau Athletic Club (established 1970) and Preseli Harriers (1989) and is based in Haverfordwest.

 

The annual Tour of Pembrokeshire road-cycling event takes place over routes of optional length. The 4th Tour, in April 2015, attracted 1,600 riders including Olympic gold medallist Chris Boardman and there were 1,500 entrants to the 2016 event. Part of Route 47 of the Celtic Trail cycle route is in Pembrokeshire. The Llys y Fran Hillclimb is an annual event run by Swansea Motor Club, and there are several other county motoring events held each year.

 

Abereiddy's Blue Lagoon was the venue for a round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in 2012, 2013, and 2016; the Welsh Surfing Federation has held the Welsh National Surfing Championships at Freshwater West for several years, and Llys y Fran Country Park hosted the Welsh Dragonboat Championships from 2014 to 2017.

 

While not at major league level, cricket is played throughout the county and many villages such as Lamphey, Creselly, Llangwm, Llechryd and Crymych field teams in minor leagues under the umbrella of the Cricket Board of Wales.

 

Notable people

From mediaeval times, Rhys ap Gruffydd (c. 1132-1197), ruler of the kingdom of Deheubarth, was buried in St Davids Cathedral. and Gerald of Wales was born c. 1146 at Manorbier Castle. Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) was born in 1457 at Pembroke Castle.

 

The pirate Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart) (Welsh: Barti Ddu) was born in Casnewydd Bach, between Fishguard and Haverfordwest in 1682.

 

In later military history, Jemima Nicholas, heroine of the so-called "last invasion of Britain" in 1797, was from Fishguard, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton GCB, born in Haverfordwest, was killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and Private Thomas Collins is believed to be the only Pembrokeshire man that fought in the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879.

 

In the arts, siblings Gwen and Augustus John were both born in Pembrokeshire, as was the novelist Sarah Waters; singer Connie Fisher grew up in Pembrokeshire. The actor Christian Bale was born in Haverfordwest.

 

Stephen Crabb, a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Wales, was brought up in Pembrokeshire and is one of the county's two Members of Parliament, the other being Simon Hart,[90] who served as Secretary of State for Wales from 2019 to 2022.

My travels around the UK by car for three weeks with my son. June/July 2019 Wales.

 

Day Nine .. A Stop at Caernarfon making our way to Hirael where we are staying the night.

 

Caernarfon is a royal town, community, and port in Gwynedd, Wales.

 

Gwynedd’s county town, home to Wales’s most famous castle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Mighty Caernarfon Castle commands the lion’s share of attention, but the town’s narrow streets and stylishly redeveloped waterfront also merit a visit. The castle, built in the 13th century by Edward I as a royal palace and military fortress, was at the core of a medieval walled town. The Romans left their mark too – 1000 years earlier they constructed their fort of Segontium on the hill above (its foundations still exist). Other attractions include Welsh Highland Railway (which runs for 25 miles to Porthmadog), Hwylfan Fun Centre, Redline Indoor Karting and the scenic Lôn Eifion recreational cycle route. Waterside Doc Fictoria is home to Galeri (contemporary arts complex with theatre and cinema). The Caernarfon Record Office has archives of Gwynedd (documents, images, maps and newspapers) stretching back 400 years. Cae’r Gors at nearby Rhosgadfan was home of Kate Roberts, one of Wales’s most celebrated writers.

For More Info: www.visitsnowdonia.info/caernarfon

Author: Ellis, Edward Sylvester, 1840-1916

Title: Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier

Publisher: George Routledge and Sons

Publication Date: 1861

URL: archive.org/details/04282590.1601.emory.edu

 

Description and Synopsis:

The cover scene depicts a man taking a pail from a young woman. In the novel, this scene occurs when Seth Jones offers to help a pretty young woman named Ina with her chores (Ellis 13).

 

Further Notes:

American author, Edward Sylvester Ellis, had a prolific career. He wrote under many pseudonyms, making attribution of all of his works tricky. He wrote books for children and adults and became one of the best known American novelists of his time. Ellis mainly wrote about the American frontier, but he also dabbled in the genres of detective fiction and science fiction (Camp).

 

Works Cited:

Camp, Paul Eugen. "Edward S(ylvester) Ellis." American Writers for Children Before 1900. Ed. Glenn E. Estes. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 42. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Jan. 2015. go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1200001115&v=2.1&...

 

- 1909 T212-1 Obak backs have a stylized Obak logo and may come with or without a frame. This card has the frame...

 

The Sacramento Solons were a minor league baseball team based in Sacramento, California. They played in the Pacific Coast League during several periods (1903, 1905, 1909–1914, 1918–1960, 1974–1976).

 

The team derived its name from Sacramento's status as capital of California. Solon was an early Greek lawmaker and the term "solons" was often used by journalists as a synonym for "senators." The team was also known at times as the Sacramento Sacts, an abbreviation of the name of the city, and the Sacramento Senators.

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Pat Flanagan

Dr. Sylvester S. Flanagan

Born: 3 July 1887 • Union / Symco, Wisconsin, USA

Died: 11 October 1970 at age 83 • Nelo, Wisconsin, USA

Height - Tall

Weight - Unknown

Position: Outfielder

Bats: Unknown • Throws: Right

- Full Name: Sylvester Simon Flanagan (he signed his name - S.S. Flanagan)

- Nicknames - Sib / Pat / Silent Pat / Steamer / Steamboat

- Employment: In 1918 he worked as a Dentist in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

- His mother and father were both born in Ireland

- After his release from the US Army in 1918 he spent most of his life living in the Winnipeg / Charleswood, Manitoba area

 

Link to his Memorial - www.findagrave.com/memorial/55174452

 

Link to his minor league stats - www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=flanag...

 

Posted by Bob Lemke at 1:41 PM - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - Tales of T212 #13 : S.S. Flannagan - "Flannagan," The Mystery Beaver - This player who appeared only in the 1910 Obak set, with his name misspelled as "Flannagan" is one of the few whom I never definitively identified in my years of Obak research. It was only years later, as I began actually writing this series, that I found out who he was from the SABR Minor Leagues database. My early notecard on Flannagan offered as possibilities James F. or Edward J., who had played the outfield and pitched, respectively, for the 1909 Vancouver Beavers of the Northwestern League. Neither played there in 1910. Since it is my impression that Obak made few, if any, errors such as producing a card for a player who wasn't on a particular team in the year the card was issued, I wasn't comfortable designating the card-guy Flanagan as either James or Edward. S.S. Flanagan (his full name is not recorded by SABR, nor any biographical details), played for Vancouver in both 1908 and 1910. He is not shown as playing anywhere in organized baseball in 1909. He had batted .351 for the Beavers in 1908, but his a career low of .209 in 1910 and was demoted to the Class D Union Assn. at Boise for 1911. He rebounded at Boise and hit .342. That earned him a call back to Class B play with Decatur of the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League for the remainder of his known pro career (1912-1915). END of Bob Lemke Blog...

 

I finally solved the mystery of who Pat Flanagan really was - on 26 March 2018...

 

(Emmons County Record, May 30, 1907) - The unwelcome news spread rapidly among baseball fans the early part of this week that Sylvester Flanagan ("Sib") who has been holding down the job on the third rubber for the local team this season, had accepted an offer to pitch the season for the Linton, (North Dakota,) club, of which Auber Wheatherby, formerly of this city, is manager. "Sib" received a check in advance payment of expenses Saturday and will leave the 26th to reach Linton in time to pitch the Decoration Day game.—New London, (Wis..) Press.

 

(Emmons County Record), August 29, 1907) - Sylvester Flanagan, the young man who has pitched for the Linton ball club this summer, left Monday morning from Bismarck by the N. P., enroute to his home at New London, Wis. "Sib" has made friends of everyone out here who became acquainted with him. Quiet and unassuming at all times and with the best of personal habits, he is a young man who secures the respect of everyone. And that has made good as a pitcher is shown by the fact that the Linton club won about three times as many games as it lost. The Record hopes that conditions will be such that the young man will be a resident of Linton and a member of the club next season.

 

(The Winnipeg Tribune August 21, 1908) - Sylvester Flanagan, better known as Silent Pat Flanagan Vancouver's sensational centre fielder, and the foremost slugger of the Northwestern league will accompany Ham Hyatt to the big leagues next year. Flanagan was sold to the Chicago White Sox of the American league, and will go up next spring. Several big league teams were after Flanagan, but he liked Chicago best and when Comiskey came through with the offer Manager Dickson accepted. Flanagan Is only twenty-one years old and he is only in his first season In organized baseball. He was formerly a pitcher and infielder, and played third base In the Michigan State League last fall.

 

(Sporting Life - 5 September 1908) - Players Purchased by the Major Clubs - Official List of American League Purchases of Young Players Given Out by the National Commission - By Chicago - From San Francisco, . R. H. Zeider, Harry Sutor; Des Moines, Arthur Bader, William Dyer; Vancouver, Flannagan; Wichita, James Scott; Pueblo, Walter Matticks.

 

(The Seattle star., January 18, 1909) - Dickson of Vancouver was bound in get Ed Flanagan. Early last season he signed a Symco, Wisconsin, player, supposedly Ed Flanagan. The player reported and it was not until after some weeks that It was found that he was Pat Flanagan Instead of Ed. Pat was told to stick around awhile. He stuck—and *sticked."

 

(The Washington herald., February 09, 1909,) The Chicago White Sox club will have three Pacific Coast players to try out this spring and they all look good in minor league company "Silent Paul" (Pat?) Flanagan the champion batter of the Northwestern League, Harry Sutor and Rollie Zeider.

 

(The Spokane press., March 08, 1909) - THEY NOTICE PAT. Special writers for the Chicago papers who are following the work of the White Sox have cast their eyes on Pat Flannagan, the champion batter of the Northwestern league and the pride of the Vancouver team. Flannagan is now with the White Sox and his work with the stick is making an early impression. If he can hold down his end as fielder he looks good for a permanent position on the team for this season.

 

(The Spokane press., March 24, 1909) - SAY PAT CAN'T STAY -

Reports from California indicate that Pat Flannagan will not be

fast enough for the company of the White Sox and will be returned to Vancouver. Flannagan lead the Northwestern league in hitting last season by a comfortable margin, but this season has not shown up as strong with the big stick. While he is playing fairly good ball it is claimed that he is not strong enough to displace others with the Sox this season. This means that Vancouver will again be a dangerous competitor for the pennant for with Flannagan in the game there is an ever present danger of some heart-breaking hits at the wrong

moment.

 

(The Evening statesman., April 10, 1909) - VANCOUVER, B. C., April 10 - Captain Lou Nordyke of the Vancouver baseball team, has practically decided on the lineup of the team that will again try to win the pennant in the Northwestern league this year Nordyke will play first base; Quigley will cover the second bag; Schornweber, shortstop; Smith or Brookins, third base: Gene Mahon, left field; Ed Flanagan, center fielder, and Ben Davis, right field. Vancouver has a good line of backstops from which to select a catcher. Donoban, an outfielder, is covering the ground like a mortgage in the outfield and he is causing no little amount of worry to the other players who are trying for outfield positions. Ed Flanagan, brother of "Silent Pat" Flanagan, the premier batsman of the Northwestern league last year, who was drafted by the Chicago White Sox gives promise of being a duplicate of his brother.

 

Edward (Ed) Joseph Flanagan / Flannagan

Birth: 06 June 1882 • Wisconsin

Death: 10 July 1957 • Washington, USA

Link to - Ed Flanagan's Minor League Stats - www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=flanag...

 

(Sacramento Union, Number 65, 27 April 1909) - Flannagan Joins Team - Outfielder Flannagan, who was with the White Sox early this season when they visited California, and who originally came from the Vancouver club in the Northwestern league, will this week join Sacramento and play in the series against San Francisco. Flannagan is a young man and a comer—the kind Sacramento fans like to see on the team. It was his batting ability last year that gained him recognition from the White Sox management. In 130 games he went to bat 484 times and secured 170 hits, which makes him an average of .352, or a little better than anything the Coast league has seen this season. Flannagan will play Doyle’s place until the “Demon” gets through subbing at first, and will then probably succeed Adams.

 

(Sacramento Union, Number 94, 26 May 1909) - With Shinn on second and Flannagan at bat, it was mentioned that “Steamboat” sometimes hit when most needed. That was one of the “times.” It was a fly, but well placed, and Jimmie Shinn had no difficulty in reaching the rubber and .scoring the tying run.

 

(Sacramento Union, Number 128, 29 June 1909) - “Steamer” Flannagan is making about ten knots at present. Wait till the propeller gets a churning at that “up-north” gait.

 

(Sacramento Union, Number 133, 4 July 1909) - SEALS GRAB BATTLE OF TWIRLERS Melchoir’s Three-Bagger in Fifth Responsible for Winning Run. BAUM OPPOSES HENLEY Flannagan Finds Slivers Easy Picking, Gathering Three Singles. - One run beat Sacramento yesterday, when Henley was pitted against Baum in the best game of baseball the fans have seen since the series opened. Melchoir’s three-base hit to left field, which won the game, was entirely a lucky drive, however, and had almost as much chance to drop outside the line as inside. "Steamer’’ Flannagan had evidently formed a previous acquaintance with Henley, or else he had met pitchers made in the same mold. After fasting on nothing but four times at bat in the day previous, Sacramento’s right fielder gathered three clean ones off the Seal marvel, but failed to connect the fourth time when a drive would have given Doyle a fair opportunity of getting across the plate.

 

(Sacramento Union, Number 136, 7 July 1909) - Flanagan then popped one up in the infield, and while Hosp, Ross and Smith held a “get-together’’ meeting as to who should catch the ball, the “Steamer’’ steamed to first and the Demon ambled along to third. Gandil picked one on the gaziz and shot it at Howard, who juggled, Doyle scoring and Flannagan going to second. A minute later Flannagan was caught in an attempt to steal third base.

 

(Los Angeles Herald, Volume 37, Number 90, 30 December 1909) - It was announced four members of the Chicago Americans were sold to the San Francisco Pacific Coast league team. The men sold were Catcher Warring, formerly of the Guthrie, Okla.. team; Pitcher Harry Stewart of the Houston, Texas, team; Pitcher Frank Miller of Des Moines, and Outfielder Flannagan, a Pacific Coast product.

 

(Sacramento Union, Number 185, 25 August 1909) - “Steamboat” Flannagan stole two bases in one day. His trip to the swimming baths evidently did him good. He also hit often and hard.

 

(The Spokane press., February 21, 1910) - BEAVER SQUAD

Bob Brown announced the following training season squad for his 1910 Beavers: Catchers - Joe Sugden, Jim (James) Flanagan, Dick Boettiger, Fred Burridge, Howard Ladd, Doran and Pierce. Pitchers - Dode Brinker, Edward Erickson, Herve Jensen, Harry Gardner, Edward (Ed) Flanagan, Pat Jach, J. Clark, William Thlele, Fred Oass, Williamson, Skillman, Standridge, Haggin, Harry Bath and Morell. Infielders - James, Breen, Harry Scharnweber, Walter Sampson, Wally Smith and Broadbent. Outfielders - Cannon, Jack Clynes, Charles Swain, E.P. Tallant, Hassey, Pat Flanagan, Jimmie Adams and Crocker.

 

(The Sunday Oregonian., March 20, 1910) - BROWN GETS 'SILENT PAT' - Sylvester S. Flanagan; Champion Slugger, Goes to Vancouver. VANCOUVER. B. C. March 16. (Special.) Sylvester S. Flanagan, better known as "Silent Pat," the champion hitter of the Northwest League, two seasons ago, has been bought by Manager Brown, of the Beavers, from the San Francisco club, of the Coast League. "Pat" slugged the ball for a .354 average when with the Vancouver champions in 1908 and his coming back has caused wild rejoicing among the local fans. Flanagan will play center field for the Beavers, who report for Spring practice one week from Saturday.

 

(The Tacoma Times., June 27, 1910) - Pretty Game Goes To Vancouver in the 11th. - Pat Flanagan should be jailed for grand larceny for his work in center field.

 

(The Seattle star., July 28, 1910) - Painless Surgical Stuff Gives Beavers Game, 4 to 0— Then Silent Pat Flanagan tore off a dandy single. Brinker and James scoring on the blow, Streib sent a flyout to Adams, and as that guardian of the middle marshes booted it, Flanagan scored.

 

(Rock Island Argus., April 16, 1912) - Decatur, Ill., April 16. Manager Chic Fraser of the Decatur Three-Eye league club has announced the purchase of Outfielder Pat Flannagan from Indianapolis.

 

(The Daily Missoulian., October 17, 1912) - Pat Flanagan, last year with Boise, played sensationally for Decatur, Ill., in the Three-I( eye) league this season. He finished with'a batting average of .300.

 

(Evening Star, / Washington, D.C. November 17, 1913) - Flanagan Sold to Atlanta. DECATUR, Ill.. November 17.. Outfielder Sylvester Flanagan of the Decatur base ball club has been sold to the Atlanta club <of the Southern League for $500. Flanagan led the Three I League in hitting during the last season with a mark of .344.

 

(Rock Island Argus., November 18, 1913) - DECATUR OUTFIELDER SOLD TO ATLANTA - Outfielder Pat Flanagan of Decatur has been sold to the Atlanta club in the Southern league. The local baseball association received a message Saturday morning from Billy Smith, manager of that team, instructing the association to send the papers for the players and the check for $500 would be forwarded. Although Decatur fans will regret to see him go, they will be glad for Steamboat because of his advancement from a Class B to a Class A league, and they hope to see him make good.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following articles are not about the same Flannagan - this is - Link to Charlie Flannagan (St. Louis Browns / 1913) stats - www.baseball-reference.com/players/f/flanach01.shtml

 

(Sporting Life - 11 October 1913) - SHOULD KNOW BETTER - THE former major league player, Dick Cooley, who this year owned and managed the San Diego Club, of the Southern California League, has been set down by the National Commission for lack of good faith while virtually acting as agent for the St. Louis American Club. The facts are stated as follows: "Manager Cooley had a player named Flannagan, who was purchased by the St. Louis American Club. President Hedges, of St. Louis, sent Cooley a blank contract, instructing him to sign Flanagan to it under a fair salary. Flanagan was getting $80 a month at San Diego and Cooley advanced him to $250 with the St. Louis Club. The latter refused to stand for the big advance, and was backed up by the National Commission under the rule which allows an advance of only 25 per cent, for players sent up on trial. St. Louis settled with the player at the rate of $100 a month, which was sufficient, as he failed to make good and was let out very soon." Cooley's action in this case was doubly reprehensible, first, because as a veteran player and manager he must have known that the figures he inserted in this untried Class D player's contract were extremely excessive; and second, because as a magnate-manager he should have known the mandatory probationary contract rule of the National Agreement. Ignorance of Baseball law seems to be almost as prevalent among magnates as ignorance of the playing rules is among players.

 

1913 San Diego Bears

Classification: D

League: Southern California League

Record: N/A

Manager: Spencer Abbott

Location: San Diego, CA

 

(Los Angeles Herald, Number 137, 10 April 1917) - SUCCESSFUL MANAGERS MUST DEVELOP PLAYERS; CAN'T PURCHASE STARS - By FRED MITCHELL There is a tremendous amount of hokus-pokus among the minor leagues when it comes to selling or disposing of promising talent to the magnates of the big league clubs. It has come to be an art with some of the minor leaguers and main a magnate has been stung by some ingenious scheme of boosting up an indifferent plaver and marketing him. Dick Cooley, an ex-leaguer of high merit, came to be known a short time back as one the greatest of minor league David Harums. He had a club at San Diego in a tiny league, and they tell the story of how he worked off a mutt In great shape. I did not see this fellow but have heard a lot of stories about him. His name was Flannigan and he was a sailor off the coast. Local papers began to exude startling information about what a great ball player this fellow was—“ Steamer” Flannigan, capable of hitting ’em a mile, wonderfully fleet of foot and generally a second Ty Cobb. Now, this made it pretty strong, since Dick Cooley knows very well how good Ty Cobb is. Dick was ill one day at Detroit and couldn’t play in the game that day. A gink named Cobb was sent in to sub for him Cooley never got his job back after that. FLANNIGAN IS SENT TO ST. LOUIS CLUB - Well, feverish major league scouts sought Flannagan's release and Colonel Bob Hedges, proprietor of the Browns, beat the others to the great find. It is said that Cooley was sore at Hedge anyway and was glad to make the sale that way. Flannigan reported to the club in due course. Manager George Stovall used him a couple of times and threw up his hands in disgust. Flannigan in the meantime ate thrice daily on the eastern trip, gained eighteen pounds in weight and got into three ball games. Arriving at a seaport town, Flannigan would visit the waterfront, chat with all the sailors and barely get to the ball yard in time to see the game start. Cooley cleaned up $1500 on the sale. Flannigan got fat and than disappeared. He has never been heard of since. It is my opinion that young players to he used as a foundation for building up a ball club must be developed. They cannot be purchased for mere money.

Bad news: @ $9 and they average 2,000 made a day!

Irish coffee

Stanton Delaplane, a travel writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, drank Irish coffee at Shannon Airport, then worked with the Buena Vista Cafe to start serving it on November 10, 1952, and worked with the bar owners Jack Koeppler and George Freeberg to recreate the Irish method for floating the cream on top of the coffee, sampling the drink one night until he nearly passed out. The group also sought help from the city's then mayor, George Christopher, who owned a dairy and suggested that cream aged at least 48 hours would be more apt to float. Delaplane popularized the drink by mentioning it frequently in his travel column. The Cafe has served, by its count, more than 30 million of the drinks.

 

All rights reserved - Copyright 2014© Henri Louis Hirschfeld

All images are exclusive property and may not be copied, downloaded, reproduced, transmitted, manipulated or used in any way without expressed, written permission of the photographer.

This is a Polaroid SX-70 which was taken by legendary photographer Ronn Spencer sometime in 1977. I was manager of the Germs, Gregg had been a writer for the seminal fanzine "Backdoor Man" and had been in Vom and was heading toward The Angry Samoans. Jim (background) was a partner with Ronn and I in White Noise Records. As White Noise, we released the Vom ep and then put out The Avengers "The American in Me" 33ep.

Ronn, Gregg and myself are still very close friends and none of us can remember the occasion during which this photo was taken.

Btw, Pat Smear, the Germs guitarist, always claimed that his father was one of the inventors of Polaroid film, I have no idea whether that is true or not.

My travels around the UK by car for three weeks with my son. June/July 2019 Wales.

 

Day Nine .. A Stop at Caernarfon making our way to Hirael where we are staying the night.

 

Caernarfon is a royal town, community, and port in Gwynedd, Wales.

 

Gwynedd’s county town, home to Wales’s most famous castle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Mighty Caernarfon Castle commands the lion’s share of attention, but the town’s narrow streets and stylishly redeveloped waterfront also merit a visit. The castle, built in the 13th century by Edward I as a royal palace and military fortress, was at the core of a medieval walled town. The Romans left their mark too – 1000 years earlier they constructed their fort of Segontium on the hill above (its foundations still exist). Other attractions include Welsh Highland Railway (which runs for 25 miles to Porthmadog), Hwylfan Fun Centre, Redline Indoor Karting and the scenic Lôn Eifion recreational cycle route. Waterside Doc Fictoria is home to Galeri (contemporary arts complex with theatre and cinema). The Caernarfon Record Office has archives of Gwynedd (documents, images, maps and newspapers) stretching back 400 years. Cae’r Gors at nearby Rhosgadfan was home of Kate Roberts, one of Wales’s most celebrated writers.

For More Info: www.visitsnowdonia.info/caernarfon

Photo taken by Linden Hudson (amateur photographer) in Brussels Belgium in 2010.

 

Who is Linden Hudson?

 

CLASSICBANDS DOT COM said: “According to former roadie David Blayney in his book SHARP DRESSED MEN: sound engineer Linden Hudson co-wrote much of the material on the ZZ Top ELIMINATOR album.” (end quote)

 

(ZZ Top never opted to give Linden credit, which would have been THE decent thing to do. It would have helped Linden's career as well. The band and management worked ruthlessly to take FULL credit for the hugely successful album which Linden had spent a good deal of time working on. Linden works daily to tell this story. Also, the band did not opt to pay Linden, they worked to keep all the money and they treated Linden like dirt. It was abuse. Linden launched a limited lawsuit, brought about using his limited resources which brought limited results and took years. No one should treat the co-writer of their most successful album like this. It's just deeply fucked up.)

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Hear the original ZZ Top ELIMINATOR writing/rehearsal tapes made by Linden Hudson and Billy Gibbons at: youtu.be/2QZ8WUTaS18

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Read Linden's story of the making of the super-famous ZZ Top ELIMINATOR album at: www.flickr.com/people/152350852@N02/

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Follow this Wikipedia link and find Linden's name throughout the article & read the album songwriter credits about halfway down at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminator_%28album%29

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LICKLIBRARY DOT COM (2013 Billy Gibbons interview) ZZ TOP'S BILLY GIBBONS FINALLY ADMITTED: “the Eliminator sessions in 1983 were guided largely by another one of our associates, Linden Hudson, a gifted engineer, during the development of those compositions.” (end quote) (Gibbons admits this after 30 years, but offers Linden no apology or reparations for lack of credit/royalties)

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MUSICRADAR DOT COM (2013 interview with ZZ Top's guitarist Billy Gibbons broke 30 years of silence about Linden Hudson introducing synthesizers into ZZ Top's sound.) Gibbons said: “This was a really interesting turning point. We had befriended somebody who would become an influential associate, a guy named Linden Hudson. He was a gifted songwriter and had production skills that were leading the pack at times. He brought some elements to the forefront that helped reshape what ZZ Top were doing, starting in the studio and eventually to the live stage. Linden had no fear and was eager to experiment in ways that would frighten most bands. But we followed suit, and the synthesizers started to show up on record.” (once again, there was no apology from ZZ Top or Billy Gibbons after this revelation).

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TEXAS MONTHLY MAGAZINE (Dec 1996, By Joe Nick Patoski): "Linden Hudson floated the notion that the ideal dance music had 124 beats per minute; then he and Gibbons conceived, wrote, and recorded what amounted to a rough draft of an album before the band had set foot inside Ardent Studios."

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FROM THE BOOK: SHARP DRESSED MEN - ZZ TOP (By David Blayney) : "Probably the most dramatic development in ZZ Top recording approaches came about as Eliminator was constructed. What had gone on before evolutionary; this change was revolutionary. ZZ Top got what amounted to a new bandsman (Linden) for the album, unknown to the world at large and at first even to Dusty and Frank."

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CNET DOT COM: (question posed to ZZ Top): Sound engineer Linden Hudson was described as a high-tech music teacher on your highly successful "Eliminator" album. How much did the band experiment with electronic instruments prior to that album?

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THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE, MARCH 2018: "Eliminator" had a tremendous impact on us and the people who listen to us," says ZZ Top’s bass player. Common band lore points to production engineer Linden Hudson suggesting that 120 beats per minute was the perfect rock tempo, or "the people's tempo" as it came to be known.

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FROM THE BOOK: SHARP DRESSED MEN - ZZ TOP by David Blayney: (page 227): "...the song LEGS Linden Hudson introduced the pumping synthesizer effect."

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(Search Linden Hudson in the various ZZ Top Wikipedia pages which are related to the ELIMINATOR album and you will find bits about Linden. Also the main ZZ Top Wikipedia page mentions Linden. He's mentioned in at least 7 ZZ Top related Wikipedia pages.)

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FROM THE BOOK: SHARP DRESSED MEN - ZZ TOP By David Blayney: "Linden found himself in the position of being Billy's (Billy Gibbons, ZZ Top guitarist) closest collaborator on Eliminator. In fact, he wound up spending more time on the album than anybody except Billy. While the two of them spent day after day in the studio, they were mostly alone with the equipment and the ideas."

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FROM THE BOOK: BEER DRINKERS & HELL RAISERS: A ZZ TOP GUIDE (By Neil Daniels, released 2014): "Hudson reportedly had a significant role to play during the planning stages of the release (ELIMINATOR)."

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FROM THE BOOK: ZZ TOP - BAD AND WORLDWIDE (ROLLING STONE PRESS, WRITTEN BY DEBORAH FROST): "Linden was always doing computer studies. It was something that fascinated him, like studio technology. He thought he might understand the components of popular songs better if he fed certain data into his computer. It might help him understand what hits (song releases) of any given period share. He first found out about speed; all the songs he studied deviated no more than one beat from 120 beats per minute. Billy immediately started to write some songs with 120 beats per minute. Linden helped out with a couple, like UNDER PRESSURE and SHARP DRESSED MAN. Someone had to help Billy out. Dusty and Frank didn't even like to rehearse much. Their studio absence wasn't really a problem though. The bass and drum parts were easily played with a synthesizer or Linn drum machine." (end quote)

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FROM THE BOOK: "SHARP DRESSED MEN - ZZ TOP" BY DAVID BLAYNEY: "After his quantitative revelations, Linden informally but instantly became ZZ Top's rehearsal hall theoretician, producer, and engineer." (end quote)

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FROM THE BOOK: "ZZ TOP - BAD AND WORLDWIDE" (ROLLING STONE PRESS, BY DEBORAH FROST): "With the release of their ninth album, ELIMINATOR, in 1983, these hairy, unlikely rock heroes had become a pop phenomenon. This had something to do with the discoveries of a young preproduction engineer (Linden Hudson) whose contributions, like those of many associated with the band over the years, were never acknowledged."

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FROM THE BOOK: ​SHARP DRESSED MEN - ZZ TOP (By DAVID BLAYNEY) : "The integral position Linden occupied in the process of building El​iminator was demonstrated eloquently in the case of song Under Pressure. Billy and Linden, the studio wizards, did the whole song all in one afternoon without either the bass player or drummer even knowing it had been written and recorded on a demo tape. Linden synthesized the bass and drums and helped write the lyrics; Billy did the guitars and vocals."

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FROM THE BOOK: "TRES HOMBRES - THE STORY OF ZZ TOP" BY DAVID SINCLAIR (Writer for the Times Of London): "Linden Hudson, the engineer/producer who lived at Beard's house (ZZ's drummer) had drawn their attention to the possibilities of the new recording technology and specifically to the charms of the straight drumming pattern, as used on a programmed drum machine. On ELIMINATOR ZZ Top unveiled a simple new musical combination that cracked open a vast worldwide market.

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FROM THE BOOK: "SHARP DRESS MEN - ZZ TOP" BY DAVID BLAYNEY: "ELIMINATOR went on to become a multi-platinum album, just as Linden had predicted when he and Billy were setting up the 124-beat tempos and arranging all the material. Rolling Stone eventually picked the album as number 39 out of the top 100 of the 80's. Linden Hudson in a fair world shoud have had his name all over ELIMINATOR and gotten the just compensation he deserved. Instead he got ostracized."

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FROM THE BOOK: ​SHARP DRESSED MEN - ZZ TOP by DAVID BLAYNEY: "He (Linden) went back with the boys to 1970 when he was working as a radio disc jocky aliased Jack Smack. He was emcee for a show ZZ did around that time, and even sang an encore tune with the band, perhaps the only person ever to have that honor." (side note: this was ZZ Top's very first show).

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FROM THE BOOK: "SHARP DRESSED MEN - ZZ TOP" BY DAVID BLAYNEY: "Linden remained at Frank's (ZZ Top drummer) place as ZZ's live-in engineer throughout the whole period of ELIMINATOR rehearsals, and was like one of the family... as he (Linden) worked at the controls day after day, watching the album (ELIMINATOR) take shape, his hopes for a big step forward in his production career undoubtably soared. ELIMINATOR marked the first time that ZZ Top was able to rehearse an entire album with the recording studio gadgetry that Billy so loved. With Linden Hudson around all the time, it also was the first time the band could write, rehearse, and record with someone who knew the men and the machines. ZZ Top was free to go musically crazy, but also musically crazy like a fox. Linden made that possible too."

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FROM THE BOOK "ZZ TOP - BAD AND WORLDWIDE" (ROLLING STONE PRESS, BY DEBORAH FROST, WRITER FOR ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE): "... SHARP DRESSED MAN which employed Hudson's 120 beat-per-minute theory. The feel, the enthusiasm, the snappy beat and crisp clean sound propelled ELIMINATOR into the ears and hearts of 5 million people who previously could have cared less about the boogie band of RIO GRANDE MUD."

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THE GREATEST ROCK REBRAND OF ALL TIME (by Jason Miller): "Sound engineer Linden Hudson researched the tempos at which the most popular rock tracks in the charts had been recorded. His data showed that there was something very special about 120 beats to a minute. Gibbons decided to record pretty much the whole of ZZ Top’s new album at that tempo. The result? 1983’s Eliminator. It was named after Gibbons’ Ford Coupé; it had been created through a unique combination of creative collaboration and data mining. And it was about to take the world by storm."

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ULTIMATECLASSICROCK DOT COM: "This new melding of styles was encouraged by Hudson, who served as a kind of pre-producer for ​EL LOCO ... ... Hudson helped construct ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard's home studio, and had lived with him for a time. That led to these initial sessions, and then a closer collaboration on 1983's ​ELIMINATOR.

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FIREDOGLAKE DOT COM: "I like Billy Gibbons' guitar tone quite a lot, but I lost all respect for them after reading how badly they fucked over Linden Hudson (the guy who was the brains behind their move to include synthesizers and co-wrote most of their career-defining Eliminator record)."

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EMAIL FROM A ZZ TOP FAN TO LINDEN (One Of Many): "I write you today about broken hearts, one is mine and one is for you. I have been a ZZ Top fan since I was 6 years old. I purchased ELIMINATOR vinyl from Caldors in Connecticut with the $20 my grandma gave me for my birthday. I will spare the #1 fan epic saga of tee shirts, harassing Noreen at the fan club via phone weekly for years, over 40 shows attended. Posters, non stop conversation about the time I have spent idolizing this band, but more Billy G, as he has seemed to break free of the Lone Wolf shackles and it became more clear this was his baby. In baseball I was Don Mattingly's #1 fan, Hershel Walker in football, Billy Gibbons in music. What do these individuals have in common? They were role models. Not a DUI, not a spousal abuse, not a drug overdose, not a cheater. Until I read your web page. I read Blayney's book around 1992 or so, I was in middle school and I was familiar with your name for a long time. I didn't realize you suffered so greatly or that your involvement was so significant. It pains me to learn my idol not only cheated but did something so wrong to another being. I now know this is where tall tales and fun loving bullshit and poor morals and ethics are distinguished and where I would no longer consider myself to look up to Billy. I love to joke and I love credit but I have always prided myself on ethics and principles... I hold them dear. I wanted to say, the snippet of UNDER PRESSURE you played sounded very new wave and I may like it more than the finished product. Well that's all. You have reached ZZ Top's biggest fan and I can let others know. Bummer. Cheers and good luck. James."​

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VINYLSTYLUS DOT COM: Much of Eliminator was recorded at 124bpm, the tempo that considered perfect for dance music by the band’s associate Linden Hudson. An aspiring songwriter, former DJ and – at the time – drummer Frank Beard’s house-sitter, Hudson’s involvement in the recording of the album would come back to haunt them. Despite assisting Gibbons with the pre-production and developing of the material that would end up on both El Loco and Eliminator, his contribution wasn’t credited when either record was released.

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INFOMORY DOT COM: ‘Eliminator’ is a studio album of the American rock band ZZ Top. It was released on March 23, 1983 and topped the charts worldwide. Its lyrics were co-written by the band’s sound engineer Linden Hudson while the band denied it.

 

Hethersett, Norfolk

  

Interviewer: It's interesting that you link those two words, intelligent and atheistic. Are you saying the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to be an atheist?

 

Dawkins: There's a fair bit of evidence in favor of that equation, yes.

 

- Richard Dawkins, the odious guru of scientific atheism, interviewed at salon.com

  

A song was heard at Christmas

to wake the midnight sky:

a Savior's birth, and peace on earth,

and praise to God on high.

The angels sang at Christmas

with all the hosts above,

and still we sing the newborn King,

his glory and his love.

 

A star was seen at Christmas,

a herald and a sign,

that men might know the way to go

to find the child divine.

The wise men watched at Christmas

in some far eastern land,

and still the wise in starry skies

discern their Maker's hand.

 

A tree was grown at Christmas,

a sapling green and young:

no tinsel bright with candlelight

upon its branches hung.

But he who came at Christmas

our sins and sorrows bore,

and still we name his tree of shame

our life for evermore.

 

A child was born at Christmas

when Christmas first began:

the Lord of all a baby small,

for love of men made man.

For love is ours at Christmas,

and life and light restored,

and so we praise through endless days

the Saviour, Christ the Lord.

 

- Timothy Dudley-Smith, English hymn writer, for the 1978 Christmas card of the Lord Mayor of Norwich.

  

detail from 'Adoration of the Shepherds and Angels' by Anning Bell, 1911. From MY CHRISTMAS SET.

Author: Ellis, Edward Sylvester, 1840-1916

Title: Nathan Todd; or, The Fate of the Sioux Captive

Publisher: George Routledge and Sons

Publication Date: 1861

URL: archive.org/details/04294326.1614.emory.edu

 

Description and Synopsis:

The cover depicts two frontiersmen preparing to shoot a group of Native Americans with horses.

 

Further Notes:

American author, Edward Sylvester Ellis, had a prolific career. He wrote under many pseudonyms, making attribution of all of his works tricky. He wrote books for children and adults and became one of the best known American novelists of his time. Ellis mainly wrote about the American frontier, but he also dabbled in the genres of detective fiction and science fiction (Camp).

 

Works Cited:

Camp, Paul Eugen. "Edward S(ylvester) Ellis." American Writers for Children Before 1900. Ed. Glenn E. Estes. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 42. Literature Resource Center. Web. 29 Jan. 2015. go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1200001115&v=2.1&...

  

I've been working on a new project with Craig and Paul, Hitotoki. Hitotoki will be a literary site featuring personal stories grounded in specific moments and places in Tokyo, told by visitors who have passed through. We are looking for writers for our May 1st launch.

 

Here's the logo, conceived by Paul and Craig, cut from stone by Eiko, and stamped on a kleenex.

My travels around the UK by car for three weeks with my son. June/July 2019 Wales.

 

Day Nine .. A Stop at Caernarfon making our way to Hirael where we are staying the night.

 

Caernarfon is a royal town, community, and port in Gwynedd, Wales.

 

Gwynedd’s county town, home to Wales’s most famous castle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Mighty Caernarfon Castle commands the lion’s share of attention, but the town’s narrow streets and stylishly redeveloped waterfront also merit a visit. The castle, built in the 13th century by Edward I as a royal palace and military fortress, was at the core of a medieval walled town. The Romans left their mark too – 1000 years earlier they constructed their fort of Segontium on the hill above (its foundations still exist). Other attractions include Welsh Highland Railway (which runs for 25 miles to Porthmadog), Hwylfan Fun Centre, Redline Indoor Karting and the scenic Lôn Eifion recreational cycle route. Waterside Doc Fictoria is home to Galeri (contemporary arts complex with theatre and cinema). The Caernarfon Record Office has archives of Gwynedd (documents, images, maps and newspapers) stretching back 400 years. Cae’r Gors at nearby Rhosgadfan was home of Kate Roberts, one of Wales’s most celebrated writers.

For More Info: www.visitsnowdonia.info/caernarfon

Key West (Spanish: Cayo Hueso) is an island in the Straits of Florida, within the U.S. state of Florida. Together with all or parts of the separate islands of Dredgers Key, Fleming Key, Sunset Key, and the northern part of Stock Island, it constitutes the City of Key West.

 

The Island of Key West is about 4 miles (6 kilometers) long and 1 mile (2 km) wide, with a total land area of 4.2 square miles (11 km2). It lies at the southernmost end of U.S. Route 1, the longest north–south road in the United States. Key West is about 95 miles (153 km) north of Cuba at their closest points. It is also 130 miles (210 km) southwest of Miami by air, about 165 miles (266 km) by road, and 106 miles (171 km) north-northeast of Havana.

 

The City of Key West is the county seat of Monroe County, which includes a majority of the Florida Keys and part of the Everglades. The total land area of the city is 5.6 square miles (14.5 km2). The official city motto is "One Human Family".

 

Key West is the southernmost city in the contiguous United States and the westernmost island connected by highway in the Florida Keys. Duval Street, its main street, is 1.1 miles (1.8 km) in length in its 14-block-long crossing from the Gulf of Mexico to the Straits of Florida and the Atlantic Ocean. Key West is the southern terminus of U.S. Route 1, State Road A1A, the East Coast Greenway and, before 1935, the Florida East Coast Railway. Key West is a port of call for many passenger cruise ships. The Key West International Airport provides airline service. Naval Air Station Key West is an important year-round training site for naval aviation due to the tropical weather, which is also the reason Key West was chosen as the site of President Harry S. Truman's Winter White House. The central business district is located along Duval Street and includes much of the northwestern corner of the island.

 

At various times before the 19th century, people who were related or subject to the Calusa and the Tequesta inhabited Key West. The last Native American residents of Key West were Calusa refugees who were taken to Cuba when Florida was transferred from Spain to Great Britain in 1763.

 

Cayo Hueso (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈkaʝo ˈweso]) is the original Spanish name for the island of Key West. It literally means "bone cay", cay referring to a low island or reef. It is said that the island was littered with the remains (bones) of prior native inhabitants, who used the isle as a communal graveyard. This island was the westernmost Key with a reliable supply of water.

 

Between 1763, when Great Britain took control of Florida from Spain, and 1821, when the United States took possession of Florida from Spain, there were few or no permanent inhabitants anywhere in the Florida Keys. Cubans and Bahamians regularly visited the Keys, the Cubans primarily to fish, while the Bahamians fished, caught turtles, cut hardwood timber, and salvaged wrecks. Smugglers and privateers also used the Keys for concealment. In 1766 the British governor of East Florida recommended that a post be set up on Key West to improve control of the area, but nothing came of it. During both the British and Spanish periods no nation exercised de facto control. The Bahamians apparently set up camps in the Keys that were occupied for months at a time, and there were rumors of permanent settlements in the Keys by 1806 or 1807, but the locations are not known. Fishermen from New England started visiting the Keys after the end of the War of 1812, and may have briefly settled on Key Vaca in 1818.

 

In 1815, the Spanish governor of Cuba in Havana deeded the island of Key West to Juan Pablo Salas, an officer of the Royal Spanish Navy Artillery posted in Saint Augustine, Florida. After Florida was transferred to the United States in 1821, Salas was so eager to sell the island that he sold it twice – first for a sloop valued at $575 to a General John Geddes, a former governor of South Carolina, and then to a U.S. businessman John W. Simonton, during a meeting in a Havana café on January 19, 1822, for the equivalent of $2,000 in pesos in 1821. Geddes tried in vain to secure his rights to the property before Simonton who, with the aid of some influential friends in Washington, was able to gain clear title to the island. Simonton had wide-ranging business interests in Mobile, Alabama. He bought the island because a friend, John Whitehead, had drawn his attention to the opportunities presented by the island's strategic location. John Whitehead had been stranded in Key West after a shipwreck in 1819 and he had been impressed by the potential offered by the deep harbor of the island. The island was indeed considered the "Gibraltar of the West" because of its strategic location on the 90-mile (140 km)–wide deep shipping lane, the Straits of Florida, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

 

On March 25, 1822, Lt. Commander Matthew C. Perry sailed the schooner USS Shark to Key West and planted the U.S. flag, claiming the Keys as United States property. No protests were made over the American claim on Key West, so the Florida Keys became the de facto property of the United States.

 

After claiming the Florida Keys for the United States, Perry renamed Cayo Hueso (Key West) to Thompson's Island for Secretary of the Navy Smith Thompson, and the harbor Port Rodgers in honor of War of 1812 hero and President of the Navy Supervisors Board John Rodgers. In 1823, Commodore David Porter of the United States Navy West Indies Anti-Pirate Squadron took charge of Key West, which he ruled as military dictator under martial law. The United States Navy gave Porter the mission of countering piracy and the slave trade in the Key West area.

 

Soon after his purchase, John Simonton subdivided the island into plots and sold three undivided quarters of each plot to:

 

John Mountain and U.S. Consul John Warner, who quickly resold their quarter to Pardon C. Greene, who took up residence on the island. Greene is the only one of the four "founding fathers" to establish himself permanently on the island, where he became quite prominent as head of P.C. Greene and Company. He was a member of the city council and also served briefly as mayor. He died in 1838 at the age of 57.

John Whitehead, his friend who had advised him to buy Key West. John Whitehead lived in Key West for only eight years. He became a partner in the firm of P.C. Greene and Company from 1824 to 1827. A lifelong bachelor, he left the island for good in 1832. He came back only once, during the Civil War in 1861, and died the next year.

John Fleeming (nowadays spelled Fleming). John W.C. Fleeming was English-born and was active in mercantile business in Mobile, Alabama, where he befriended John Simonton. Fleeming spent only a few months in Key West in 1822 and left for Massachusetts, where he married. He returned to Key West in 1832 with the intention of developing salt manufacturing on the island but died the same year at the age of 51.

Simonton spent the winter in Key West and the summer in Washington, where he lobbied hard for the development of the island and to establish a naval base on the island, both to take advantage of the island's strategic location and to bring law and order to the town. He died in 1854.

 

The names of the four "founding fathers" of modern Key West were given to main arteries of the island when it was first platted in 1829 by William Adee Whitehead, John Whitehead's younger brother. That first plat and the names used remained mostly intact and are still in use today. Duval Street, the island's main street, is named after Florida's first territorial governor, William Pope Duval, who served between 1822 and 1834 as the longest-serving governor in Florida's U.S. history.

 

William Whitehead became chief editorial writer for the Enquirer, a local newspaper, in 1834. He preserved copies of his newspaper as well as copies from the Key West Gazette, its predecessor. He later sent those copies to the Monroe County clerk for preservation, which gives us a view of life in Key West in the early days (1820–1840).

 

In the 1830s, Key West was the richest city per capita in the United States.

 

In 1846, the city suffered severely from the 1846 Havana hurricane.

 

In 1852 the first Catholic Church, St. Mary's Star-Of-The-Sea, was built. The year 1864 became a landmark for the church in South Florida when five Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary arrived from Montreal, Canada, and established the first Catholic school in South Florida. At the time it was called Convent of Mary Immaculate. The school is still operating today and is now known as Mary Immaculate Star of the Sea School.

 

During the American Civil War, while Florida seceded and joined the Confederate States of America, Key West remained in U.S. Union hands because of the naval base. Most locals were sympathetic to the Confederacy, however, and many flew Confederate flags over their homes. However, Key West was also home to a large free black population. This population grew during the war as more enslaved black people fled from their masters and came under the relative safety of the Union garrison there. Fort Zachary Taylor, constructed from 1845 to 1866, was an important Key West outpost during the Civil War. Construction began in 1861 on two other forts, East and West Martello Towers, which served as side armories and batteries for the larger fort. When completed, they were connected to Fort Taylor by railroad tracks for movement of munitions. Early in 1864, 900 men from the 2nd United States Colored Troops (USCT) arrived in Key West as replacements for the 47th Pennsylvania Volunteers. Many of these men would see action in southern Florida and the 2nd USCT would become "one of the most active" black regiments in Florida. Fort Jefferson, located about 68 miles (109 km) from Key West on Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas, served after the Civil War as the prison for Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, convicted of conspiracy for setting the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln.

 

In the 19th century, major industries included wrecking, fishing, turtling, and salt manufacturing. From 1830 to 1861, Key West was a major center of U.S. salt production, harvesting the commodity from the sea (via receding tidal pools) rather than from salt mines.[26] After the outbreak of the Civil War, Union troops shut down the salt industry after Confederate sympathizers smuggled the product into the South.[26] Salt production resumed at the end of the war, but the industry was destroyed by an 1876 hurricane and never recovered, in part because of new salt mines on the mainland.

 

During the Ten Years' War (an unsuccessful Cuban war for independence in the 1860s and 1870s), many Cubans sought refuge in Key West. Several cigar factories relocated to the city from Cuba, and Key West quickly became a major producer of cigars. A fire on April 1, 1886, that started at a coffee shop next to the San Carlos Institute and spread out of control, destroyed 18 cigar factories and 614 houses and government warehouses. Some factory owners chose not to rebuild and instead moved their operations to the new community of Ybor City in Tampa, leading to a slow decline in the cigar industry in Key West. Still, Key West remained the largest and wealthiest city in Florida at the end of the 1880s.

 

USS Maine sailed from Key West on her fateful visit to Havana, where she blew up and sank in Havana Harbor, igniting the Spanish–American War. Crewmen from the ship are buried in Key West, and the Navy investigation into the blast occurred at the Key West Customs House.

 

In October 1909, Key West was devastated by the 1909 Florida Keys hurricane. Further damage was suffered the following year in the 1910 Cuba hurricane.

 

Key West was relatively isolated until 1912, when it was connected to the Florida mainland via the Overseas Railway extension of Henry M. Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway (FEC). Flagler created a landfill at Trumbo Point for his railyards.

 

The 1919 Florida Keys hurricane caused catastrophic damage to the city.

 

On December 25, 1921, Manuel Cabeza was lynched by members of the Ku Klux Klan for living with a black woman.

 

Pan American Airlines was founded in Key West, originally to fly visitors to Havana, in 1926. The airline contracted with the United States Postal Service in 1927 to deliver mail to and from Cuba and the United States. The mail route was known as the Key West, Florida – Havana Mail Route.

 

The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 destroyed much of the Overseas Railway and killed hundreds of residents, including around 400 World War I veterans who were living in camps and working on federal road and mosquito-control projects in the Middle Keys. The FEC could not afford to restore the railroad.

 

The U.S. government then rebuilt the rail route as an automobile highway, completed in 1938, built atop many of the footings of the railroad. It became an extension of U.S. Route 1. The portion of U.S. 1 through the Keys is called the Overseas Highway. Franklin Roosevelt toured the road in 1939.

 

During World War II, more than 14,000 ships came through the island's harbor. The population, because of an influx of soldiers, sailors, laborers, and tourists, sometimes doubled or even tripled at times during the war.

 

Starting in 1946, US President Harry S. Truman established a working vacation home in Key West, the Harry S. Truman Little White House, where he would spend 175 days of his presidency.

 

In 1948, Key West suffered damage from two hurricanes within as many months, from the September 1948 Florida hurricane then the 1948 Miami hurricane.

 

Prior to the Cuban revolution of 1959, there were regular ferry and airplane services between Key West and Havana.

 

John F. Kennedy was to use "90 miles from Cuba" extensively in his speeches against Fidel Castro. Kennedy himself visited Key West a month after the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

 

In 1982, the city of Key West briefly asserted independence as the Conch Republic as a protest over a United States Border Patrol blockade. This blockade was set up on US 1, where the northern end of the Overseas Highway meets the mainland at Florida City. A traffic jam of 17 miles (27 km) ensued while the Border Patrol stopped every car leaving the Keys, supposedly searching for illegal immigrants attempting to enter the mainland United States. This paralyzed the Florida Keys, which rely heavily on the tourism industry. Flags, T-shirts and other merchandise representing the Conch Republic are still popular souvenirs for visitors to Key West, and the Conch Republic Independence Celebration—including parades and parties—is celebrated annually, on April 23.

 

In 1998 Hurricane Georges damaged the city.

 

In 2017, Hurricane Irma caused substantial damage with wind and flooding, killing three people.

 

The Florida Keys are a coral cay archipelago off the southern coast of Florida, forming the southernmost part of the continental United States. They begin at the southeastern coast of the Florida peninsula, about 15 miles (24 km) south of Miami and extend in a gentle arc south-southwest and then westward to Key West, the westernmost of the inhabited islands, and on to the uninhabited Dry Tortugas. The islands lie along the Florida Straits, dividing the Atlantic Ocean to the east from the Gulf of Mexico to the northwest, and defining one edge of Florida Bay. The southern part of Key West is 93 miles (150 km) from Cuba. The Keys are located between about 24.3 and 25.5 degrees North latitude.

 

More than 95% of the land area lies in Monroe County, but a small portion extends northeast into Miami-Dade County, such as Totten Key. The total land area is 137.3 square miles (356 km2). At the 2010 census the population was 73,090, with an average density of 532.34 per square mile (205.54/km2), although much of the population is concentrated in a few areas of much higher density, such as the city of Key West, which has 32% of the Keys' total population. The 2014 Census population estimate was 77,136. The 2020 Census population estimate was 82,874.

 

The city of Key West is the county seat of Monroe County. The county consists of a section on the mainland which is almost entirely in Everglades National Park, and the Keys islands from Key Largo to Dry Tortugas National Park.

 

The Keys were originally inhabited by the Calusa and Tequesta tribes and were charted by Juan Ponce de León in 1513. De León named the islands Los Martires ("The Martyrs"), as they looked like suffering men from a distance. "Key" is derived from the Spanish word cayo, meaning small island. For many years, Key West was the largest town in Florida, and it grew prosperous on wrecking revenues. The isolated outpost was well located for trade with Cuba and the Bahamas and was on the main trade route from New Orleans. Improved navigation led to fewer shipwrecks, and Key West went into a decline in the late nineteenth century.

 

The Keys were long accessible only by water. This changed with the completion of Henry Flagler's Overseas Railway in the early 1910s. Flagler, a major developer of Florida's Atlantic coast, extended his Florida East Coast Railway down to Key West with an ambitious series of oversea railroad trestles. Three hurricanes disrupted the project in 1906, 1909, and 1910.

 

The strongest hurricane to strike the U.S. made landfall near Islamorada in the Upper Keys on Labor Day, Monday, September 2, 1935. Winds were estimated to have gusted to 200 mph (320 km/h), raising a storm surge more than 17.5 feet (5.3 m) above sea level that washed over the islands. More than 400 people were killed, though some estimates place the number of deaths at more than 600.

 

The Labor Day hurricane was one of only four hurricanes to make landfall at Category 5 strength on the U.S. coast since reliable weather records began (about 1850). The other storms were Hurricane Camille (1969), Hurricane Andrew (1992), and Hurricane Michael (2018).

 

In 1935, new bridges were under construction to connect a highway through the entire Keys. Hundreds of World War I veterans working on the roadway as part of a government relief program were housed in non-reinforced buildings in three construction camps in the Upper Keys. When the evacuation train failed to reach the camps before the storm, more than 200 veterans perished. Their deaths caused anger and charges of mismanagement that led to a Congressional investigation.

 

The storm also ended the 23-year run of the Overseas Railway; the damaged tracks were never rebuilt, and the Overseas Highway (U.S. Highway 1) replaced the railroad as the main transportation route from Miami to Key West.

 

One of the longest bridges when it was built, the Seven Mile Bridge connects Knight's Key (part of the city of Marathon in the Middle Keys) to Little Duck Key in the Lower Keys. The piling-supported concrete bridge is 35,862 ft (10,931 m) or 6.79 miles (10.93 km) long. The current bridge bypasses Pigeon Key, a small island that housed workers building Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway in the 1900s, that the original Seven Mile Bridge crossed. A 2.2-mile (3.5 km) section of the old bridge remains for access to the island, although it was closed to vehicular traffic on March 4, 2008. The aging structure has been deemed unsafe by the Florida Department of Transportation. Costly repairs, estimated to be as much as $34 million, were expected to begin in July 2008. Monroe County was unable to secure a $17 million loan through the state infrastructure bank, delaying work for at least a year. On June 14, 2008, the old bridge section leading to Pigeon Key was closed to fishing as well. While still open to pedestrians—walking, biking and jogging—if the bridge were closed altogether, only a ferry subsidized by FDOT and managed by the county would transport visitors to the island.

 

After the destruction of the Keys railway by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, the railroad bridges, including the Seven Mile Bridge, were converted to automobile roadways. This roadway, U.S. Highway 1, became the Overseas Highway that runs from Key Largo south to Key West. Today this highway allows travel through the tropical islands of the Florida Keys and the viewing of exotic plants and animals found nowhere else on the US mainland and the largest coral reef chain in the United States.

 

Following the Cuban Revolution, many Cubans emigrated to South Florida. Key West traditionally had strong links with its neighbor ninety miles south by water, and large numbers of Cubans settled there. The Keys still attract Cubans leaving their home country, and stories of "rafters" coming ashore are not uncommon.

 

In 1982, the United States Border Patrol established a roadblock and inspection points on US Highway 1, stopping all northbound traffic returning to the mainland at Florida City, to search vehicles for illegal drugs and undocumented immigrants. The Key West City Council repeatedly complained about the roadblocks, which were a major inconvenience for travellers, and hurt the Keys' important tourism industry.

 

After various unsuccessful complaints and attempts to get a legal injunction against the blockade failed in federal court in Miami, on April 23, 1982, Key West mayor Dennis Wardlow and the city council declared the independence of the city of Key West, calling it the "Conch Republic". After one minute of secession, he (as "Prime Minister") surrendered to an officer of the Key West Naval Air Station (NAS) and requested US$1,000,000,000 in "foreign aid".

 

The stunt succeeded in generating great publicity for the Keys' plight, and the inspection station roadblock was removed. The idea of the Conch Republic has provided a new source of revenue for the Keys by way of tourist keepsake sales, and the Conch Republic has participated in later protests.

 

The northern and central sections of the Florida Keys are the exposed portions of an ancient coral reef, the Key Largo Limestone. The northernmost island arising from the ancient reef formation is Elliott Key, in Biscayne National Park. North of Elliott Key are several small transitional keys, composed of sand built up around small areas of exposed ancient reef. Further north, Key Biscayne and places north are barrier islands, built up of sand. The islands in the southwestern part of the chain, from Big Pine Key to the Marquesas Keys, are exposed areas of Miami Limestone.

 

The Florida Keys have taken their present form as the result of the drastic changes in sea level associated with recent glaciations or ice ages. Beginning some 130,000 years ago the Sangamonian Stage raised sea levels about 25 feet (7.6 m) feet above the current level. All of southern Florida was covered by a shallow sea. Several parallel lines of reef formed along the edge of the submerged Florida Platform, stretching south and then west from the present Miami area to what is now the Dry Tortugas. This reef formed the Key Largo Limestone that is exposed on the surface from Soldier Key (midway between Key Biscayne and Elliott Key) to the southeast portion of Big Pine Key and the Newfound Harbor Keys. The types of coral that formed Key Largo Limestone can be identified on the exposed surface of these keys. Minor fluctuations in sea level exposed parts of the reef, subjecting it to erosion. Acidic water, which can result from decaying vegetation, dissolves limestone. Some of the dissolved limestone redeposited as a denser cap rock, which can be seen as outcrops overlying the Key Largo and Miami limestones throughout the Keys. The limestone that eroded from the reef formed oolites in the shallow sea behind the reef, and together with the skeletal remains of bryozoans, formed the Miami Limestone that is the current surface bedrock of the lower Florida peninsula and the lower keys from Big Pine Key to Key West. To the west of Key West the ancient reef is covered by recent calcareous sand. While the islands of the upper and middle keys, consisting of Key Largo Limestone, form a long narrow arc, the islands of the lower keys are perpendicular to the line of that arc. This configuration arose from an ancient tidal-bar system, in which tidal channels cut through a submerged oolitic deposit. The bars lithified into Miami Limestone, and with changes in sea level are presently exposed as the islands, while the channels between the bars now separate the islands.

 

Just offshore of the Florida Keys along the edge of the Florida Straits is the Florida Reef (also known as the Florida Reef Tract). The Florida Reef extends 170 miles (270 km) from Fowey Rocks just east of Soldier Key to just south of the Marquesas Keys. It is the third-largest barrier reef system in the world.

 

The climate and environment of the Florida Keys are closer to that of the Caribbean than the rest of Florida, though unlike the Caribbean's volcanic islands, the Keys were built by plants and animals. The Upper Keys islands are composed of sandy-type accumulations of limestone grains produced by plants and marine organisms. The Lower Keys are the remnants of large coral reefs, which became fossilized and exposed when the sea level dropped.

 

The natural habitats of the Keys are upland forests, inland wetlands and shoreline zones. Soil ranges from sand to marl to rich, decomposed leaf litter. In some places, "caprock" (the eroded surface of coral formations) covers the ground. Rain falling through leaf debris becomes acidic and dissolves holes in the limestone, where soil accumulates and trees root.

 

The Florida Keys have distinctive plant and animals species, some found nowhere else in the United States, as the Keys define the northern extent of their ranges. The climate also allows many imported plants to thrive. Some exotic species which arrived as landscape plants now invade and threaten natural areas.

 

The native flora of the Keys is diverse, including members of both temperate families, such as red maple (Acer rubrum), slash pine (Pinus elliottii var. densa) and oaks (Quercus spp.), growing at the southern end of their ranges, and tropical families, including mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni), gumbo limbo (Bursera simaruba), stoppers (Eugenia spp.), Jamaican dogwood (Piscidia piscipula), and many others, which grow only in tropical climates. Several types of palms are native to the Florida Keys, including the Florida thatch palm (Thrinax radiata), which grows to its greatest size in Florida on the islands of the Keys.

 

The Keys are also home to unique animal species, including the American crocodile, Key deer (protected by the National Key Deer Refuge), and the Key Largo woodrat. The Keys are part of the northernmost range of the American crocodile, which is found throughout the Neotropics. The Key Largo Woodrat is found only in the northern part of its namesake island and is a focus of management activities in Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge. About 70 miles (110 km) west of Key West is Dry Tortugas National Park.

 

The waters surrounding the Keys are part of a protected area known as the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

 

U.S. Highway 1, the "Overseas Highway", runs over most of the inhabited islands of the Florida Keys. The islands are listed in order from southwest to north. Mile markers are listed for keys that the Overseas Highway runs across or near:

Dry Tortugas

Loggerhead Key

Marquesas Keys

Sunset Key

Wisteria Island

Key West (MM 0-4)

Fleming Key

Sigsbee Park (off to the north at MM 2¾)

Stock Island (MM 5)

Raccoon Key (off to the north at MM 5¼)

Boca Chica Key (MM 7-8)

Rockland Key (MM 9)

East Rockland Key (MM 9½)

Big Coppitt Key (MM 10)

Geiger Key (off to the south at MM 10¾)

Shark Key (off to the north at MM 11¼)

Saddlebunch Keys (MM 12-16)

Lower Sugarloaf Key (MM 17)

Park Key (MM 18)

Sugarloaf Key (MM 19-20)

Cudjoe Key (MM 21-23)

Knockemdown Key

Summerland Key (MM 24-25)

Ramrod Key (MM 27)

Middle Torch Key, Big Torch Key (off to the north at MM 27¾)

Little Torch Key (MM 28½)

Big Pine Key (MM 30-32)

No Name Key

Scout Key (MM 34-35), formerly known as West Summerland Key

Bahia Honda Key (MM 37-38)

Ohio Key (MM 38¾), also known as Sunshine Key

Missouri Key (MM 39¼)

Little Duck Key (MM 39¾)

 

The Seven Mile Bridge (MM 40-46¾) separates the Lower Keys from the Middle Keys:

Pigeon Key (off to the north near MM 45; access is at MM 46¾)

Knights Key (MM 47)

Vaca Key (MM 48-53)

Boot Key (off to the south at MM 48; bridge closed)

Fat Deer Key (MM 53¼-55)

Shelter Key (off to the south at MM 53¾)

Long Point Key (MM 56)

Crawl Key (MM 56½)

Grassy Key (MM 58-60)

 

(Knights, Vaca, Boot, Long Point, Crawl, and Grassy Keys, as well as most of Fat Deer Key, are incorporated in the city of Marathon. The remaining portion of Fat Deer Key and most of Shelter Key are part of Key Colony Beach.):

Duck Key (MM 61)

Conch Key (MM 62-63)

 

The Long Key Bridge (MM 63¼-65¼) separates the Middle Keys from the Upper Keys:

Long Key (MM 66-70), formerly known as Rattlesnake Key

Fiesta Key (off to the north at MM 70)

Craig Key (MM 72)

Lower Matecumbe Key (MM 74-77)

Lignumvitae Key

Indian Key

Indian Key Fill (MM 79)

Tea Table (MM 79½)

Upper Matecumbe Key (MM 80-83)

Windley Key (MM 85)

Plantation Key (MM 86-90)

 

(Lower Matecumbe through Plantation Keys are incorporated as Islamorada, Village of Islands. The "towns" of Key Largo, North Key Largo and Tavernier, all on the island of Key Largo, are not incorporated.):

Key Largo (MM 91-107)

Tavernier Key

Rodriguez Key

 

All keys north of Broad Creek are in Biscayne National Park and Miami-Dade County. The following are "true" Florida Keys (exposed ancient coral reefs):

Old Rhodes Key

Totten Key

Reid Key

Rubicon Keys

Adams Key

Elliott Key

 

The following are "transitional keys", made of exposed ancient reef surrounded by sand:

Sands Key

Boca Chita Key

Ragged Keys

Soldier Key

Key Biscayne is not one of the Florida Keys, but the southernmost of the barrier islands along the Atlantic coast of Florida.

 

French postcard in the Entr'acte series by Éditions Asphodèle, Mâcon, no. 003/86. Collection: B. Courtel / D.R. Doris Day, Bill Philips, and Frank Flanagan on the set of Lucky me (Jack Donohue, 1954). Caption: On Doris Day's face, make-up artist Bill Philips (left) makes a final touch-up and cinematographer Frank Flanagan (right) measures the light intensity for a scene in preparation.

 

American actress and singer Doris Day (1922-2019) sang with several big bands before going solo in 1947. In the 1950s, she made a series of popular film musicals, including Calamity Jane (1953) and The Pajama Game (1957). With Rock Hudson, she starred in the box office hit Pillow Talk (1959). On TV, she starred in the sitcom The Doris Day Show (1968-1973).

 

Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was born in 1922, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Alma Sophia (Welz), a housewife, and William Joseph Kappelhoff, a music teacher and choirmaster. Her mother named her after her favourite silent film star, Doris Kenyon. She had two brothers, Richard, who died before she was born and Paul, a few years older. For many years it was uncertain whether she was born in 1922 or 1924, with Day herself reportedly believing her birth year was the latter and giving her age accordingly. It wasn't until 3 April 2017, her 95th, not 93rd, birthday, that her birth certificate was found by the Associated Press, which confirmed she was born in 1922. Her parents divorced while she was still a child and she lived with her mother. Like most little girls, Doris liked to dance. At fourteen, she formed a dance act with a boy, Jerry Doherty, and they won $500 in a local talent contest. She and Jerry took a brief trip to Hollywood to test the waters. They felt they could succeed, so she and Jerry returned to Cincinnati with the intention of packing and making a permanent move to Hollywood. Tragically, the night before Doris was to move to Hollywood, her car was hit by a train and she badly injured her right leg. The accident ended the possibility of a dancing career. She spent her next years wheelchair-bound, but during this time began singing along with the radio. Observing her daughter sing Alma decided Doris should have singing lessons. She engaged a teacher, Grace Raine. After three lessons, Raine told Alma that young Doris had "tremendous potential". Raine was so impressed that she gave Doris three lessons a week for the price of one. Years later, Day said that Raine had the biggest effect on her singing style and career. At age 17, Day had her first professional jobs as a vocalist, on the WLW radio program 'Carlin's Carnival', and in a local restaurant, Charlie Yee's Shanghai Inn. While performing for the radio, she was approached by band leader Barney Rapp. He felt that her name, Kappelhoff, was too harsh and awkward and that she should change her name to something more pleasant. The name 'Day' was suggested by Rapp from one of the songs in Doris' repertoire, 'Day by Day'. She didn't like the name at first, feeling that it sounded too much like a burlesque performer. While she was performing in Barney Rapp's band, she met trombonist Al Jorden, and they married in 1941. The marriage was extremely unhappy and there were reports of Jordan's alcoholism and abuse of the young star. They divorced within two years, not long after the birth of their son Terrence Jorden called Terry. Despondent and feeling his life had little meaning after the much publicised divorce, Jorden later committed suicide. After working with Rapp, Day worked with bandleaders Jimmy James, Bob Crosby, and Les Brown. The years touring with Les Brown & His Band of Renown, she later called 'the happiest times in my life'. In 1941, Day appeared as a singer in three Soundies (three-minute film clips containing a song, dance and/or band or orchestral number) with the Les Brown band. Her first hit recording was 'Sentimental Journey' in 1945. It became an anthem of the desire of World War II demobilising troops to return home. In 1946, Doris married saxophone player and former child actor George Weidler, but this union lasted less than a year. After leaving Brown to embark on a solo career, she recorded more than 650 songs from 1947 to 1967. Day's agent talked her into taking a screen test at Warner Bros. The executives there liked what they saw and signed her to a contract. Her first starring role was in Romance on the High Seas (Michael Curtiz, Busby Berkeley, 1948), with Jack Carson and Janis Paige. The next year, she made two more films, My Dream Is Yours (Michael Curtiz, 1949) and It's a Great Feeling (David Butler, 1949). Audiences took to her beauty, terrific singing voice and bubbly personality, and she turned in fine performances in the films she made - in addition to several hit records.

 

Doris Day made three films for Warner Bros. in 1950 and five more in 1951. She co-starred with Gordon MacRae in five nostalgic period musicals: Tea for Two (David Butler, 1950), The West Point Story (Roy Del Ruth, 1950) with James Cagney and Virginia Mayo, On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951), Starlift (Roy Del Ruth, 1951), and By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler, 1953). Her most commercially successful film for Warner was I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), which broke box-office records of 20 years. The film is a musical biography of lyricist Gus Kahn, played by Danny Thomas. It was Day's fourth film directed by Michael Curtiz. One of her few dramatic roles was in Storm Warning (Stuart Heisler, 1951) with Ginger Rogers and Ronald Reagan. She briefly dated Ronald Reagan - with whom she also co-starred in The Winning Team (1952) - shortly after his divorce from Jane Wyman when she and Reagan were contract players at Warner Bros. Doris Day met and married Martin Melcher in 1951. He adopted her young son Terry and became her manager. In 1953, Doris starred in Calamity Jane (David Butler, 1953), which was a major hit. She performed 'Secret Love' in the film, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Several more hits followed including Lucky Me (Jack Donohue, 1954), Love Me or Leave Me (Charles Vidor, 1955) with James Cagney. Alfred Hitchcock had seen her dramatic role in Storm Warning and choose her to play Jo McKenna opposite James Stewart in his re-make The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). In the film she sang the song 'Que Será, Será! (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)', which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became an evergreen. In 1959, Day entered her most successful phase as a film actress with a series of romantic comedies. Her best-known film is probably the first one, Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959) with Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. For her performance she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Leading Actress. She later co-starred with Hudson and Randall again in Lover Come Back (Delbert Mann, 1961), and Send Me No Flowers (Norman Jewison, 1964). In all three, Day and Hudson played love interests while Randall played Hudson's close friend.

 

Doris Day started out the 1960s with the hit Please Don't Eat the Daisies (Charles Walters, 1960) in which her co-star was David Niven. In 1962, Day appeared with Cary Grant in the comedy That Touch of Mink (Delbert Mann, 1962), the first film in history ever to gross $1 million in one theatre (Radio City Music Hall). During 1960 and the 1962 to 1964 period, she ranked number one at the box office. Despite her successes at the box office, the late 1950s and early 1960s were a difficult period for Day. In 1958, her brother Paul had died. Around this time, her husband, who had also taken charge of her career, made deals for her to star in films she didn't really care about, which led to a bout with exhaustion. The 1960s weren't to be a repeat of the previous busy decade. She made less films, but the ones she did make were successful: Do Not Disturb (Ralph Levy, 1965) with Rod Taylor, and The Glass Bottom Boat (Frank Tashlin, 1966). By the late 1960s, the sexual revolution of the baby boomer generation had refocused public attitudes about sex. Times had changed, but Day's films had not. Where Were You When the Lights Went Out? (Hy Averback, 1968) and With Six You Get Eggroll (Howard Morris, 1968) with Brian Keith, would be her final features. In 1968, her husband Martin Melcher suddenly died. Between 1956 and his death, he had produced 18 of her films. A shocked Day discovered she was millions of dollars in debt. Melcher and his business partner Jerome Bernard Rosenthal had squandered virtually all of her considerable earnings, but she was eventually awarded $22 million by the courts in a case against Rosenthal.

 

After Martin Melcher's death, Doris Day never made another film. She professed not to have known that he had negotiated a multimillion-dollar deal with CBS to launch her own TV series, The Doris Day Show, the following fall. Day hated the idea of performing on television, but felt obligated to do it and needed the work to help pay off her debts. The show became successful and lasted from 1968 until 1973. The Doris Day Show was a light and fluffy sitcom, which changed formats and producers almost every season. Originally it was about widow Doris Martin and her two young sons (Philip Brown and Todd Stark) who left the big city for the quiet and peace of her family's ranch, which was run by her dad Buck (Denver Pyle) and ranchhand Leroy (James Hampton). Later Doris, Buck and sons Billy and Toby moved to San Francisco, where Doris got a job as a secretary to bumbling magazine publisher Michael Nicholson (McLean Stevenson). In Season Three, the Martin family moved into an apartment above the Paluccis' Italian restaurant, and Doris began writing features for Today's World magazine. Finally, the kids, family, Nicholson, the Paluccis' and all other cast members vanished, and Doris became a single staff writer for Today's World, where her new boss was Cy Bennett (John Dehner). After her series went off the air, Doris Day only made occasional TV appearances. She did two television specials, The Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff Special (1971) and Doris Day Today (1975). She also appeared on the John Denver TV show (1974). In 1976, she married for the fourth time, to Barry Comden, 12 years her junior. They had met at the Beverly Hills Old World Restaurant where he was the maitre d'. The couple divorced in 1982. Comden complained that Day preferred the company of her dogs more than him. From then on Doris devoted her life to animals. During the location filming of The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) she had seen how camels, goats and other 'animal extras' in a marketplace scene were being treated. It began her lifelong commitment to prevent animal abuse. For years, she ran the Doris Day Animal League in Carmel, a resort town a little south of San Francisco. In the 1985–1986 season, Day returned to the screen with her own television talk show, Doris Day's Best Friends, on CBN. The network cancelled the show after 26 episodes, despite the worldwide publicity it received. Much of that came from her interview with Rock Hudson, in which a visibly ill Hudson was showing the first public symptoms of AIDS. Hudson would die from the syndrome a year later. Her son Terry Melcher had become a music producer and composer who worked with The Beach Boys, Bobby Darin and The Byrds. With Terry and a partner, she co-owned the Cypress Inn in Carmel, a small inn built in a Mediterranean motif. Terry died of melanoma in 2004, aged 62. In June 2004 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. She did not attend the White House award ceremony because of her intense fear of flying. In 2006, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In a rare interview with The Hollywood Reporter on 4 April 2019, a day after her 97th birthday, Day talked about her work on the Doris Day Animal Foundation, founded in 1978. On the question of what her favourite film was, she answered Calamity Jane: "I was such a tomboy growing up, and she was such a fun character to play. Of course, the music was wonderful, too—'Secret Love,' especially, is such a beautiful song." As per her last wishes, there will be no funeral or graveside service. Doris Day will be cremated and her ashes scattered in Carmel.

 

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

St Davids Cathedral is situated in St Davids, Britain's smallest city, in the county of Pembrokeshire, near the most westerly point of Wales.

 

The monastic community was founded by Saint David, Abbot of Menevia, who died in 589. Between 645 and 1097, the community was attacked many times by raiders, including the Vikings; however it was of such note as both a religious and an intellectual centre that King Alfred summoned help from the monastic community at St Davids in rebuilding the intellectual life of the Kingdom of Wessex. Many of the bishops were murdered by raiders and marauders, including Bishop Moregenau in 999 and Bishop Abraham in 1080. The stone that marked his grave, known as the "Abraham Stone", is intricately carved with early Celtic symbols and is now on permanent display within the Cathedral Exhibition at Porth-y-Tŵr.

 

In 1081, William the Conqueror visited St Davids to pray, and thus recognised it as a holy and respected place. In 1089, the shrine of David was vandalised and stripped of its precious metals. In 1090, the Welsh scholar Rhigyfarch wrote his Latin Life of David, highlighting David's sanctity, thus beginning the almost cult-like status he achieved.

 

In 1115, with the area under Norman control, King Henry I of England appointed Bishop Bernard as Bishop of St Davids. He began to improve life within the community, and commenced construction of a new cathedral. In 1123, Pope Calixtus II granted Bishop Bernard's request to bestow a papal privilege upon St Davids, making it a centre of pilgrimage for the Western world; the Pope decreed that "Two pilgrimages to St Davids is equal to one to Rome, and three pilgrimages to one to Jerusalem". The new cathedral was quickly constructed and Bishop Bernard consecrated it in 1131. Henry II of England's visit in 1171 saw the following of David increase and the need for a larger cathedral.

 

The present cathedral was begun in 1181 and completed not long after. Problems beset the new building and the community in its infancy: the collapse of the new tower in 1220 and earthquake damage in 1247/48.

  

Bishops Palace as it appears today

Under Bishop Gower (1328–1347) the cathedral was modified further, with the rood screen and the Bishops Palace intended as permanent reminders of his episcopacy; the palace is now a picturesque ruin.

 

In 1365, Bishop Adam Houghton and John of Gaunt began to build St Mary's College and a chantry. He later added the cloister, which connects it to the cathedral.

 

The episcopacy of Edward Vaughan (1509–1522) saw the building of the Holy Trinity chapel, with its fan vaulting which some[who?] say inspired the roof of King's College, Cambridge. This period also saw great developments for the nave, whose roof and Irish oak ceiling were constructed between 1530 and 1540. Bishop Barlow, unlike his predecessor as bishop, wished to suppress the following of David, and stripped St David's shrine of its jewels and confiscated the relics of St David and St Justinian in order to counteract "superstition" in 1538. In 1540, the body of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond and father of Henry VII, was brought to be entombed in front of the high altar from the dissolved Greyfriars' Priory in Carmarthen.

 

The establishment of the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell greatly affected many cathedrals and churches, and was particularly felt in St Davids. The cathedral was all but destroyed by Cromwell's forces and the lead was stripped from the Bishops Palace roof.

 

There is a pronounced slope to the floor of the cathedral, amounting to a height difference of nearly four metres between the east and west ends, and the building is still shifting minutely.

 

The Welsh architect John Nash was commissioned to restore the west front in 1793 to repair the damage done two hundred years previously. Eclectic in style (with Gothic and Perpendicular characteristics – the latter attributed partly to his destruction of the windows of the chapel of St Mary's College in order to reuse that tracery for his west front), his work soon proved to be substandard (as had his previous work on the chapter house). Within a century the Nash west front had become unstable and the whole building was restored by George Gilbert Scott between 1862 and 1870. The lady chapel was restored by public subscription in 1901 and the eastern chapels were restored through a legacy of the Countess of Maidstone, granddaughter of Bishop John Jenkinson, between 1901 and 1910.

 

The cathedral suffered the pains of disestablishment in 1923, as did the whole Church in Wales. The diocese was made smaller by the removal of the Archdeaconry of Brecon to form the new Diocese of Swansea and Brecon. However, this left a large area as a diocese to govern and St Davids began to deteriorate as the centre of the diocese, being nowhere near the centre – the bishop's residence had been at Carmarthen since the 16th century, but administration and the focus moved from the cathedral to the diocese's now largest town.

 

The 1950s saw the appointment of the Reverend Carl Witton-Davies as dean; appointed in his thirties, his driving vision and energy was short-lived as he was offered what some was believed as a preferment as Archdeacon of Oxford, but did not leave that position for the rest of his service in the church. The cathedral began to have life again and the famous Welsh Youth Pilgrimages to St Davids (Cymry'r Groes) led many to a life of service in the church and provided the Church in Wales with inspired clergy for a decade following. It was Grade I-listed by Cadw in 1951.

 

The 1960s saw the restoration of St Mary's College as the cathedral hall, for the use of the cathedral parish and for use as an area for art exhibitions and poetry readings. It was dedicated by Archbishop Edwin Morris in 1966 and the inaugural event was a poetry reading by the poet R. S. Thomas, who served as a vicar in the Bangor diocese.

 

During the 1980s a number of official events in cathedral life took place: in 1981, Charles, Prince of Wales, visited to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the consecration of the cathedral; and on Maundy Thursday 1982, Queen Elizabeth II distributed the Royal Maundy at the cathedral. This was the first occasion that the ceremony had taken place outside England. In 1989–90, the 1,400th anniversary of the death of St David was presided over by the Archbishop of Wales, George Noakes, who was also diocesan Bishop of St Davids.

 

The decades leading to and immediately following the year 2000 have been the most notable in the cathedral's history since its construction. First, the British Government decided to reinstate the title of "city" to St Davids and this was formally conferred by Queen Elizabeth II on 1 June 1995. The task that lay before the dean, the Very Reverend Wyn Evans, on his appointment in 1994 was huge: a new organ was badly needed and the west front needed extensive restoration. It was also thought to be time for the cathedral to invest in its future by creating a visitor centre within the bell tower, enlarging the peal of bells from eight to ten and by the "reconstruction", or completion, of the cathedral cloisters to house the cathedral choir, vestries, an education suite, rooms for parish use and a refectory as a reminder of the monastic beginnings. The first project was the restoration of the west front, with the original quarry that was used for stone at Caerbwdi Bay being reopened. This phase was completed in 1998, in time for the organ to be dismantled and rebuilt by the organ builders Harrison and Harrison of Durham. The organ was completed in the middle months of 2000 and dedicated on 15 October that year.

 

The ring of bells was cast by Whitechapel Bell Foundry of London and presented as a gift by the American Friends of St Davids Cathedral. The substantial task of rebuilding the cloisters as an education centre and refectory began in 2003 and was completed in May 2007. The translation of Wyn Evans from dean to bishop led to the appointment of Jonathan Lean as dean in 2009.

 

The bells are not hung in the central tower of the cathedral but in the old gatehouse, Porth y Twr. There are 10 bells, with the heaviest weighing 24 long cwt 3 qr 25 lb (2,797 lb or 1,269 kg) in D. The back eight bells were cast in 1928 by Mears & Stainbank, London and two trebles added in 2000 cast by Whitechapel Bell Foundry, London. Details of the bells:

 

The restored Shrine of St David was unveiled and re-dedicated by the Right Reverend Wyn Evans, Bishop of St Davids, at a Choral Eucharist on St Davids Day 2012.

 

There are at least three services said or sung per day, each week, with sung services on five out of seven days.

 

The cathedral choir at St Davids was the first cathedral choir in the United Kingdom to use girls and men as the main choir, rather than boys and men. (Salisbury Cathedral introduced boys and girls earlier on an equal basis, whereas St Davids uses girls as their "main" cathedral choristers.) There is also a boys' choir whose weekly Evensong is a major event within the cathedral week. They sing with the vicars choral regularly.

 

The St Davids Cathedral Festival runs through the Whitsun school holiday each year and showcases some of the world's best performers. The week sees performers, both professional and young, play in front of thousands. The cathedral choir serve as a highlight each year, being a very popular concert, as well as the Festival Chorus and Orchestra who perform a major work on the final night of the festival.

 

Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) in the 13th century relates the strange story of a marble footbridge leading from the church over the Alun rivulet in St Davids. The marble stone was called "Llechllafar" ("the talking stone") because it once spoke when a corpse was carried over it to the cemetery for interment. The effort of speech had caused it to break, despite its size of ten feet in length, six in breadth and one in thickness. This bridge was worn smooth due to its age and the thousands of people who had walked over it, however the superstition was so great that corpses were no longer carried over it. This ancient bridge was replaced in the 16th century and its present whereabouts is not known.

 

Another legend is that Merlin had prophesied the death on Llechllafar of an English king, conqueror of Ireland, who had been injured by a man with a red hand. King Henry II, whilst on a pilgrimage to Saint Davids, having come over from Ireland, heard of the prophecy and crossed Llechllafar without ill effect. He boasted that Merlin was a liar, to which a bystander replied that the King would not conquer Ireland and was therefore not the king of the prophecy. This turned out to be true, for Henry never did conquer the whole of Ireland.

 

The cathedral's exterior and overall design were used as the basis of the fictional Nemeton monastery in the video game Koudelka and its sequels Shadow Hearts and Shadow Hearts: Covenant.

 

Pembrokeshire is a county in the south-west of Wales. It is bordered by Carmarthenshire to the east, Ceredigion to the northeast, and is otherwise surrounded by the sea. Haverfordwest is the largest town and administrative headquarters of Pembrokeshire County Council.

 

The county is generally sparsely populated and rural, with an area of 200 square miles (520 km2) and a population of 123,400. After Haverfordwest, the largest settlements are Milford Haven (13,907), Pembroke Dock (9,753), and Pembroke (7,552). St Davids (1,841) is a city, the smallest by population in the UK. Welsh is spoken by 17.2 percent of the population, and for historic reasons is more widely spoken in the north of the county than in the south.

 

Pembrokeshire's coast is its most dramatic geographic feature, created by the complex geology of the area. It is a varied landscape which includes high sea cliffs, wide sandy beaches, the large natural harbour of Milford Haven, and several offshore islands which are home to seabird colonies. Most of it is protected by Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, and can be hiked on the 190-mile (310 km) Pembrokeshire Coast Path. The interior of Pembrokeshire is relatively flat and gently undulating, with the exception of the Preseli Mountains in the north.

 

There are many prehistoric sites in Pembrokeshire, particularly in the Preseli Mountains. During the Middle Ages several castles were built by the Normans, such as Pembroke and Cilgerran, and St David's Cathedral became an important pilgrimage site. During the Industrial Revolution the county remained relatively rural, with the exception of Milford Haven, which was developed as a port and Royal Navy dockyard. It is now the UK's third-largest port, primarily because of its two liquefied natural gas terminals. The economy of the county is now focused on agriculture, oil and gas, and tourism.

 

Human habitation of the region that is now Pembrokeshire extends back to between 125,000 and 70,000 years  and there are numerous prehistoric sites such as Pentre Ifan, and neolithic remains (12,000 to 6,500 years ago), more of which were revealed in an aerial survey during the 2018 heatwave; in the same year, a 1st-century Celtic chariot burial was discovered, the first such find in Wales. There may have been dairy farming in Neolithic times.

 

There is little evidence of Roman occupation in what is now Pembrokeshire. Ptolemy's Geography, written c. 150, mentioned some coastal places, two of which have been identified as the River Teifi and what is now St Davids Head, but most Roman writers did not mention the area; there may have been a Roman settlement near St Davids and a road from Bath, but this comes from a 14th-century writer. Any evidence for villas or Roman building materials reported by mediaeval or later writers has not been verified, though some remains near Dale were tentatively identified as Roman in character by topographer Richard Fenton in his Historical Tour of 1810. Fenton stated that he had "...reason to be of opinion that they had not colonized Pembrokeshire till near the decline of their empire in Britain".

 

Part of a possible Roman road is noted by CADW near Llanddewi Velfrey, and another near Wiston. Wiston is also the location of the first Roman fort discovered in Pembrokeshire, investigated in 2013.

 

Some artefacts, including coins and weapons, have been found, but it is not clear whether these belonged to Romans or to a Romanised population. Welsh tradition has it that Magnus Maximus founded Haverfordwest, and took a large force of local men on campaign in Gaul in 383 which, together with the reduction of Roman forces in south Wales, left a defensive vacuum which was filled by incomers from Ireland.

 

Between 350 and 400, an Irish tribe known as the Déisi settled in the region known to the Romans as Demetae.  The Déisi merged with the local Welsh, with the regional name underlying Demetae evolving into Dyfed, which existed as an independent petty kingdom from the 5th century.  In 904, Hywel Dda married Elen (died 943), daughter of the king of Dyfed Llywarch ap Hyfaidd, and merged Dyfed with his own maternal inheritance of Seisyllwg, forming the new realm of Deheubarth ("southern district"). Between the Roman and Norman periods, the region was subjected to raids from Vikings, who established settlements and trading posts at Haverfordwest, Fishguard, Caldey Island and elsewhere.

 

Dyfed remained an integral province of Deheubarth, but this was contested by invading Normans and Flemings who arrived between 1067 and 1111.  The region became known as Pembroke (sometimes archaic "Penbroke":), after the Norman castle built in the cantref of Penfro. In 1136, Prince Owain Gwynedd at Crug Mawr near Cardigan met and destroyed a 3,000-strong Norman/Flemish army and incorporated Deheubarth into Gwynedd.  Norman/Flemish influence never fully recovered in West Wales.  In 1138, the county of Pembrokeshire was named as a county palatine. Rhys ap Gruffydd, the son of Owain Gwynedd's daughter Gwenllian, re-established Welsh control over much of the region and threatened to retake all of Pembrokeshire, but died in 1197. After Deheubarth was split by a dynastic feud, Llywelyn the Great almost succeeded in retaking the region of Pembroke between 1216 and his death in 1240.  In 1284 the Statute of Rhuddlan was enacted to introduce the English common law system to Wales, heralding 100 years of peace, but had little effect on those areas already established under the Marcher Lords, such as Cemais in the north of the county.

 

Henry Tudor, born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, landed an army in Pembrokeshire in 1485 and marched to Cardigan.  Rallying support, he continued to Leicestershire and defeated the larger army of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. As Henry VII, he became the first monarch of the House of Tudor, which ruled England until 1603.

 

The Laws in Wales Act 1535 effectively abolished the powers of the Marcher Lords and divided the county into seven hundreds, roughly corresponding to the seven pre-Norman cantrefi of Dyfed. The hundreds were (clockwise from the northeast): Cilgerran, Cemais, Dewisland, Roose, Castlemartin, Narberth and Dungleddy and each was divided into civil parishes; a 1578 map in the British Library is the earliest known to show parishes and chapelries in Pembrokeshire. The Elizabethan era brought renewed prosperity to the county through an opening up of rural industries, including agriculture, mining and fishing, with exports to England and Ireland, though the formerly staple woollen industry had all but disappeared. 

 

During the First English Civil War (1642–1646) the county gave strong support to the Roundheads (Parliamentarians), in contrast to the rest of Wales, which was staunchly Royalist. In spite of this, an incident in Pembrokeshire triggered the opening shots of the Second English Civil War when local units of the New Model Army mutinied. Oliver Cromwell defeated the uprising at the Siege of Pembroke in July 1648.  On 13 August 1649, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland began when New Model Army forces sailed from Milford Haven.

 

In 1720, Emmanuel Bowen described Pembrokeshire as having five market towns, 45 parishes and about 4,329 houses, with an area of 420,000 acres (1,700 km2). In 1791 a petition was presented to the House of Commons concerning the poor state of many of the county's roads, pointing out that repairs could not be made compulsory by the law as it stood. The petition was referred to committee.  People applying for poor relief were often put to work mending roads. Workhouses were poorly documented. Under the Poor Laws, costs and provisions were kept to a minimum, but the emphasis was often on helping people to be self-employed. While the Poor Laws provided a significant means of support, there were many charitable and benefit societies. After the Battle of Fishguard, the failed French invasion of 1797, 500 French prisoners were held at Golden Hill Farm, Pembroke. From 1820 to 1878 one of the county's prisons, with a capacity of 86, was in the grounds of Haverfordwest Castle. In 1831, the area of the county was calculated to be 345,600 acres (1,399 km2) with a population of 81,424.

 

It was not until nearly the end of the 19th century that mains water was provided to rural south Pembrokeshire by means of a reservoir at Rosebush and cast iron water pipes throughout the district.

 

Throughout much of the 20th century (1911 to 1961) the population density in the county remained stable while it rose in England and Wales as a whole. There was considerable military activity in Pembrokeshire and offshore in the 20th century: a naval base at Milford Haven because German U-boats were active off the coast in World War I and, in World War II, military exercises in the Preseli Mountains and a number of military airfields. The wartime increase in air activity saw a number of aircraft accidents and fatalities, often due to unfamiliarity with the terrain. From 1943 to 1944, 5,000 soldiers from the United States Army's 110th Infantry Regiment were based in the county, preparing for D-Day. Military and industrial targets in the county were subjected to bombing during World War II. After the end of the war, German prisoners of war were accommodated in Pembrokeshire, the largest prison being at Haverfordwest, housing 600. The County of Pembroke War Memorial in Haverfordwest carries the names of 1,200 of those that perished in World War I.

 

In 1972, a second reservoir for south Pembrokeshire, at Llys y Fran, was completed.

 

Pembrokeshire's tourism portal is Visit Pembrokeshire, run by Pembrokeshire County Council. In 2015 4.3 million tourists visited the county, staying for an average of 5.24 days, spending £585 million; the tourism industry supported 11,834 jobs. Many of Pembrokeshire's beaches have won awards, including Poppit Sands and Newport Sands. In 2018, Pembrokeshire received the most coast awards in Wales, with 56 Blue Flag, Green Coast or Seaside Awards. In the 2019 Wales Coast Awards, 39 Pembrokeshire beaches were recognised, including 11 awarded Blue Flag status.

 

The Pembrokeshire coastline is a major draw to tourists; in 2011 National Geographic Traveller magazine voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the second best in the world and in 2015 the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park was listed among the top five parks in the world by a travel writer for the Huffington Post. Countryfile Magazine readers voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the top UK holiday destination in 2018, and in 2019 Consumers' Association members placed Tenby and St Davids in the top three best value beach destinations in Britain. With few large urban areas, Pembrokeshire is a "dark sky" destination. The many wrecks off the Pembrokeshire coast attract divers. The decade from 2012 saw significant, increasing numbers of Atlantic bluefin tuna, not seen since the 1960s, and now seen by some as an opportunity to encourage tourist sport fishing.

 

The county has a number of theme and animal parks (examples are Folly Farm Adventure Park and Zoo, Manor House Wildlife Park, Blue Lagoon Water Park and Oakwood Theme Park), museums and other visitor attractions including Castell Henllys reconstructed Iron Age fort, Tenby Lifeboat Station and Milford Haven's Torch Theatre. There are 21 marked cycle trails around the county.

 

Pembrokeshire Destination Management Plan for 2020 to 2025 sets out the scope and priorities to grow tourism in Pembrokeshire by increasing its value by 10 per cent in the five years, and to make Pembrokeshire a top five UK destination.

 

As the national sport of Wales, rugby union is widely played throughout the county at both town and village level. Haverfordwest RFC, founded in 1875, is a feeder club for Llanelli Scarlets. Village team Crymych RFC in 2014 plays in WRU Division One West. There are numerous football clubs in the county, playing in five leagues with Haverfordwest County A.F.C. competing in the Cymru Premier.

 

Triathlon event Ironman Wales has been held in Pembrokeshire since 2011, contributing £3.7 million to the local economy, and the county committed in 2017 to host the event for a further five years. Ras Beca, a mixed road, fell and cross country race attracting UK-wide competitors, has been held in the Preselis annually since 1977. The record of 32 minutes 5 seconds has stood since 1995. Pembrokeshire Harriers athletics club was formed in 2001 by the amalgamation of Cleddau Athletic Club (established 1970) and Preseli Harriers (1989) and is based in Haverfordwest.

 

The annual Tour of Pembrokeshire road-cycling event takes place over routes of optional length. The 4th Tour, in April 2015, attracted 1,600 riders including Olympic gold medallist Chris Boardman and there were 1,500 entrants to the 2016 event. Part of Route 47 of the Celtic Trail cycle route is in Pembrokeshire. The Llys y Fran Hillclimb is an annual event run by Swansea Motor Club, and there are several other county motoring events held each year.

 

Abereiddy's Blue Lagoon was the venue for a round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in 2012, 2013, and 2016; the Welsh Surfing Federation has held the Welsh National Surfing Championships at Freshwater West for several years, and Llys y Fran Country Park hosted the Welsh Dragonboat Championships from 2014 to 2017.

 

While not at major league level, cricket is played throughout the county and many villages such as Lamphey, Creselly, Llangwm, Llechryd and Crymych field teams in minor leagues under the umbrella of the Cricket Board of Wales.

 

Notable people

From mediaeval times, Rhys ap Gruffydd (c. 1132-1197), ruler of the kingdom of Deheubarth, was buried in St Davids Cathedral. and Gerald of Wales was born c. 1146 at Manorbier Castle. Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) was born in 1457 at Pembroke Castle.

 

The pirate Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart) (Welsh: Barti Ddu) was born in Casnewydd Bach, between Fishguard and Haverfordwest in 1682.

 

In later military history, Jemima Nicholas, heroine of the so-called "last invasion of Britain" in 1797, was from Fishguard, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton GCB, born in Haverfordwest, was killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and Private Thomas Collins is believed to be the only Pembrokeshire man that fought in the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879.

 

In the arts, siblings Gwen and Augustus John were both born in Pembrokeshire, as was the novelist Sarah Waters; singer Connie Fisher grew up in Pembrokeshire. The actor Christian Bale was born in Haverfordwest.

 

Stephen Crabb, a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Wales, was brought up in Pembrokeshire and is one of the county's two Members of Parliament, the other being Simon Hart,[90] who served as Secretary of State for Wales from 2019 to 2022.

Cilgerran Castle is a 13th-century ruined castle located in Cilgerran, Pembrokeshire, Wales, near Cardigan. The first castle on the site was thought to have been built by Gerald of Windsor around 1110–1115, and it changed hands several times over the following century between English and Welsh forces. In the hands of William Marshal, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, the construction of the stone castle began after 1223. After passing through successive families, it was left to ruin and eventually abandoned by 1400. The castle backs onto a cliff face, with the remaining ruins dating from the 13th century. It was most heavily fortified where it faces inland, and includes a pair of drum towers, rather than a central keep, which remain standing. It passed into the hands of the National Trust in 1938. It is open to the public on payment of an entry fee but times vary.

  

The castle sits on a rocky promontory above the River Teifi, with one side directly onto a cliff face. An earth and timber castle is believed to have existed prior to the current building, but was destroyed by Welsh forces. The existing masonry dates from around 13th century. The walls facing the cliff top were the least heavily fortified, with the defences concentrated on those that faced inland. These comprised two lines of defence, with an outer bailey and two drum towers rather than a central keep as typically seen in other castles of this period. The gatehouse is located in the south east of the building, and only partly remains. A ditch around the outside of the castle was cut from the rock face, which is thought to have once been spanned by a pivoting bridge. Cilgerran Castle is the most northerly of all castles in Pembrokeshire. It is twinned with Cardigan Castle, located on the opposite bank of the river 3 miles (4.8 km) downstream.

 

The castle is largely ruinous, though the two substantial towers remain. From the castle there are walks down to the River Teifi. The castle is a National Trust property, in the guardianship of Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments Executive Agency. It is open to the public under their auspices, and in 2015 it was the site of a re-enactment of the Battle of Agincourt to mark the 600th anniversary.

 

The initial Cilgerran Castle was built by Gerald of Windsor around 1110–1115, but was little more than a wooden palisade. This was replaced by a stone outer wall at some point prior to the attack by Rhys ap Gruffydd in 1165. Rhys had taken Cardigan Castle a matter of weeks before, and upon the capture of Cilgerran Castle, he destroyed it entirely. He began a reconstruction effort, using stone and lime mortar.[9] In 1204, it was taken back for the English by William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, who drove out Rhy's son, Maelgwn ap Rhys. Marshal set about making repairs, but these proved ineffective as it was taken once more in 1215 Llywelyn the Great after a single day's battle.

 

It was recaptured by William Marshal, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, in 1223. He began the rebuilding of the castle into its present form, which was later completed by the de Cantilupe family. The size of the stones used in the parts of the castle remaining from this period indicate that it was built at great haste. Cilgerran was not taken by Welsh forces after this period, although in 1258 when English forces were defeated nearby, the castle had to push back the forces of the Princes of Deheubarth. Following the death of Anselm Marshal, 6th Earl of Pembroke, it passed via a co-heiress to the de Cantilupe family. It passed again in 1272 after end of that line, to the Hastings family. But Cilgerran Castle was allowed to go to ruin by 1387, and was thought to be deserted by 1400. But the property continued to be passed down through the Earls of Pembroke into the time of Jasper Tudor, Duke of Bedford. In 1509, Gruffudd Vychan was named Steward of the Lordship of Cilgerran and Constable of Cilgerran Castle. It has been the subject of several paintings, including Kilgarran Castle on the Twyvey; Hazy Sunrise, previous to a Sultry Day, Cilgerran Castle on the Teifi, Looking Upstream, and View in Wales: Mountain Scene with Village and Castle – Evening each by J. M. W. Turner which are all in the national collection at the Tate. The 19th Century saw continued decline of the castle, the dry ditch bailey being converted into the village pound and the curtain wall of the bailey falling due to slate quarrying in the area in 1863. In 1938, it was presented to the National Trust.

 

Pembrokeshire is a county in the south-west of Wales. It is bordered by Carmarthenshire to the east, Ceredigion to the northeast, and is otherwise surrounded by the sea. Haverfordwest is the largest town and administrative headquarters of Pembrokeshire County Council.

 

The county is generally sparsely populated and rural, with an area of 200 square miles (520 km2) and a population of 123,400. After Haverfordwest, the largest settlements are Milford Haven (13,907), Pembroke Dock (9,753), and Pembroke (7,552). St Davids (1,841) is a city, the smallest by population in the UK. Welsh is spoken by 17.2 percent of the population, and for historic reasons is more widely spoken in the north of the county than in the south.

 

Pembrokeshire's coast is its most dramatic geographic feature, created by the complex geology of the area. It is a varied landscape which includes high sea cliffs, wide sandy beaches, the large natural harbour of Milford Haven, and several offshore islands which are home to seabird colonies. Most of it is protected by Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, and can be hiked on the 190-mile (310 km) Pembrokeshire Coast Path. The interior of Pembrokeshire is relatively flat and gently undulating, with the exception of the Preseli Mountains in the north.

 

There are many prehistoric sites in Pembrokeshire, particularly in the Preseli Mountains. During the Middle Ages several castles were built by the Normans, such as Pembroke and Cilgerran, and St David's Cathedral became an important pilgrimage site. During the Industrial Revolution the county remained relatively rural, with the exception of Milford Haven, which was developed as a port and Royal Navy dockyard. It is now the UK's third-largest port, primarily because of its two liquefied natural gas terminals. The economy of the county is now focused on agriculture, oil and gas, and tourism.

 

Human habitation of the region that is now Pembrokeshire extends back to between 125,000 and 70,000 years  and there are numerous prehistoric sites such as Pentre Ifan, and neolithic remains (12,000 to 6,500 years ago), more of which were revealed in an aerial survey during the 2018 heatwave; in the same year, a 1st-century Celtic chariot burial was discovered, the first such find in Wales. There may have been dairy farming in Neolithic times.

 

There is little evidence of Roman occupation in what is now Pembrokeshire. Ptolemy's Geography, written c. 150, mentioned some coastal places, two of which have been identified as the River Teifi and what is now St Davids Head, but most Roman writers did not mention the area; there may have been a Roman settlement near St Davids and a road from Bath, but this comes from a 14th-century writer. Any evidence for villas or Roman building materials reported by mediaeval or later writers has not been verified, though some remains near Dale were tentatively identified as Roman in character by topographer Richard Fenton in his Historical Tour of 1810. Fenton stated that he had "...reason to be of opinion that they had not colonized Pembrokeshire till near the decline of their empire in Britain".

 

Part of a possible Roman road is noted by CADW near Llanddewi Velfrey, and another near Wiston. Wiston is also the location of the first Roman fort discovered in Pembrokeshire, investigated in 2013.

 

Some artefacts, including coins and weapons, have been found, but it is not clear whether these belonged to Romans or to a Romanised population. Welsh tradition has it that Magnus Maximus founded Haverfordwest, and took a large force of local men on campaign in Gaul in 383 which, together with the reduction of Roman forces in south Wales, left a defensive vacuum which was filled by incomers from Ireland.

 

Between 350 and 400, an Irish tribe known as the Déisi settled in the region known to the Romans as Demetae.  The Déisi merged with the local Welsh, with the regional name underlying Demetae evolving into Dyfed, which existed as an independent petty kingdom from the 5th century.  In 904, Hywel Dda married Elen (died 943), daughter of the king of Dyfed Llywarch ap Hyfaidd, and merged Dyfed with his own maternal inheritance of Seisyllwg, forming the new realm of Deheubarth ("southern district"). Between the Roman and Norman periods, the region was subjected to raids from Vikings, who established settlements and trading posts at Haverfordwest, Fishguard, Caldey Island and elsewhere.

 

Dyfed remained an integral province of Deheubarth, but this was contested by invading Normans and Flemings who arrived between 1067 and 1111.  The region became known as Pembroke (sometimes archaic "Penbroke":), after the Norman castle built in the cantref of Penfro. In 1136, Prince Owain Gwynedd at Crug Mawr near Cardigan met and destroyed a 3,000-strong Norman/Flemish army and incorporated Deheubarth into Gwynedd.  Norman/Flemish influence never fully recovered in West Wales.  In 1138, the county of Pembrokeshire was named as a county palatine. Rhys ap Gruffydd, the son of Owain Gwynedd's daughter Gwenllian, re-established Welsh control over much of the region and threatened to retake all of Pembrokeshire, but died in 1197. After Deheubarth was split by a dynastic feud, Llywelyn the Great almost succeeded in retaking the region of Pembroke between 1216 and his death in 1240.  In 1284 the Statute of Rhuddlan was enacted to introduce the English common law system to Wales, heralding 100 years of peace, but had little effect on those areas already established under the Marcher Lords, such as Cemais in the north of the county.

 

Henry Tudor, born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, landed an army in Pembrokeshire in 1485 and marched to Cardigan.  Rallying support, he continued to Leicestershire and defeated the larger army of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. As Henry VII, he became the first monarch of the House of Tudor, which ruled England until 1603.

 

The Laws in Wales Act 1535 effectively abolished the powers of the Marcher Lords and divided the county into seven hundreds, roughly corresponding to the seven pre-Norman cantrefi of Dyfed. The hundreds were (clockwise from the northeast): Cilgerran, Cemais, Dewisland, Roose, Castlemartin, Narberth and Dungleddy and each was divided into civil parishes; a 1578 map in the British Library is the earliest known to show parishes and chapelries in Pembrokeshire. The Elizabethan era brought renewed prosperity to the county through an opening up of rural industries, including agriculture, mining and fishing, with exports to England and Ireland, though the formerly staple woollen industry had all but disappeared. 

 

During the First English Civil War (1642–1646) the county gave strong support to the Roundheads (Parliamentarians), in contrast to the rest of Wales, which was staunchly Royalist. In spite of this, an incident in Pembrokeshire triggered the opening shots of the Second English Civil War when local units of the New Model Army mutinied. Oliver Cromwell defeated the uprising at the Siege of Pembroke in July 1648.  On 13 August 1649, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland began when New Model Army forces sailed from Milford Haven.

 

In 1720, Emmanuel Bowen described Pembrokeshire as having five market towns, 45 parishes and about 4,329 houses, with an area of 420,000 acres (1,700 km2). In 1791 a petition was presented to the House of Commons concerning the poor state of many of the county's roads, pointing out that repairs could not be made compulsory by the law as it stood. The petition was referred to committee.  People applying for poor relief were often put to work mending roads. Workhouses were poorly documented. Under the Poor Laws, costs and provisions were kept to a minimum, but the emphasis was often on helping people to be self-employed. While the Poor Laws provided a significant means of support, there were many charitable and benefit societies. After the Battle of Fishguard, the failed French invasion of 1797, 500 French prisoners were held at Golden Hill Farm, Pembroke. From 1820 to 1878 one of the county's prisons, with a capacity of 86, was in the grounds of Haverfordwest Castle. In 1831, the area of the county was calculated to be 345,600 acres (1,399 km2) with a population of 81,424.

 

It was not until nearly the end of the 19th century that mains water was provided to rural south Pembrokeshire by means of a reservoir at Rosebush and cast iron water pipes throughout the district.

 

Throughout much of the 20th century (1911 to 1961) the population density in the county remained stable while it rose in England and Wales as a whole. There was considerable military activity in Pembrokeshire and offshore in the 20th century: a naval base at Milford Haven because German U-boats were active off the coast in World War I and, in World War II, military exercises in the Preseli Mountains and a number of military airfields. The wartime increase in air activity saw a number of aircraft accidents and fatalities, often due to unfamiliarity with the terrain. From 1943 to 1944, 5,000 soldiers from the United States Army's 110th Infantry Regiment were based in the county, preparing for D-Day. Military and industrial targets in the county were subjected to bombing during World War II. After the end of the war, German prisoners of war were accommodated in Pembrokeshire, the largest prison being at Haverfordwest, housing 600. The County of Pembroke War Memorial in Haverfordwest carries the names of 1,200 of those that perished in World War I.

 

In 1972, a second reservoir for south Pembrokeshire, at Llys y Fran, was completed.

 

Pembrokeshire's tourism portal is Visit Pembrokeshire, run by Pembrokeshire County Council. In 2015 4.3 million tourists visited the county, staying for an average of 5.24 days, spending £585 million; the tourism industry supported 11,834 jobs. Many of Pembrokeshire's beaches have won awards, including Poppit Sands and Newport Sands. In 2018, Pembrokeshire received the most coast awards in Wales, with 56 Blue Flag, Green Coast or Seaside Awards. In the 2019 Wales Coast Awards, 39 Pembrokeshire beaches were recognised, including 11 awarded Blue Flag status.

 

The Pembrokeshire coastline is a major draw to tourists; in 2011 National Geographic Traveller magazine voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the second best in the world and in 2015 the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park was listed among the top five parks in the world by a travel writer for the Huffington Post. Countryfile Magazine readers voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the top UK holiday destination in 2018, and in 2019 Consumers' Association members placed Tenby and St Davids in the top three best value beach destinations in Britain. With few large urban areas, Pembrokeshire is a "dark sky" destination. The many wrecks off the Pembrokeshire coast attract divers. The decade from 2012 saw significant, increasing numbers of Atlantic bluefin tuna, not seen since the 1960s, and now seen by some as an opportunity to encourage tourist sport fishing.

 

The county has a number of theme and animal parks (examples are Folly Farm Adventure Park and Zoo, Manor House Wildlife Park, Blue Lagoon Water Park and Oakwood Theme Park), museums and other visitor attractions including Castell Henllys reconstructed Iron Age fort, Tenby Lifeboat Station and Milford Haven's Torch Theatre. There are 21 marked cycle trails around the county.

 

Pembrokeshire Destination Management Plan for 2020 to 2025 sets out the scope and priorities to grow tourism in Pembrokeshire by increasing its value by 10 per cent in the five years, and to make Pembrokeshire a top five UK destination.

 

As the national sport of Wales, rugby union is widely played throughout the county at both town and village level. Haverfordwest RFC, founded in 1875, is a feeder club for Llanelli Scarlets. Village team Crymych RFC in 2014 plays in WRU Division One West. There are numerous football clubs in the county, playing in five leagues with Haverfordwest County A.F.C. competing in the Cymru Premier.

 

Triathlon event Ironman Wales has been held in Pembrokeshire since 2011, contributing £3.7 million to the local economy, and the county committed in 2017 to host the event for a further five years. Ras Beca, a mixed road, fell and cross country race attracting UK-wide competitors, has been held in the Preselis annually since 1977. The record of 32 minutes 5 seconds has stood since 1995. Pembrokeshire Harriers athletics club was formed in 2001 by the amalgamation of Cleddau Athletic Club (established 1970) and Preseli Harriers (1989) and is based in Haverfordwest.

 

The annual Tour of Pembrokeshire road-cycling event takes place over routes of optional length. The 4th Tour, in April 2015, attracted 1,600 riders including Olympic gold medallist Chris Boardman and there were 1,500 entrants to the 2016 event. Part of Route 47 of the Celtic Trail cycle route is in Pembrokeshire. The Llys y Fran Hillclimb is an annual event run by Swansea Motor Club, and there are several other county motoring events held each year.

 

Abereiddy's Blue Lagoon was the venue for a round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in 2012, 2013, and 2016; the Welsh Surfing Federation has held the Welsh National Surfing Championships at Freshwater West for several years, and Llys y Fran Country Park hosted the Welsh Dragonboat Championships from 2014 to 2017.

 

While not at major league level, cricket is played throughout the county and many villages such as Lamphey, Creselly, Llangwm, Llechryd and Crymych field teams in minor leagues under the umbrella of the Cricket Board of Wales.

 

Notable people

From mediaeval times, Rhys ap Gruffydd (c. 1132-1197), ruler of the kingdom of Deheubarth, was buried in St Davids Cathedral. and Gerald of Wales was born c. 1146 at Manorbier Castle. Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) was born in 1457 at Pembroke Castle.

 

The pirate Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart) (Welsh: Barti Ddu) was born in Casnewydd Bach, between Fishguard and Haverfordwest in 1682.

 

In later military history, Jemima Nicholas, heroine of the so-called "last invasion of Britain" in 1797, was from Fishguard, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton GCB, born in Haverfordwest, was killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and Private Thomas Collins is believed to be the only Pembrokeshire man that fought in the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879.

 

In the arts, siblings Gwen and Augustus John were both born in Pembrokeshire, as was the novelist Sarah Waters; singer Connie Fisher grew up in Pembrokeshire. The actor Christian Bale was born in Haverfordwest.

 

Stephen Crabb, a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Wales, was brought up in Pembrokeshire and is one of the county's two Members of Parliament, the other being Simon Hart,[90] who served as Secretary of State for Wales from 2019 to 2022.

A classic scene envisioned by artist Earl Norem... Before the 1972 movie adaptation of Mario Puzo's THE GODFATHER, a "Book Bonus" version was published in the August 1969 issue of the men's adventure magazine MALE, where Puzo had worked as an Associate Editor and writer for years. The MALE version featured cover artwork by Mort Kunstler and interior art by Norem. You can see and read more about it in this post on my blog here -> www.menspulpmags.com/2015/08/earl-norem-and-mort-kunstler...

Begging or panhandling is the practice of imploring others to grant a favor, often a gift of money, with little or no expectation of reciprocation. Beggars may be found in public places such as transport routes, urban parks, and near busy markets. Besides money, they may also ask for food, drink, cigarettes or other small items.

 

According to a study in the journal of the Canadian Medical Association, "70% of beggars stated that they would prefer a minimum-wage job, typically citing a desire for a 'steady income' or 'getting off the street.' However, many felt they could not handle conventional jobs because of mental illness, physical disability or lack of skills."

 

HISTORY

Beggars have existed in human society since before the dawn of recorded history. Begging has happened in most societies around the world, though its prevalence and exact form vary.

 

GREECE

Ancient Greeks distinguished between the ptochos (Greek: πτωχός, "passive poor" or "beggars") and the penes (Greek: ποινής, "active poor"), with the latter being accorded a higher social status. The New Testament contains several references to Jesus' status as the savior of the ptochos, usually translated as "the poor", considered the most wretched portion of society.

 

BRITAIN

A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called vagabonds, was first published in 1566 by Thomas Harman. From early modern England, another example is Robert Greene in his coney-catching pamphlets, the titles of which included "The Defence of Conny-catching," in which he argued there were worse crimes to be found among "reputable" people. The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay. The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew was first published in 1745. There are similar writers for many European countries in the early modern period.[citation needed]

 

According to Jackson J. Spielvogel, "Poverty was a highly visible problem in the eighteenth century, both in cities and in the countryside... Beggars in Bologna were estimated at 25 percent of the population; in Mainz, figures indicate that 30 percent of the people were beggars or prostitutes... In France and Britain by the end of the century, an estimated 10 percent of the people depended on charity or begging for their food."

 

The British Poor Laws, dating from the Renaissance, placed various restrictions on begging. At various times, begging was restricted to the disabled. This system developed into the workhouse, a state-operated institution where those unable to obtain other employment were forced to work in often grim conditions in exchange for a small amount of food. The welfare state of the 20th century greatly reduced the number of beggars by directly providing for the basic necessities of the poor from state funds.

 

INDIA

Beggary is an age old social phenomenon in India. In the medieval and earlier times begging was considered to be an acceptable occupation which was embraced within the traditional social structure. This system of begging and alms-giving to mendicants and the poor is still widely practiced in India with over 400,000 beggars in 2015.

 

In contemporary India, beggars are often stigmatized as undeserving. People often believe that beggars are not destitute and instead call them professional beggars. There is a wide perception of begging scams. This view is refuted by grass root research organizations such as Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan, which claim that beggars and other homeless are overwhelmingly destitute and vulnerable. Their studies indicate that 99 percent men and 97 percent women resort to beggary due to abject poverty, distress migration from rural villages and the unavailability of employment.

 

RELIGIOUS GEGGING

Many religions have prescribed begging as the only acceptable means of support for certain classes of adherents, including Hinduism, Sufi Islam, Buddhism, and Jainism, typically to provide a way for certain adherents to focus exclusively on spiritual development without the possibility of becoming caught up in worldly affairs.

 

Religious ideals of ‘Bhiksha’ in Hinduism, ‘Zakat’ in Islam and ‘Charity’ in Christianity besides others promote alms-giving. This obligation of making gifts to God by alms-giving explains the occurrence of generous donations outside religious sites like temples and mosques to mendicants begging in the name of God.

 

In Buddhism, monks and nuns traditionally live by begging for alms, as did the historical Gautama Buddha himself. This is, among other reasons, so that lay people can gain religious merit by giving food, medicines, and other essential items to the monks. The monks seldom need to plead for food; in villages and towns throughout modern Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other Buddhist countries, householders can often be found at dawn every morning streaming down the road to the local temple to give food to the monks. In East Asia, monks and nuns were expected to farm or work for returns to feed themselves.

 

LEGAL RESTRICTIONS

Begging has been restricted or prohibited at various times and for various reasons, typically revolving around a desire to preserve public order or to induce people to work rather than to beg for economic or moral reasons. Various European poor laws prohibited or regulated begging from the Renaissance to modern times, with varying levels of effectiveness and enforcement. Similar laws were adopted by many developing countries such as India.

 

"Aggressive panhandling" has been specifically prohibited by law in various jurisdictions in the United States and Canada, typically defined as persistent or intimidating begging.

 

AUSTRIA

There is no nationwide ban but it is illegal in several federal states.

 

CANADA

The province of Ontario introduced its Safe Streets Act in 1999 to restrict specific kinds of begging, particularly certain narrowly defined cases of "aggressive" or abusive begging.[15] In 2001 this law survived a court challenge under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.[16] The law was further upheld by the Court of Appeal for Ontario in January 2007.

 

One response to the anti-panhandling laws which were passed was the creation of the Ottawa Panhandlers Union which fights for the political rights of panhandlers. The union is a shop of the Industrial Workers of the World.

 

British Columbia enacted its own Safe Streets Act in 2004 which resembles the Ontario law. There are also critics in that province who oppose such laws.

 

CHINA

Begging in China is illegal if:

- Coercing, decoying or utilizing others to beg;

- Forcing others to beg, repeatedly tangling or using other means of nuisance.

 

Those cases are violations of the Article 41 of the Public Security Administration Punishment Law of the People's Republic of China. For the first case, offenders would receive a detention between 10 days and 15 days, with an additional fine under RMB 1,000; for the second case, it is punishable by a 5-day detention or warning.

 

According to Article 262(2) or the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China, organizing disabled or children under 14 to beg is illegal and will be punished by up to 7 years in prison, and fined.

 

DENMARK

Begging in Denmark is illegal under section 197 of the penal code. Begging or letting a member of your household under 18 beg is illegal after being warned by the police and is punishable by 6 months in jail.

 

FINLAND

Begging has been legal in Finland since 1987 when the poor law was invalidated. In 2003, the Public Order Act replaced any local government rules and completely decriminalized begging.

 

FRANCE

A law against begging ended in 1994 but begging with aggressive animals or children is still outlawed.

 

GREECE

Under article 407 of the Greek Penal Code, begging is punishable by up to 6 months in jail and up to a 3000 euro fine.

 

HUNGARY

Has a nationwide ban and for instance in Budapest even picking things from rubbish bins is outlawed.

 

INDIA

Begging is criminalized in cities such as Mumbai and Delhi as per the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act, BPBA (1959). Under this law, officials of the Social Welfare Department assisted by the police, conduct raids to pick up beggars who they then try in special courts called ‘beggar courts’. If convicted, they are sent to certified institutions called ‘beggar homes’ also known as ‘Sewa Kutir’ for a period ranging from one to ten years for detention, training and employment. The government of Delhi, besides criminalizing alms-seeking has also criminalized alms-giving on traffic signals to reduce the ‘nuisance’ of begging and ensure the smooth flow of traffic.

 

AAA and People's Union of Civil Liberties, PUCL have critiqued this Act and advocated for its repeal. Section 2(1) of the BPBA broadly defines ‘beggars’ as those individuals who directly solicit alms as well as those who have no visible means of subsistence and are found wandering around as beggars. Therefore, during the implementation of this law the homeless are often mistaken as beggars. Beggar homes, which are meant to provide vocational training, have been often found to have abysmal living conditions

 

ITALY

Begging with children or animals is forbidden but the law is not enforced.

 

JAPAN

Buddhist monks appear in public when begging for alms.[23] Although homelessness in Japan is common, such people rarely beg.

 

LUXEMBOURG

Begging in Luxembourg is legal except when it is indulged in as a group or the beggar is a part of an organised effort. According to Chachipe a Roma rights advocacy NGO 1639 begging cases were reported by Luxembourgian law enforcement authorities. Roma beggars were arrested, handcuffed, taken to police stations and held for hours and had their money confiscated.

 

NORWAY

Begging is banned in some counties and there were plans for a nationwide ban in 2015, however this was dropped after the Centre Party withdrew their support.

 

PHILIPPINES

Begging is prohibited in the Philippines under the Anti-Mendicancy Law of 1978 although this is not strictly enforced.

 

PORTUGAL

In Portugal, panhandlers normally beg in front of Catholic churches, at traffic lights or on special places in Lisbon or Oporto downtowns. Begging is not illegal in Portugal. Many social and religious institutions support homeless people and panhandlers and the Portuguese Social Security normally gives them a survival monetary subsidy.

 

ROMANIA

Law 61 of 1991 forbids the persistent call for the mercy of the public, by a person which is able to work.

 

US State Department Human Rights reports note a pattern of Roma children registered for "vagrancy and begging".

 

UNITED KINGDOM

Begging is illegal under the Vagrancy Act of 1824. However it does not carry a jail sentence and is not well enforced in many cities, although since the Act applies in all public places it is enforced more frequently on public transport.

 

UNITED STATES

In parts of San Francisco, California, aggressive panhandling is prohibited.

 

In May 2010, police in the city of Boston started cracking down on panhandling in the streets in downtown, and were conducting an educational outreach to residents advising them not to give to panhandlers. The Boston police distinguished active solicitation, or aggressive panhandling, versus passive panhandling of which an example is opening doors at store with a cup in hand but saying nothing.

 

U. S. Courts have repeatedly ruled that begging is protected by the First Amendment's free speech provisions. On August 14, 2013, the U. S. Court of Appeals struck down a Grand Rapids, Michigan anti-begging law on free speech grounds[31] An Arcata, California law banning panhandling within twenty feet of stores was struck down on similar grounds in 2012.

 

USE OF FUNDS

A 2002 study of 54 panhandlers in Toronto reported that of a median monthly income of $638 Canadian dollars (CAD), those interviewed spent a median of $200 CAD on food and $192 CAD on alcohol, tobacco and illegal drugs, according to Income and spending patterns among panhandlers, by Rohit Bose and Stephen W. Hwang. The Fraser Institute criticized this study citing problems with potential exclusion of lucrative forms of begging and the unreliability of reports from the panhandlers who were polled in the Bose/Hwang study.

 

In North America, panhandling money is widely reported to support substance abuse and other addictions. For example, outreach workers in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, surveyed that city's panhandling community and determined that approximately three-quarters use donated money to buy tobacco products while two-thirds buy solvents or alcohol.[35] In Midtown Manhattan, one outreach worker anecdotally commented to the New York Times that substance abuse accounts for 90 percent of panhandling funds. This, too, may not be representative since outreach workers work with those with abuse problems.

 

COMMUNITIES REDUCING STREET BEGGING

Because of concerns that people begging on the street may use the money to support alcohol or drug abuse, some advise those wishing to give to beggars to give gift cards or vouchers for food or services, and not cash. Some shelters also offer business cards with information on the shelter's location and services, which can be given in lieu of cash. This has been criticised since there are typically far fewer shelter beds than people in need.

 

NOTABLE BEGGARS

Bampfylde Moore Carew, self-styled King of the Beggars

Diogenes of Sinope

Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism accepted alms from people to survive

Gavroche Thenardier in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables

Lazarus

Nicholas Jennings in Thomas Harman's Caveat for Common Cursitors

So Chan, Chinese folk hero of Drunken Fist

 

WIKIPEDIA

Meran, city in South Tyrol (Merano, Alto Adige, Italy), town charter in 1317, to 1475 mint (relocation to Hall/Tyrol), or until 1480 capital of Tyrol (relocation of the residence to Innsbruck, but formally remained Meran until 1848 capital).

In the Middle Ages, there was a relationship between Vienna and Meran and others by the person of Andre Hiltprant "von Meran", born in Vienna before 1385, who was traceable as a (long-distance) merchant (cloth merchant) and local politician (1442 mayor in Vienna) in both cities (1416 and 1430 in Merano, where the catastrophic Passer flood of 1419 may have contributed that Hiltprant can not be detected in Meran in the 1420s) and whose ancestors evidently came from there.

After Meran had acquired a new importance as a city of education, it came in the Biedermeier era, significantly influenced by the Viennese society, to a slow upswing as a spa and tourist town. In 1827, the Austrian diplomat Bartholomäus Stürmer came to the grape cure in Obermais (now part of Meran). In 1836 Mathilde princess Schwarzenberg and her family doctor Johann Nepomuk Huber stayed in Merano (who published his observations and researches in book form in 1837); Huber became aware of the spot advertised as a "health resort" because of its mild climate and its grape and whey cures (analogous to the ascent of Bad Ischl with the help of the Viennese physician Franz Wirer); the mild climate was suitable both for a "wintering" of healthy people as well as a residence for those who wanted to treat their lung disease. In 1844, Archduke Johann bought Schenna Castle near Meran and, through his enthusiasm, aroused Merano's reputation as a climatically favored mountain town.

As in the 1850s, the number of spa guests rose, was in 1855 founded a spa club. Meran 1864 after the five most important spas of the monarchy (Carlsbad, Marienbad, Baden near Vienna, Bad Ischl and Badgastein) with 1,604 guests in last place, it reached 1913 with 38,901 guests the second place. Three events had 1857, 1870-1872 and 1881 significantly promoted this development: the construction of the Brenner Railway to Bolzano, the two winters (1870/1871 and 1871/1872) of Empress Elisabeth (the first time in the castle Trauttmansdorff lodged and her monument today in a park named after her, which is connected to the castle since 2003 by the "Sisi Promenade") and the opening of the railway line from Bolzano to Merano (thus completing the connection to the Central European railway network).

In the first decade of the 20th century, Merano became the preferred residence of the Viennese nobility, whose relatives wanted to document their complete independence from working life through long stays. In its wake came (as in other resorts) literati (for example, 1882 and 1886 Arthur Schnitzler, 1897 Rainer Maria Rilke, 1906 and 1908 Stefan Zweig [including Palais Labers], from 1916 Herzmanovsky-Orlando and 1920 Franz Kafka) and artists (for example, between 1898 and 1902 Franz Defregger, 1908 Alfred Kubin or 1913 Albin Egger-Lienz) to Merano; in the 19th century we also meet a number of painters who were searching for motifs in Meran (for example Jacob Alt, Thomas Ender and Friedrich Gauermann). Of the often associated patronage (in the sense of invitations), both social circles may have benefited: the former in prestige, the latter in notoriety. Hotels were built in a central location (first near the train station as the no longer existing Grand Hotel Emma, ​​later at the Passer (river) in the spa area (as the Hotel Meranerhof and built in 1904-1906 by Peter Delugan Palace Hotel [today Grand Hotel Palace] in which also Zweig once stayed, this hotel is probably the only one that not only maintained its rank to the present but steadily increased it.

The sanatoriums were built mainly in Obermais. 1900 the city theater was opened, 1907 the cure center house; when in the beginning mainly Bavarian architects had been engaged, was for the extension of the casino the widely known Art Nouveau architect Friedrich Ohmann from Vienna commissioned.

Among the composers who visited Meran include Béla Bartók 1900/1901, Egon Wellesz, Wilhelm Kienzl, who often conducted his "Evangelimann" in the Stadttheater in 1913 (and lived in Vienna from 1917) and Max Reger 1914 (sanatorium Martinsbrunn). Zweig lodged in Palais Labers, but also in the 1906 built palace hotel (now Grand Hotel Palace). In the 19th century we also meet a number of painters who were searching for motifs in Meran (for example Jacob Alt, Thomas Ender and Friedrich Gauermann). Famous writers (for example Roda Roda) gave readings here.

The number of Viennese people who came either from Merano to Vienna, and those who went to Merano and lived there until the end of their lives (for example Anton Ascher, the director of the Carl Theater, the school reformer Armand Dumreicher or the sculptor Josef Bilger), is big.

In the interwar period, especially politicians chose Merano as a residence, but also Richard Strauss, who stayed here for a long time in 1922 and from the 1930s, and Herzmanovsky-Orlando, who moved to Merano in 1916 and died here in 1954 at Rametz Castle.

 

Meran, Stadt in Südtirol (Merano, Alto Adige, Italien), Stadtrecht 1317, bis 1475 Münzstätte (Verlagerung nach Hall/Tirol), beziehungsweise bis 1480 Hauptstadt von Tirol (Verlagerung der Residenz nach Innsbruck, formal blieb Meran allerdings bis 1848 Hauptstadt).

Im Mittelalter ergab sich eine Beziehung zwischen Wien und Meran und anderen durch die Person des vor 1385 in Wien geborenen Andre Hiltprant "von Meran", der als (Fernhandels-)Kaufmann (Tuchhändler) und Kommunalpolitiker (1442 Bürgermeister in Wien) in beiden Städten nachweisbar ist (1416 und 1430 in Meran, wobei das katastrophale Passer-Hochwasser von 1419 möglicherweise dazu beigetragen hat, dass Hiltprant in den 1420er Jahren nicht in Meran nachgewiesen werden kann) und dessen Vorfahren offenkundig von dort stammten.

Nachdem Meran eine neue Bedeutung als Bildungsstadt erlangt hatte, kam es in der Biedermeierära, maßgeblich beeinflusst von der Wiener Gesellschaft, zu einem langsamen Aufschwung als Kur- und Tourismusstadt. 1827 kam der österreichische Diplomat Bartholomäus Stürmer zur Traubenkur nach Obermais (heute Teil von Meran), 1836 hielt sich Mathilde Fürstin Schwarzenberg mit ihrem Hausarzt Johann Nepomuk Huber in Meran auf (der seine Beobachtungen und Recherchen 1837 in Buchform veröffentlichte); durch Huber wurde man (analog zum Aufstieg von Bad Ischl mit Hilfe des Wiener Arztes Franz Wirer) auf den wegen seines milden Klimas als "Luftkurort" angepriesenen Ort und seine Trauben- und Molkekuren aufmerksam; das milde Klima eignete sich sowohl für eine "Überwinterung" Gesunder wie auch als Aufenthaltsort für jene, die ihr Lungenleiden behandeln wollten. 1844 kaufte Erzherzog Johann das nahe von Meran gelegene Schloss Schenna und weckte durch seine Schwärmerei den Ruf Merans als klimatisch begünstigte Gebirgsstadt.

Als in den 1850er Jahren die Zahl der Kurgäste stieg, begründete man 1855 einen Kurverein. Stand Meran 1864 nach den fünf bedeutendsten Kurorten der Monarchie (Karlsbad, Marienbad, Baden bei Wien, Bad Ischl und Badgastein) mit 1.604 Gästen an letzter Stelle, so erreichte es 1913 mit 38.901 Gästen den zweiten Rang. Drei Ereignisse hatten 1857, 1870-1872 und 1881 diese Entwicklung maßgeblich gefördert: der Bau der Brennerbahn bis Bozen, die zweimalige Überwinterung (1870/1871 und 1871/1872) von Kaiserin Elisabeth (die das erste Mal im Schloss Trauttmansdorff logierte und deren Denkmal heute in einem nach ihr benannten Park steht, der seit 2003 durch die "Sisi-Promenade" mit dem Schloss verbunden ist) sowie die Eröffnung der Bahnlinie von Bozen nach Meran (womit der Anschluss ans mitteleuropäische Bahnnetz vollendet war).

Im ersten Jahrzehnt des 20. Jahrhunderts entwickelte sich Meran zum bevorzugten Aufenthaltsort des Wiener Adels, dessen Angehörige durch lange Aufenthalte ihre völlige Unabhängigkeit vom Erwerbsleben dokumentieren wollten. In seinem Gefolge kamen (wie auch in anderen Kurorten) Literaten (beispielsweise 1882 und 1886 Arthur Schnitzler, 1897 Rainer Maria Rilke, 1906 und 1908 Stefan Zweig [unter anderem auf Schloss Labers], ab 1916 Herzmanovsky-Orlando und 1920 Franz Kafka) und Künstler (beispielsweise zwischen 1898 und 1902 Franz Defregger, 1908 Alfred Kubin oder 1913 Albin Egger-Lienz) nach Meran; im 19. Jahrhundert treffen wir auch auf eine Reihe von Malern, die sich zur Motivsuche in Meran aufhielten (beispielsweise Jacob Alt, Thomas Ender und Friedrich Gauermann). Von dem häufig damit verbundenen Mäzenatentum (im Sinne von Einladungen) dürften beide Gesellschaftskreise profitiert haben: erstere an Ansehen, letztere an Bekanntheitsgrad. Hotels entstanden in zentraler Lage (zunächst in der Nähe des Bahnhofs wie das nicht mehr bestehende Grand Hotel Emma, später an der Passer im Kurbereich (wie das Hotel Meranerhof und das 1904-1906 von Peter Delugan erbaute Palast-Hotel [heute Grand Hotel Palace], in dem auch Zweig einmal logierte; dieses Hotel ist wohl das einzige, das seinen Rang bis in die Gegenwart nicht nur behaupten, sondern stetig erhöhen konnte.

Die Sanatorien wurden hauptsächlich in Obermais errichtet. 1900 wurde das Stadttheater eröffnet, 1907 das Kurmittelhaus; hatte man anfangs überwiegend bayerische Architekten verpflichtet, beauftragte man für den Erweiterungsbau des Kurhauses den weithin bekannten Jugenstilarchitekten Friedrich Ohmann aus Wien.

Zu den Komponisten, die Meran besuchten, gehören Béla Bartók 1900/1901, Egon Wellesz, Wilhelm Kienzl, der 1913 im Stadttheater oftmals seinen "Evangelimann" dirigierte (und ab 1917 in Wien lebte) sowie Max Reger 1914 (Sanatorium Martinsbrunn). Zweig logierte in Schloss Labers, aber auch im 1906 erbauten Palast-Hotel (heute Grand Hotel Palace). Im 19. Jahrhundert treffen wir auch auf eine Reihe von Malern, die sich zur Motivsuche in Meran aufhielten (beispielsweise Jacob Alt, Thomas Ender und Friedrich Gauermann). Berühmte Schriftsteller (beispielsweise Roda Roda) hielten hier Lesungen.

Die Zahl von Wienern, die entweder aus Meran nach Wien kamen, und jener, die nach Meran gingen und dort bis an ihr Lebensende lebten (beispielsweise Anton Ascher, der Direktor des Carl-Theaters, der Schulreformer Armand Dumreicher oder der Bildhauer Josef Bilger), ist groß.

In der Zwischenkriegszeit wählten besonders Politiker Meran als Aufenthaltsort, aber auch Richard Strauss, der sich 1922 und ab den 1930er Jahren längere Zeit hier aufhielt, und Herzmanovsky-Orlando, der 1916 nach Meran übersiedelte und hier 1954 auf Schloss Rametz verstarb.

www.wien.gv.at/wiki/index.php?title=Meran

Darlene Love

 

Darlene Wright (born July 26, 1941),[a] known by her stage name, Darlene Love, is an American popular music singer and actress. She gained prominence in the 1960s for the song "He's a Rebel," a No. 1 American single in 1962, and was one of the artists who performed on the celebrated Christmas album A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector, produced by Phil Spector in 1963. She is ranked number 84 among Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Singers.[1]

 

As a minister's daughter, she grew up listening to gospel music and was a dedicated member of her church. She began singing in her church choir at age ten. During choir practice she caught the attention of choir director Cora Martin-Moore. After singing for Martin she was asked to go to the Music Mart where she sang and did some broadcasts; Love's career began there.[2] As it was her first musical experience, it was also the main influence for her to pursue a music career. Those who knew her described her vocals as "a voice of a nightingale." She claimed, "(singing in) the choir was a big influence on my life. I call it my learning ground. Singing in the choir, I learned harmony."[3]

 

As an actress, she is perhaps best remembered for playing Roger Murtaugh's wife in the Lethal Weapon film series.

 

Early career

Love was born Darlene Wright on July 26, 1941 in Los Angeles, California to Ellen Maddox and Reverend Joe Wright.[4][5] Her sister Edna grew up to be the lead singer of the group Honey Cone.[6] She grew up in South Los Angeles, long before the racial tension, crime and violence for which the area later became infamous had taken over the community. Love later remembered the Los Angeles of her childhood as "a city that existed mostly in people's imaginations…. But for us, Los Angeles had nothing to do with movie stars or stubbly, hard-drinking gumshoes trying to piece together broken dreams after hours. For us, Los Angeles was contained in about 20 blocks, bookended on one side by our projects and playgrounds and on the other by church."[7]

 

Love began singing with her local church choir in Hawthorne, California. While still in high school (1957) she also sang with the Echoes,[8] a mixed gender doo-wop group. She was then invited to join a little-known girl group called the Blossoms,[9] who in 1962 began working with producer Phil Spector. With her powerful voice she was soon a highly sought-after vocalist, and managed to work with many of the legends of 1950s and 1960s rock and soul, including Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, Bill Medley, the Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, Tom Jones and Sonny and Cher; Darlene and the Blossoms sang backup for Sharon Marie (Esparza) (a Brian Wilson act), as well as John Phillips' solo album John, Wolfking of L.A., recorded in 1969. They also appeared on Johnny Rivers' hits, including "Poor Side of Town" "Baby I Need Your Loving" and "The Tracks of My Tears". (The Blossoms recorded singles, usually with little success, on Capitol 1957-58 [pre-Darlene Love], Challenge 1961-62, OKeh 1963, Reprise 1966-67, Ode 1967, MGM 1968, Bell 1969-70, and Lion 1972.)

 

The single "He's a Rebel" was hurriedly released by Spector in November 1962 by having the Blossoms record the track in order to get his version of the Gene Pitney song onto the market before that of Vikki Carr. The single "He's a Rebel" was credited to the Crystals,[10] but actually featured Love singing lead for the first time on a Phil Spector recording. The ghost release of this single came as a total surprise to the Crystals who were an experienced and much traveled girl harmony group in their own right, but they were nevertheless required to perform and promote the new single on television and on tour as if it were their own.

 

With the Blossoms, Love contributed backing vocals behind many of the biggest hits of the 1960s including the Ronettes' "Be My Baby", Shelley Fabares' "Johnny Angel", Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "Monster Mash", Frank Sinatra's version of "That's Life", and the Crystals' "Da Doo Ron Ron". As a solo artist, Love also contributed backing vocals to the Ronettes' "Baby, I Love You".

 

She was also part of a trio called Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, who recorded Spector's version of "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah", an Oscar-winning song from the 1946 Walt Disney film Song of the South, which got into the Top 10 in 1963. The Blossoms landed a weekly part on Shindig!, one of the top music shows of the era. They were part of the highly acclaimed Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special, which aired on NBC.

 

"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" is a song recorded by Darlene Love for the 1963 holiday compilation album, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector. The song was written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, along with Phil Spector, with the intention of being sung by Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes. According to Love, Ronnie Spector was not able to put as much emotion into the song as needed. Instead, Love was brought into the studio to record the song, which became a big success over time and one of Love's signature tunes.

 

Career break

 

Darlene Love engaging audience at Barnes & Noble Tribeca, June 17, 2013.

Into the 1970s Love continued to work as a backup singer, before taking a break in order to raise a family. In 1973, she recorded vocals as a cheerleader along with Michelle Phillips, for the Cheech & Chong single "Basketball Jones", which peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.[citation needed]

 

1980s return

Love returned to music in the early 1980s and to an appreciative audience she thought might have long since forgotten her. She had been performing at venues like the Roxy in Los Angeles, and it was a conversation with Steven Van Zandt that greased the wheels for her to go to New York and begin performing there in 1982, at places like The Bottom Line. She also sang "OOO Wee Baby" in the 1980 movie The Idolmaker. Along with performing in small venues, Love worked as a maid in Beverly Hills. One day while she was cleaning one of these homes, she heard her song "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" on the radio. She took this as a sign that she needed to change her life and go back to singing.[11]

 

In the mid-1980s she portrayed herself in the Tony Award-nominated jukebox musical Leader of the Pack, which featured the iconic rock and roll songs written by Ellie Greenwich, many of them for the young Love. The showstopping number of that show, "River Deep - Mountain High", had been recorded by Phil Spector with Ike & Tina Turner and had been less than the success they had expected. Leader of the Pack commenced as a revue at the Greenwich Village nightclub The Bottom Line, as did the later show about Love's life, Portrait of a Singer, which never made the move uptown. Portrait included covers of "A Change Is Gonna Come" and "Don't Make Me Over", as well as "River Deep, Mountain High" and original music from some of the instrumental writers of early rock and roll, including Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. Love contributed a cover of the Hollywood Argyles song "Alley Oop" to the soundtrack of the 1984 film Bachelor Party.

 

In 1986, Love's second chance came when she was asked to sing "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" on David Letterman's Christmas show. This became a yearly tradition.[11]

 

In 1987, Love sang backup for U2's remake of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)". In 1990, Love released the album Paint Another Picture, which included an update of her old hit "He's Sure the Man I Love", by Mann and Weill, as well as a ballad written especially for her, "I've Never Been the Same," by Judy Wieder. The album did not make the US charts. In 1990, Cher invited Love and her sister Edna Wright as her background vocalists for the Heart of Stone tour. Love released a minor single in 1992 with "All Alone on Christmas", written and composed by Steven Van Zandt, which can be found on the Home Alone 2: Lost in New York soundtrack. Love also contributed vocals to the soundtrack of the film Jingle All the Way.

 

She continues to do a Christmas show every year in New York City, which is always capped by "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)".

 

Love recorded a duet with Bette Midler on the latter's 2014 studio release album "It's the Girls!", a collection of songs paying tribute to girl groups. The two singers performed "He's Sure the Boy I Love", a track credited to the Crystals although actually recorded by Love, Fanita James of the Blossoms, and other studio session singers.

 

Love's most recent album Introducing Darlene Love was released September 18, 2015 on Steve Van Zandt's label, Wicked Cool Records.[12] There are 10 songs on this album, including singles and features by Van Zandt, two new songs by Bruce Springsteen, and covers of Joan Jett and Elvis Costello songs, among others. "Forbidden Nights", the first track, is one of the more successful songs on this album. It is a song that Elvis Costello previously produced for an unfinished Broadway musical.[12]

 

Acting roles

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Love also began an acting career, playing Trish Murtaugh, the wife of Danny Glover's character, in the four Lethal Weapon movies.[9] Love has held many star roles in various Broadway productions. She acted and sang in Grease, in the short-lived musical adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie, and starred as Motormouth Maybelle in Broadway's Hairspray from August 2005 till April 2008.[13] She later reprised the role in the Hollywood Bowl production of the show in 2011. In 2019, she appeared in the Netflix original movie Holiday Rush.[14]

 

Television appearances

Love performed the song "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" each year on the last pre-Christmas episode of Late Night with David Letterman (NBC, 1986–92) and the Late Show with David Letterman (CBS, 1993–2015). Her final Christmas appearance was on December 19, 2014, nine days after the official announcement of the show's finale in May 2015.[15] Letterman has stated that the annual performance is his favorite part of Christmas. Due to the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, Love was unable to perform on the Letterman show in 2007;[16] a repeat of her 2006 performance was shown instead. Love was also the musical guest on Late Show with David Letterman on May 7, 2007, performing "River Deep-Mountain High."

 

She was a special guest on the December 17, 2005, broadcast of Saturday Night Live, singing "White Christmas" with the SNL band and providing the vocals for a Robert Smigel cartoon entitled "Christmastime for the Jews." Love performed with Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band in November 2009 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert at Madison Square Garden.

 

With the ending of the Letterman show, Love has performed "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" on the ABC morning show The View each December since 2015. She has usually performed the song as a duet, being joined by Patti LaBelle in 2016, Fantasia in 2017, and Bryan Adams in 2018.

 

20 Feet from Stardom

She appears in the documentary film 20 Feet from Stardom (2013), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary at the 86th Academy Awards. 20 Feet from Stardom also won the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Music Film, with the award being presented to the featured artists as well as the production crew.

 

In the film, Love revealed that she had signed with Spector as a solo artist after the success of "He's a Rebel", and had recorded "He's Sure the Boy I Love" with the impression it would be released as her first single as a solo artist. However, Spector instead used Love's recording and released it as the newest single for the Crystals without informing Love. She only learned of the switch when she heard a DJ on the radio announce that the single was "the newest Crystals record".

 

Subsequently, Love recorded "Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry" which was released as a single by Spector, and now featured Love's name as the artist. She says that Spector offered $3,000 for her rights to the song. And though he said it was going to be a hit, she took the money. But, in spite of that decision, she said that she has continued to have a career because people have loved hearing her sing her songs.

 

Awards and accomplishments

In 1995 Love won the Rhythm and Blues Foundation's Pioneer Award.[2]

 

Darlene Love alongside Rob Hoerburger, editor and writer for the New York Times wrote her autobiography titled My Name Is Love, published in 1998.[17] In the memoir, Love writes about her life in the music industry, her years of struggle, and her present projects.[18]

 

On December 15, 2010, it was announced that Love had been chosen for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[19] On March 14, 2011, Love was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,[20] with a speech by Bette Midler.[21][22] Midler said "she changed my view of the world, listening to those songs, you had to dance, you had to move, you had to keep looking for the rebel boy." Near tears, Love noted that she will turn 70 later this year, and thanked Spector "for recognizing my talent and making me the main voice in his Wall of Sound." Her speech elicited a standing ovation. Later, she sang "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" with Springsteen providing a guitar solo.[23]

 

In August 2014, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) announced that it is producing a biopic for the big screen based on Love's life, starring singing icon Toni Braxton.

 

In 2015, Love was featured in the September issue of Entertainment Weekly. In the music section of the magazine, it introduces Love's five decades of musical accomplishments such as different solos and albums.

 

Love provided the inaugural performance to christen the opening of the Clermont Performing Arts Center in Clermont, Florida on September 26, 2015.[24]

 

2016 Tour

Beginning January 1, 2016, Love began touring her new album across the United States.

 

Discography

U.S. albums

1963 - Various Artists Today's Hits (Philles Records 4004)

1963 - Various Artists A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (Philles Records 4005)

1977 - Various Artists Phil Spector's Greatest Hits (Warner/Spector Records 9104)

1978 - Various Artists Lakeshore Music presents Rock and Roll Forever (Warner Special Products #2508) (same as above release)

1985 - Leader of the Pack Original Broadway Cast (Elektra Records 60420)

1985 - Darlene Love Live! (Rhino/Atlantic Records RNLP 855)

1988 - Paint Another Picture (Columbia/CBS Records CK 40605)

1990 - Various Artists Dick Tracy: Music from and inspired by the film (Sire/Warner Bros. Records 26236)

1991 - Various Artists Back to Mono (1958–1969) (ABKCO Records 7118) (boxed set)

1992 - Various Artists A Very Special Christmas 2 (A&M/PolyGram Records 450 003)

1992 - The Best of Darlene Love (The Philles Recordings) (ABKCO Records 7213)

1992 - Bringing It Home (with Lani Groves) (Shanachie Records 9003)

1998 - Various Artists Grease Is the Word (Rhino/Atlantic Records)

1998 - Unconditional Love (Harmony Records)

2007 - It's Christmas of Course (Shout! Factory/SME)

2008 - So Much Love: A Darlene Love Anthology 1958–1998 (Ace CDCHD 1169)

2011 - The Sound of Love: The Very Best of Darlene Love Audio CD

2011 - The Sound of Love: The Very Best of Darlene Love Blu-spec CD (Released on November 2, 2011)

2015 - Introducing Darlene Love (Wicked Cool/Columbia/SME)

U.S. singles

Incomplete list of recordings.

 

YearTitleChart positions

U.S. Hot 100

[25]

1961"Son-In-Law" (The Blossoms) Challenge 9109 (lead vocals by unknown session vocalist)79

1961"Hard to Get" (The Blossoms) Challenge 9122-

1962"The Search Is Over" (The Blossoms) Challenge 9138-

1962"He's a Rebel" (released as the Crystals) Philles 1061

1962"Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" (released as Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans) Philles 107 (lead vocals by Bobby Sheen)8

1962"He's Sure the Boy I Love" (released as the Crystals) Philles 10911

1963"Why Do Lovers Break Each Others Hearts" (released as Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans) Philles 11038

1963"Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry" / "My Heart Beat a Little Bit Faster" Philles 11139

1963"Not Too Young to Get Married" (released as Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans) Philles 113 (joint lead vocals with Bobby Sheen)63

1963"Wait ‘til My Bobby Gets Home" / "Take It From Me" Philles 11426

1963"A Fine, Fine Boy" Philles 11753

1963"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" Philles 11943

1964"Stumble and Fall" / "He's A Quiet Guy" Philles 123-

1964"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" Philles 125-

1964"3625 Groovy Street" / "What Are We Gonna Do In '64" (The Wildcats) Reprise 0253 (The Blossoms under a pseudonym; features unison lead vocals)-

1965"Good Good Lovin'" / "That's When the Tears Start" (The Blossoms) Reprise 0436-

1966"Lover Boy" / "My Love Come Home" (The Blossoms) Reprise 0475-

1966"Let Your Love Shine On Me / Deep Into My Heart" (The Blossoms) Reprise 0522-

1966"Too Late To Say You're Sorry / If" Reprise 0534-

1967"Deep Into My Heart / Good Good Lovin'" (The Blossoms) Reprise 0639-

1967"Wonderful" b/w "Stoney End" (The Blossoms) Ode 101 (B-side features joint lead vocals with Jean King)-

1968"Tweedlee Dee" (The Blossoms) MGM 13964-

1968"Cry Like A Baby" (The Blossoms) Ode 106-

1969"A Stoney End" b/w "Wonderful" - reissued (The Blossoms) Ode 125 (A-side features joint lead vocals with Jean King)-

1969"You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' / Something So Wrong" (The Blossoms) Bell 780-

1969"(You're My) Soul And Inspiration / Stand By" (The Blossoms) Bell 797-

1970"I Ain't Got To Love Nobody Else / Don't Take Your Love" (The Blossoms) Bell 857-

1970"One Step Away / Break Your Promise" (The Blossoms) Bell 937-

1972"Touchdown" (The Blossoms) Lion 108-

1972"Grandma's Hands" (The Blossoms) Lion 125-

1974"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" / "Winter Wonderland" Warner/Spector 0401-

1975"Lord, If You're A Woman / Stumble And Fall" Warner/Spector 0410-

1977"There's No Greater Love" (The Blossoms) Epic 50435-

1988"He's Sure the Man I Love / I've Never Been the Same/ Everybody Needs" Columbia 07984-

1992"All Alone on Christmas" (used in the film Home Alone 2: Lost in New York) Fox 1000383

2005"Christmastime for the Jews" (from Saturday Night Live)

2019"Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)"29

Filmography

YearFilmRoleNotes

1969Change of HabitBackup Singeruncredited

1969The Love God?Singer with the Blossomsuncredited

1987Lethal WeaponTrish Murtaugh

1989Lethal Weapon 2Trish Murtaugh

1992Lethal Weapon 3Trish Murtaugh

1998Lethal Weapon 4Trish Murtaugh

201320 Feet from StardomHerselfdocumentary

2016New GirlHerself

2019Holiday RushAunt Jo Robinson

Notes

a. ^ Some sources say 1938

 

References

"100 Greatest Singers of All Time". Rolling Stone. Retrieved June 10, 2015.

"Darlene Love". History-of-rock.com. July 26, 1938. Retrieved August 11, 2014.

Carroll, Jim (May 17, 2014). "The Love of Music". The State Journal. Frankfort, Kentucky. Archived from the original on June 6, 2014. Retrieved June 5, 2014.

"Darlene Wright in the California birth index". Darlene Wright, 26 July 1941, Mother's Maiden Name: Maddox Missing or empty |url= (help)

Love, Darlene; Hoerburger, Rob (2013). My Name Is Love: The Darlene Love Story. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0062305510.

"Edna Wright - Biography & History". AllMusic.com. Retrieved December 28, 2016.

"Darlene Love". Biography.com. October 8, 2015. Archived from the original on August 14, 2013. Retrieved March 4, 2017.

Doo-Wop Group Biographies: The Echoes/Poets

"Darlene Love spreads Christmas cheer". CBS News. December 25, 2011. Retrieved March 24, 2012.

"Darlene Love: A Prominent Star, Born In The Background". NPR. February 16, 2011. Retrieved August 11, 2014.

Friend, Tad (July 1, 2013). "Unsung". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 14, 2015.

Mansfield, Brian (August 4, 2015). "Darlene Love's 'Introducing' coming Sept. 18". USA Today. Retrieved December 28, 2016.

"Darlene Love | Broadway Buzz". Broadway.com. August 22, 2005. Retrieved August 11, 2014.

"Holiday Rush: Full Cast & Crew". IMDb.com. 2019. Retrieved December 2, 2019.

Itzkoff, Dave (December 20, 2014). "Darlene Love's Last 'Letterman' Christmas". The New York Times.

Wolcott, Mike (December 24, 2007). "People: Love Lost for Letterman". Contra Costa Times. Walnut Creek, California. Archived from the original on December 28, 2007.

Love, Darlene; Hoerburger, Rob (1998). My Name is Love (1st ed.). New York, NY: William Morrow and Co. ISBN 9780688156572. OCLC 39189821.

"Press – Welcome to Darlene Love". The official website of Darlene Love. Retrieved August 11, 2014.

"Darlene Love Biography". The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. July 26, 1938. Retrieved April 14, 2012.

"Darlene Love: A Prominent Star, Born In The Background". NPR. February 16, 2011. Retrieved April 14, 2012.

"Darlene Love: inducted in 2011". The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Retrieved August 11, 2014.

Greene, Andy (March 15, 2011). "Alice Cooper, Darlene Love, Neil Diamond Make for Unforgettable Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Ceremony". Retrieved March 15, 2011.

LA Times Blog (March 14, 2014). "Live from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony: Tom Waits, Dr. John, Darlene Love, Alice Cooper and Neil Diamond celebrate in New York". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 5, 2014.

Violanti, Tony (September 27, 2015). "Villagers enjoy performance of Darlene Love at new performing arts center". Villages-News.com. Retrieved September 28, 2015.

"Darlene Love Chart History: Hot 100". Billboard. Retrieved December 31, 2019.

External links

Official website

Darlene Love at AllMusic Edit this at Wikidata

Darlene Love discography at Discogs Edit this at Wikidata

Darlene Love on IMDb

Darlene Love at the Internet Broadway Database Edit this at Wikidata

Darlene Love at the Internet Off-Broadway Database

History of Rock and Roll: Darlene Love

Who Is Darlene Love? Official blog and news site.

Darlene Love Interview

Notice the leaves and you will see variations in the color of the new, bright ones in contrast to the older leaves: variations you can enhance by camera postion relative to light direction. -Don Blair, in an interview with Peter Skinner photography writer for Rangefinder magazine. , "The Best of Photographic Lighting: Techniques and Images for Digital Photographers" by Bill Hurter

Character Creation

 

The Scarlet Witch and her twin brother Quicksilver debuted as a part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in X-Men #4 (March 1964). They were depicted as reluctant villains, only wanting safety from persecution and uninterested in team leader Magneto's plans for global domination.

 

The Scarlet Witch is depicted as calm and submissive, like many female comic book characters of the time. Her costume was composed of a bathing suit with straps, opera gloves, short boots, a leotard covering her body, a superhero cape, and a wimple, all of which were colored in shades of red. She was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

 

Lee and Kirby also produced the Avengers comic book, composed of Marvel's most prominent solo heroes at the time. Save for Captain America, Lee and Kirby eventually had all the Avengers leave to focus on their individual careers, replacing them with former villains from other comics who did not have a series of their own: the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver from X-Men, and Hawkeye from Iron Man's adventures in Tales of Suspense. The team was known as "Cap's Kooky Quartet".

 

Although common in later years, such a wide-scale change in the roster of a superhero group was completely unprecedented (usually, superhero teams only exchanged one or two members at a time rather than almost the entire roster at once). Lee and the following Avengers writer, Roy Thomas, hinted that other Avengers were romantically interested in the Scarlet Witch. The twins later leave the team after a crossover with the X-Men.

 

Some years later, Thomas brought Wanda and Pietro back into the team and started a long-running romantic relationship between the Scarlet Witch and the android hero Vision, thinking it would help with the series' character development.

 

He elected those characters because they were only published in the Avengers comic book and did not star in solo adventures, so relationship drama in the series would not interfere with stories in other publications.

 

Their first kiss took place during the Kree–Skrull War arc. Thomas also added Hawkeye into a love triangle with both characters, eventually having the archer realize that Vision and Wanda were truly in love.

 

A fan of Golden Age heroes, Roy Thomas often found ways to integrate the older characters into modern-day stories. In Giant-Size Avengers #1 (August 1974), Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are revealed to be the children of Golden Age superheroes Whizzer (Robert Frank) and Miss America (Madeline Joyce).

 

Steve Englehart succeeded Thomas as the writer of Avengers. He gave Wanda a more assertive personality and removed the highly-protective Quicksilver from the team.

 

In 1974, Englehart expanded Wanda's powers by having her learn witchcraft from Agatha Harkness. The Vision and the Scarlet Witch married in Giant-Size Avengers #4 (June 1975), the end of the Celestial Madonna story arc.

 

In 1979, Wanda learns Bob Frank and Madeline Joyce are not her and Pietro's parents. Wanda then stars in the 4-issue limited series The Vision and the Scarlet Witch (1982–83), by writer Bill Mantlo and penciler Rick Leonardi.

 

In this limited series, Magneto was retconned to be Wanda and Pietro's father. Englehart returned to the characters with penciler Richard Howell for a second limited series, in which the Scarlet Witch gets pregnant by magical means and delivers twin sons, William and Thomas.

 

Englehart took over as writer for the spin-off series West Coast Avengers, later adding Vision and Wanda to the team.

 

John Byrne later replaced Englehart on the series (which was renamed Avengers West Coast). He wrote and illustrated the controversial "Vision Quest" storyline, where the Vision is dismantled and turned into an emotionless being who later even refuses the chance to regain his emotions (leading to the annulment of his marriage to the Scarlet Witch).

 

Around this same time, Wanda is brainwashed twice by different villains, first to become a servant for the parasitic life form That Which Endures[ and then to be a "Bride of Set" during the crossover Atlantis Attacks.

 

Although her mind is restored both times, the repeated trauma renders her catatonic. At this time, the Vision decides he cannot help Wanda or the Avengers West Coast and returns to the NYC team.

 

Byrne's next storyline involved Wanda becoming a villain yet again, now displaying greater and more focused power than before, and rejoining Magneto.

 

Writers Roy and Dann Thomas took over Avengers West Coast. They revealed that Wanda's new personality, attacks on the Avengers and increase in power were all due to manipulations by the time villain Immortus, who had been seen watching the Avengers during some of Byrne's issues. The storyline disclosed Wanda is a "nexus being", a person who greatly affects timelines.

 

By influencing Wanda to tap into her nexus energies, Immortus caused her increase in power and the creation of the children. Immortus wishes to use her to warp reality, but Wanda comes to her senses and gives up her nexus energies.

 

Roy and Dann Thomas then revealed that a side effect of this caused Wanda to remember her children and temporarily lose her powers. The website Women in Refrigerators interviewed Englehart about these changes, who said he did not like them.

 

Multiple stories after the Immortus storyline featured Wanda remembering and mourning her children, and even judging teammate Spider-Woman for bringing her child along on an Avengers assignment.

 

Roy Thomas later wrote the short story "A Study in Scarlet", with art by Al Bigley and Mike DeCarlo, published in Avengers West Coast Annual #7 (1992). The short story featured Wanda reflecting on how she was glad Agatha's memory-blocking spell only lasted a short time, as she appreciates having had the chance to mourn her children properly.

 

She then accidentally creates a window into another timeline where she sees a version of events where she, Vision, and the children remained together. This brings her comfort and helps her feel she can cope with the loss better.

 

Following the Immortus storyline, Wanda is a more serious-minded character, wishing to atone for turning against the Avengers twice in a short amount of time and endangering reality. When she regains her powers, her hexes are initially more difficult to control and only on the power level she had when she first joined the Avengers.

 

To compensate, she practices the magic Harkness taught her. In 1994, Avengers West Coast ended, and several of its team members reformed as an independent group led by Wanda in the series Force Works. The new title ran for only a couple of years. In 1994, a Scarlet Witch four-issue limited series was written by Andy Lanning and Dan Abnett, and pencilled by John Higgins.

 

Marvel Comics was nearing bankruptcy in 1996. The Avengers and other titles were relaunched in a new continuity and line of books called Heroes Reborn, outsourced to the studios of Image Comics artists.

 

Rob Liefeld worked with the relaunched Avengers title and included the Scarlet Witch in the team, making her a sorceress with no mutant abilities (the Heroes Reborn reality did not make any reference to any people born with mutant powers). After Marvel renegotiated the terms of the deal, Liefeld was replaced with writer Walter Simonson and penciler Michael Ryan. The project was a success, boosting the sales of the titles and bringing Marvel Comics out of bankruptcy.

 

The project ended after a year, and the Avengers were returned to the mainstream Marvel reality. The Avengers series relaunched again, now under Kurt Busiek and George Pérez. Pérez designed a new, complicated design for Wanda, increasing the volume of curls in her hair and giving her a costume with Romani influences. Pérez commented he preferred this more challenging design but accepted other artists would find it irksome.

 

Later when he became the artist on Avengers, Alan Davis asked to change the design because it didn't work well with his simpler, less detailed style. During Busiek's stories, Wanda once again becomes a powerful sorceress by tapping into the energy of "chaos magic". Busiek clarifies her true mutant power is to tap into magical energy fields and manipulate them, just as Magneto taps into and manipulates electromagnetic fields.

 

Marvel decided to relaunch the Avengers series again, with a new roster, headquarters, atmosphere, and creative direction.

 

To promote the change and gain reader interest, the inciting event was depicted in the 2004 story Avengers Disassembled written by Brian Michael Bendis and with art by David Finch.

 

In the story, a remark by the Wasp causes Wanda to remember her children (how and when Wanda once again lost the memories of her children is not explained). She suddenly relives the trauma of their loss and feels betrayed by the Avengers, both for allowing Harkness to cloud her memories and for being unable to save her children from Mephisto.

 

Emotionally overwhelmed and simultaneously experiencing a drastic increase in power, Wanda kills Agatha Harkness and causes the Avengers to suffer their "worst day" by altering the minds of She-Hulk and Iron Man, and causing simulations of the villain Ultron and the alien Kree to attack.

 

This leads to the apparent deaths of different characters and the destruction of Avengers Mansion. Wanda is discovered to be the culprit and stopped, after which she falls into a coma.

 

The Avengers disband, then reform in New Avengers. To explain her sudden increase in power, the sorcerer Dr. Strange says Wanda's actual mutant power is to reshape reality, adding that her talk of tapping into "chaos magic" is a lie because such a force does not exist. This contradicted earlier comics where Dr. Strange himself uses chaos magic and "catastrophe magic", and later Marvel stories confirm chaos magic is a real force that sorcerers can access.

 

Wanda was seen again in the limited series House of M, creating an alternate version of Earth. When Earth's heroes defeat her, she causes "M-Day", removing the powers of most mutants on Earth. She then appeared in the Young Avengers follow-up series, Avengers: The Children's Crusade (2010-2012), which retconned Avengers Disassembled by revealing Wanda's extreme actions and enhanced power levels during recent stories were the result of tapping into an enormous source of energy that then corrupted her, similar to when she was possessed by Chthon, brainwashed by That Which Endures, and corrupted by Immortus.

 

This was now the explanation as to how she was able to warp reality and why she would no longer be that powerful, and partially exonerated her from her actions against the Avengers and during M-Day. Wanda was again portrayed as someone who wanted to atone for her past, accepting partial responsibility rather than completely blaming outside influences, allying herself with Doctor Doom.

 

Avengers: The Children's Crusade also now referred to the children of William and Thomas not as "pieces" of Mephisto's essence but as "lost souls" who had been taken away by Mephisto, indicating they actually had been alive and explaining how they could be reincarnated as the teenage heroes Speed and Wiccan.

 

Fictional character biography

 

The Scarlet Witch (real name Wanda Maximoff) is a human with the ability to alter probability. For a time, she was believed to be the daughter of the mutant Magneto and his late Roma wife Magda. Wanda is also the fraternal twin sister of Pietro (Quicksilver). Wanda and her brother are both Romani and Jewish. Shortly after Magda became pregnant, she witnessed her husband use his magnetic powers and realized that he was a mutant.

 

Being terrified of mutants, Magda did not tell him about her pregnancy and fled from their home at the first opportunity. Magda eventually found refuge with a benevolent cow-like humanoid named Bova, who lived on Mount Wundagore in Transia. The twins were born on Mt. Wundagore, and due to the mountain's mystical energy, it gave Wanda the ability to use magic in addition to her other powers.

 

Shortly after the birth, Magda was driven mad with fear that Magneto might come for her and discover the twins. Despite Bova's attempts to reassure her, she fled the mountain during a blizzard in order to protect the twins and apparently died of exposure soon afterward.

 

The motherless twins became the responsibility of Bova. A short time later, Bova helped a World War II heroine named Miss America give birth to a child fathered by her superhero husband, the Whizzer, but unfortunately, both child and mother died from radiation poisoning soon afterward.

 

After Whizzer arrived, Bova only told him that Miss America had died, and gave him Pietro and Wanda to care for, claiming they were his children. Whizzer initially took the twins with him, but once he discovered they were not his own, he immediately returned them to Bova on Mt. Wundagore.

 

Bova then found another set of foster parents for Wanda and Pietro named Django and Marya Maximoff, who had just lost two children of their own. Django and Marya were Roma, and unfortunately suffered from prejudice and persecution in Transia.

 

Django worked as a doll-maker, but it was hard for him to find customers due to him being Roma. Django eventually had to steal food to keep his family from starving. When Wanda grew older, she received unwanted advances by a boy her age and was forced to use her powers to keep him away from her. The villagers, however, accused Wanda of seducing the boy and attacked the Maximoffs, setting fire to the family’s wagon.

 

Marya was still inside and burned to death. They clubbed Django unconscious, but Wanda and Pietro were able to escape. Wanda and Pietro now believed that they were the only members of their family left. The two twins grew up together taking care of themselves, and Pietro grew very protective of Wanda.

 

Character Evolution: Silver Age

 

Scarlet Witch has been through some major changes in her comic book career. Wanda began her career as a mutant on the side of evil, being a member of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. But just over a year later in May 1965, she joined the Avengers and became a hero in Avengers #16.

 

The line between good and evil with her blurred, not because of ideals, but because the slightest misuse of her powers was a cause for concern for many.

 

Bronze Age and Modern Age

 

For many years, Wanda was a core member of the Avengers and West Coast Avengers teams. But the Avengers Disassembled, House of M and Decimation storylines radically altered her powers and her place in the Marvel Universe.

 

Her powers had initially been portrayed as a simple ability to manipulate probability and generate hexes on her opponents. But following a breakdown caused by the realization that she had lost her children, Wanda manifested an ability to alter all of reality and caused the deaths of several characters as she lashed out at her former friends.

 

The Children's Crusade storyline, involving the Young Avengers in a quest to find and confront the now amnesiac Wanda who may once again alter her place in the Marvel Universe for good.

 

Major Story Arcs

 

Brotherhood of Evil Mutants

 

Eventually, Wanda and Pietro used their powers in public again, resulting in their being attacked by a superstitious mob. Magneto arrived and saved their lives, and in return, they agreed to join his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Wanda became known as the Scarlet Witch, and Pietro, due to his power of super-speed, took the name Quicksilver. They were the first members of the Brotherhood, but neither Magneto nor the twins were actually aware that Magneto was their real father.

 

Wanda was now a beautiful young woman and two male members of the Brotherhood, Toad, and Mastermind, often tried to seduce her, but Magneto always protected her from them.

 

However, Magneto would also inflict pain on Wanda whenever she gave a thought of leaving the Brotherhood. Magneto recruited more powerful beings to aid the Brotherhood, such as Namor, after Wanda failed her objectives during certain missions.

 

Namor eventually quit the Brotherhood after witnessing Wanda being abused by Magneto for her disloyalty. After Magneto was taken from Earth by the cosmic entity called the Stranger, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants effectively disbanded. The American superhero Iron Man then asked Wanda and Pietro to join his team of heroes, the Avengers.

 

The Avengers

 

The twins briefly went back to Europe to consider the offer, but soon returned to America and joined the Avengers. They wanted to redeem themselves for their past actions when they were members of the Brotherhood. Captain America trained them as Avengers, and Hawkeye became Wanda’s closest friend on the team. During her stay with the Avengers, Wanda became attracted to the android Avenger known as the Vision and the two began dating romantically.

 

Both Pietro and Hawkeye were very vocal in their disagreement with the relationship. Pietro felt dating an android was beneath Wanda, and Hawkeye also disapproved because he had developed his own feelings for Wanda. Eventually, Hawkeye got over his jealousy and gave Wanda and Vision his blessing. Pietro, on the other hand, denounced his sister’s love. Later, during an argument with Hawkeye, a telepath named Moondragon erased Pietro’s hate for the Vision.

 

Learning Her Powers & Marriage

 

Also during her time with the Avengers, Wanda was tutored by a true witch named Agatha Harkness. Harkness helped her to understand and employ her powers more efficiently. She disciplined Wanda’s magical ability and taught her to control her mutant hex power.

 

Wanda's romance with the Vision culminated in the two getting married. This important event in her life caused her to wonder who her real father was. For a time, she believed that the Whizzer was her biological father. Wanda eventually learned that Magneto was her real father, which made her even angrier at Magneto because of his abusive behavior during her time in the Brotherhood. Later, after Agatha Harkness died, Wanda became infused with magic powers that made her pregnant with twins, whom she named Thomas and William. Wanda and Vision decided to retire as Avengers in order to raise their children.

 

West Coast Avengers

 

Vision and Wanda eventually came out of retirement and joined a depleted West Coast Avengers. The Vision was kidnapped by other countries that were still angered with his attempt to take over the world years earlier. Vision's memories were eventually wiped clean, leaving him completely robotic and logic-driven and with no emotional attachment to anything, including Wanda. She decided to find a way to restore the Vision's memories and personality.

 

Wanda sought out Wonder Man, who was considered the Vision’s 'brother,' since the android's personality and memories had originally been created from Wonder Man's own. But since they shared the same psychic template, Wonder Man also loved Wanda and had always been jealous of the Vision. He wanted Wanda to marry him instead. Wonder Man was counseled by Wasp (who could not have children of her own and questioned the existence of Wanda’s children), who convinced him to not allow anyone to use his memories to restore the Vision’s.

 

Fading Children

 

Wanda’s children began to fade in and out of existence. It was eventually revealed that Agatha Harkness was still alive, and had used mystical energies containing parts of Mephisto’s soul, turning them into Wanda’s children in order to hide them.

One of Mephisto’s minions kidnapped Wanda’s children and reabsorbed them back into Mephisto. The Avengers attempted to rescue the children but failed. Agatha erased a grief-stricken Wanda’s memories of her twins and helped the Avengers escape from Mephisto’s realm.

 

Everyone’s life went on, with Vision still having no memories and showing little concern for Wanda on the battlefield. Vision eventually decided to leave the West Coast team to join the East Coast roster. Wanda begged Vision to stay by her side, but he told her that the East Coast needed him more than she did.

 

This led to Wanda having a nervous breakdown and helping found a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, along with Magneto (who had returned to Earth) and Quicksilver. Pietro soon revealed that he only joined Magneto to take back his fragile sister. The West Coast Avengers tried to save Wanda, but she was then kidnapped by Immortus. Immortus revealed that he had manipulated Wanda’s relationship with Vision in order to destroy the android, and this process made Wanda emotionally fragile.

 

Force Works & Return to the Avengers

 

During the process, Wanda’s mutant power connected her to multiple parallel universes. She was then rescued by the West Coast Avengers and rejoined the team. Wanda stayed with the West Coast Avengers for quite some time. Hawkeye helped her deal with the loss of her husband and her twins.

 

Wanda would eventually become leader of the West Coast Avengers, but soon left to become a founding member of a new team called Force Works. The ill-fated team did not last long however, when Wonder Man died on the first mission as a member of Force Works. The group disbanded, and Wanda rejoined the Avengers.

 

Around this time, Vision began to regain his past memories and emotions for Wanda and the couple tried to reconcile. They were interrupted when they had to battle Onslaught and died alongside other heroes. They were put in an alternate universe, but were returned to their proper universe by Franklin Richards.

 

Return to Earth-616

 

After returning to their own Earth, Wanda, along with her fellow Avengers and the Fantastic Four, soon tried to settle down once more after the events of the last few months. It was however not much later that Wanda was kidnapped by the sorceress Morgan Le Fey.

 

She was able to escape and resurrected Wonder Man to ghost form in the process. Le Fey battled Vision and wounded him badly. Vision tells Wanda not to visit him because of his current status and her fragile mind. Wanda revisited Agatha Harkness where she learns that her mutant powers were still evolving. She is able to now channel Chaos Magic which is considered very dangerous by professional magicians.

 

Wanda also learns that she can resurrect the dead now. After she was rejected by Vision so much, she decided to revive Wonder Man and pursue a relationship with him. They began having an obvious affair right in front of Vision who had his entire memories restored.

 

However, their relationship would go nowhere after Wonder Man reveals that he does not want to get married and have children. Wanda dumped Wonder Man right after that. Soon Wanda and Vision would reconcile and try to rebuild their relationship. Wanda began using her Chaos Magic more often and it started to consume her with chaos energy.

 

Avengers Disassembled

 

When the Wasp began a romantic relationship with Hawkeye, she would constantly talk to Wanda about the developments of their romance. One day after Wasp had a few drinks, she revealed to Wanda that she once had children that were hidden to her.

 

This triggered something deep inside Wanda’s mind. She sought out her former teacher, Agatha Harkness to learn the truth, and murdered Agatha for the betrayal. She went on to exact her revenge on her fellow Avengers. She hit each of them unexpectedly.

 

At this point, Wanda was believed not to be in her right mind, driven mad by her immense power and the memory of the children she lost. It is highly likely that what she did to the other Avengers was unknown even to her, and their destruction was created on a subconscious level.

 

First, the corpse of Jack Of Hearts was animated and blew up the Avengers Mansion, killing Scott Lang. It is not fully known whether this was actually Scott Lang's body, if his mind was in the body at the time of the attack, or if it was simply a construct generated by Wanda's magic which was meant to resemble the former Avenger.

 

Next, during a U.N. meeting where Iron Man was speaking, the unmasked Tony Stark became overwhelmed with the sensation of drunkenness despite his long-term sobriety. He called out the Latverian ambassador, talking about how the entire country should be wiped off the map, and threatening to kill the politician where he stood.

 

Before Hank Pym was able to lecture Tony, Wanda's Avengers communicator signaled a code white, signaling that they were needed at the Mansion. As Stark flew off, the United States Chief of Staff called him and informed him that he was being forced to resign from his position within the government.

 

Back at the mansion, SHIELD had arrived at the scene to lend assistance and investigate. The Vision flew in on an Avengers Quinjet, crashing into the side of the building. An apologetic Vision emerged from the rubble and ejected several metal orbs which grew into Ultron robots.

 

The army of Ultron robots attacked the Avengers, sending She-Hulk into a blind rage. After the Ultron robots were defeated, She-Hulk ripped the body of the Vision in half, utterly destroying him. Iron Man arrived just in time to incapacitate her, but not before she had severely injured both Wasp and Lionheart.

 

At this point, Wanda had either killed or taken several of her teammates out of action, most likely still not even realizing that she was behind the attacks. The remaining Avengers had little time to try to figure out what was happening or who was attacking them before returning to the Mansion.

 

When they returned, they found Nick Fury as well as many past members who were close enough to assemble, and a few friends of the team. Fury was trying to get the superheroes who had arrived to leave so that they wouldn't mess up his investigation when a group of Kree warriors (generated by Wanda's magic) flew in to attack. During the attack on the Avengers, Hawkeye sacrificed himself to bring down the Kree warship.

 

After the destruction of the ship, the remaining Kree fled and Doctor Strange arrived to inform them that the attacks on the Avengers were magic-based. He declared Wanda to be insane due to her possession of reality-altering abilities that were beyond her comprehension or control. He was aghast that she had been allowed to live her life without checks and balances, saying anyone who had such a powerful control over probability would have lost their grasp on reality. He scolded the Avengers for not consulting with him about Wanda’s past. He also reveals that there is no such thing as “Chaos Magic.”

 

Strange led the Avengers to Wanda who had begun creating a fake reality around her composed of those she cared for. The arrival of the Avengers threatened this peace and the existence of the children that she had once again willed into being.

 

Wanda summoned new constructs of heroes and villains to battle the group of superheroes and created demons to battle Strange. She was no match for Strange's power, and she was immobilized by him. It was then that Magneto, hearing of his daughter's mental break, arrived to rescue her. Magneto took Wanda back to Genosha in hopes of healing her broken mind.

 

House of M

 

While in Genosha, Magneto asked Professor X to help Wanda but he refuses to do so. Instead, Xavier put Wanda in a coma. She was trying to restore her husband’s life and undo the harm she has caused. Xavier then calls a meeting with the Avengers and the X-Men to decide whether they should allow Wanda to live or not. A horrified Pietro immediately came to Wanda and told her of this.

 

He convinced her, while she was in this fragile mental state, to distort probability to create a new reality, called House of M. In this new reality, the mutant/human ratio was reversed, and Magneto was the supreme ruler (hence, House of M). Wanda was also not a mutant in this reality and she had children.

 

However, Layla Miller used her powers to restore the memories of a few mutants, who created an assault force to try and re-establish the correct reality. This militia assumed it was Magneto who convinced Wanda to create the House of M. They attacked the House of M with a full army and in the process, Layla was able to restore Magneto’s memories. Wanda confessed it was Pietro that convinced her to warp reality.

 

No More Mutants

 

Infuriated, Magneto yelled at his son for using his name in this and nearly killed Pietro. Wanda then revived Pietro, angered that Magneto placed mutants over his own children. To remedy the problem, Wanda conjured all her powers and uttered the 3 most impacting words in all of the Marvel Universe: "No more mutants". This sent reality to where it was before with only a select few remembering what had happened, and 99% of the mutant population losing their powers. From that time onward, the events were referred to as M-Day.

 

Decimation

 

It is later revealed, that not only does Wanda not remember House of M or have her powers, she does not have any recollection of who she was, and has created a new life for herself. She currently resides in an unknown village in Europe. Later, Hawkeye was able to track Wanda down to a city near Wundagore Mountain.

 

Hawkeye saves Wanda from thieves but Wanda reveals that she has no memories of her past and believes that she has lived in the village her entire life. She thanks Hawkeye and calls him her hero. The two grow close.

 

After that Hawkeye tried to enter Aunt Agatha's room, but when he tried to grab the doorknob, it disappeared as if by magic. Hawkeye looked at Wanda but she, seemingly, was still asleep. Beast has also tried to get Wanda to undo the damage she caused the mutant race. Instead, she tells him a story about the fisherman and the mermaid, after informing Beast his watch was a fake.

 

He asks her questions about magic in the hopes it would trigger her memories, but she simply states she is waiting for her Aunt Agatha (who many suspect to be Agatha Harkness) and does not believe in magic.

 

Beast dreams of having a conversation with Wanda, who tells him "Sand is sand" and that he shouldn't mourn the passing of what passes, that she didn't invent death. When he tells her she delivered a death sentence, she reminds him that she spoke her mind and brought about change, not death. No more mutants, no more pain. However, when he brings up the valid point of asking about the mutants who were happy with their gifts, Wanda points out that he's still dreaming.

 

The Children's Crusade

 

The Young Avengers Wiccan and Speed convinced that the Scarlet Witch is their biological mother, go in search of the real Wanda. Along the way, they encounter both Magneto and Quicksilver, who are quickly drawn into a fight as Pietro attempts to kill his father Magneto. Wiccan transports the Young Avengers, Magneto, and Quicksilver to Transia to begin their search. In the midst of a fight, Wanda suddenly reappears, only to be 'killed' by Quicksilver, who had hurled some wooden stakes at Magneto but hit Wanda instead.

 

This 'Wanda' is revealed to be a Doombot, suggesting to the gathered group that Wanda is being held captive by Dr. Doom. After teleporting solo into Castle Doom, Wiccan encounters Wanda inside her private quarters. Hoping for a nice reunion with his mother, Wiccan attempts to tell her that he is her son. Unfortunately, Wanda has no knowledge of him or anything about her past life. She tells him she is set to marry Doom in a day.

 

Before Wiccan can do anything, Doom bursts into the room and knocks him out with a blast from his suit. Doom reveals to Wiccan (after healing him and removing his powers) that he didn't find Wanda, instead, Wanda found him. She has lost her powers and has no recollection of her past. He also claimed that he loves her.

 

On her wedding day, Wanda frees Wiccan from his chains and tells him that Victor wasn't acting in his usual way when he saw Wiccan and she asks Wiccan to tell her everything.

 

Wiccan tells her about Scarlet Witch up till the event when he meets Speed. He cuts off in his mid-sentence: "and I realized (that Speed and I are your lost twin sons)-" when he sees that the Avengers, as well as the Young Avengers and Magneto, have arrived in battle Doom and Wanda. Wolverine sees Wanda and attacks her and is about to kill her when he gets hit by a laser beam from Iron Lad.

 

While the rest of the Avengers and Young Avengers reunite with Iron Lad, Doom slips away to where Wanda and Wiccan are at and attempts to kill Billy.

 

Wanda begs him to stop and says she doesn't believe Wiccan's story but wonders why Doom is so concerned she might have. Magneto burst through the wall and attacks Doom, while Billy slips away with Wanda saying they have to get her somewhere safe. Iron Lad appears and says he can help by transporting all the Young Avengers and Wanda to his safe haven in the Timestream. Iron Lad says that to try and help Wanda regain her memory, they should go back to the day it started when Wanda resurrected Jack of Hearts and murdered her teammates. Everyone is worried about them (especially Cassie) changing the past but Iron Lad assures them that with his technology, they can inhabit the past without affecting it. He transports them all to the Avengers Mansion, the day of Wanda's breakdown, but she still doesn't recognize or recall anything.

 

Cassie sees her deceased father, Scott Lang, and runs to him. To everyone's surprise, she is able to touch him and he can see her. Suddenly Jack of Hearts appears and the Young Avengers (with Scott in tow) run from him. Wanda stays behind and walks up to Jack, and he pleads with her about why she's making him do this. As Speed, grabs Wanda to escape, Jack exploded. They appear in the present with Scott Lang, but in this reality, he is still dead, as he stands in front of his own memorial statue.

 

They ask Iron Lad how that is possible and how he brought them and Scott there without changing the past. He replied that he didn't and then Wanda appears behind them saying that she did it. They turn to see Wanda, in her Scarlet Witch costume, telling them that Billy was right, she is the Scarlet Witch and she remembers everything.

 

Feeling guilty about her past misdeeds, Wanda attempts to commit suicide. Billy is able to talk her out of it by revealing that he believes himself and Speed to be her reincarnated children. He then requests that she use her powers to reveal whether or not he and Thomas are her children, to which she agrees.

 

She realizes that they are in fact her children and her, Billy, and Thomas tearfully embrace each other. Beast suggests that Wanda absolve herself of her crimes by attempting to reverse the effects of M-Day. She is successfully able to restore the powers of the mutant known as Rictor, just as a team of X-Men shows up to confront her. As the X-Men try to take Wanda into their custody, both Magneto and the Avengers defend her which leads to a battle between both teams.

 

During the battle, Emma Frost uses her telepathy to influence the thoughts of both Wiccan and Speed until Wanda interferes and causes each member of both teams to fall asleep before teleporting herself and the Young Avengers to Doctor Doom's castle. There Doctor Doom and Wanda convince the Young Avengers into using a spell to separate Wanda from her powers. Combining the powers of Wanda, Wiccan and Doctor Doom they began their spell until it was interrupted by Patriot, who fired an explosive arrow at Wanda which interrupted the spell before it could be completed and thereby giving Doctor Doom all the powers that they were trying to harness.

 

Avengers vs. X-Men

 

During Avengers vs. X-Men, Wanda finds herself on the side of the Avengers, her powers being the only thing capable of hurting the Phoenix Five. As the Phoenix avatars grew stronger, however, Wanda's hex bolts became less and less effective. Tony Stark deduced that it would require the efforts of both Wanda and Hope Summers to stop the Phoenix.

 

Although she had fought with Hope at first, they successfully defeated Cyclops after he became the Dark Phoenix and rid the world of the Phoenix Force for now. The aftermath of this fight resulted in the re-emergence of the mutant race with several new powers manifesting at the very moment of the Phoenix dispersal.

 

Powers & Abilities

 

The Scarlet Witch possesses the mutant power of affecting probability fields. By a combination of gestures and mental concentration, she creates a hex-sphere, a finite pocket of reality-disrupting quasi-psionic force, which upon reaching its intended target, causes the disturbance in the molecular-level probability field surrounding the target. Thus, unlikely phenomena will occur.

 

Among the many phenomena she is able to cause are: the sudden melting of gun barrels, the spontaneous combustion of any flammable object, the rapid rust or decay of various organic and inorganic materials, the poltergeist-like deflection of an object in flight, the sudden evacuation of air from a given volume, the disruption of energy transmissions and fields, and so on. These phenomena occur practically instantaneously after the completion of her hex. Her range of hex-casting is limited by her line of sight. She cannot watch a live television broadcast and cause a hex-phenomenon to occur at its point of origin.

 

Scarlet Witch's hex-casting ability had a 20% unreliable factor and she is limited in the range of sight, although she has been able to overcome the latter limitation on occasion via extreme concentration and sorcerous enchantment.

 

Wanda is also a living focal point for the Earth's magic. Her sorcerous training with Agatha Harkness is separate from her mutant ability of probability (science). But the mixture of the two makes her considerably more powerful than just using her probability powers. She has a special affinity for the natural elements and materials that true witches utilize in their spells: the four alchemical elements, wood, organic substances, etc.

 

The reliability factor of her hex-casting ability is also limited by her physical condition: when well-rested, in good health and mentally and emotionally alert, Scarlet Witch can cast numerous hex-spheres in rapid succession and attain desirable results for almost an hour. However, certain events in House of M, have shown that her limits may have been removed altogether. And her powers actually evolved, giving her the mutant ability to alter reality on a vast scale by way of magic.

 

⚡ Happy 🎯 Heroclix 💫 Friday! 👽

_____________________________

 

A year of the shows and performers of the Bijou Planks Theater.

 

Secret Identity: Wanda Maximoff

 

Publisher: Marvel

 

First Appearance: The X-Men #4 (March 1964)

 

Created by: Stan Lee (writer)

Jack Kirby (artist)

Ham the Zenith Man, 12103 Venice Boulevard, Mar Vista, California. Horace Hamacher was an electronics technician during World War II before becoming a news writer for radio station WOW of Omaha. After moving to Mar Vista in 1948, he decided he preferred repairing radios to writing copy, and opened up the Mar Vista Radio Service. By 1950 “Ham” was also providing sales and repair service for TVs, and referred to himself in local ads as Ham the Television Man. In the late 50s he began specializing in Zenith TVs and offering an early version of a remote control called Space Command (“Tune your TV from your easy chair”). In 1967 he became Ham the Zenith Man, the self-proclaimed “largest exclusive Zenith dealer in California”. Ham passed away in 1982; his business carried on in this building until 1994. This metal “Ham the Zenith Man” sign is all that remains.

Home of:

Bob Woodward (Journalist, Author)

Located: 3027 Q Street NW

 

Robert Upshur "Bob" Woodward (born March 26, 1943) is one of the best-known journalists in the United States, thanks largely to his work in helping uncover the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation, in a historical partnership with Carl Bernstein, while working as a reporter for The Washington Post. He has written twelve best-selling nonfiction books and has twice contributed reporting to efforts that collectively earned the Post and its National Reporting staff a Pulitzer Prize.

 

Woodward was discharged from the Navy in August 1970. He had applied to several law schools, but had also applied for a job as a reporter for the Washington Post. Harry Rosenfeld, the paper's metropolitan editor, hired him on a two-week trial basis, a tryout that failed because of his complete lack of experience as a journalist. Still interested in becoming a reporter, he got a job with the Montgomery Sentinel. A year after his on-the-job training at the Sentinel, he left that paper and joined The Washington Post in August 1971.

 

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein / Watergate

He and Carl Bernstein were assigned to investigate the June 17, 1972 burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in a Washington, D.C. office building called Watergate. Their work, under editor Ben Bradlee, led to the uncovering of a large number of political "dirty tricks" used by the Nixon re-election committee during his campaign for reelection. Their book about the scandal, All the President's Men, became a #1 best-seller and was later turned into a movie. The 1976 film, starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, transformed the reporters into celebrities and inspired a wave of interest in investigative journalism. The book and movie also led to one of Washington D.C.'s most famous mysteries: the identity of Woodward's secret Watergate informant known as Deep Throat, a reference to the title of a popular pornographic movie at the time. Woodward said he would protect Deep Throat's identity until the man died or allowed his name to be revealed. For over 30 years, only Woodward, Bernstein, and a handful of others knew the informant's identity until he revealed himself to Vanity Fair magazine as former FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt in May 2005. Woodward has confirmed his identity and published a book, titled The Secret Man, which detailed his relationship with Felt.

 

George W. Bush Administration

Woodward has spent the most time of any journalist with President George W. Bush, interviewing him four times for more than seven hours total. Woodward's most recent two books, Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004), are detailed accounts of the Bush presidency, including the response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Woodward is at work on another book about Bush's second administration.

 

In a series of articles published in January 2002, he and Dan Balz described the events at Camp David in the aftermath of September 11. In these articles, they mention the Worldwide Attack Matrix.

 

Woodward has been accused by some critics of being too close to the Bush administration, and some say his relationship with the current administration is in stark contrast to his investigative role in Watergate. Others disagree, however. In 2004 both the Bush campaign and the Kerry-Edwards campaign recommended his book Plan of Attack, and The New York Times said the book contained “convincing accounts of White House failures... presented alongside genial encounters with the president.”

 

Involvement in the Plame scandal

On November 14, 2005 Woodward gave a two-hour deposition to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. He testified that a senior administration official told him in June 2003 that Iraq war critic, Joe Wilson’s wife (later identified as Valerie Plame), worked for the CIA. Woodward therefore appears to have been the first reporter to learn about her employment from a government source. The deposition was reported in The Washington Post on November 16, 2005, and was the first time Woodward revealed publicly that he had any special knowledge about the case. Woodward testified the information was given to him in a “casual” and “offhand” manner, and said that he does not believe it was part of any coordinated effort to “out” Plame as a CIA employee.

 

Woodward said the revelation came at the end of a long, confidential background interview for his 2004 book Plan of Attack. He did not reveal the official’s disclosure at the time because it did not strike him as important. Later, he kept it to himself because it came as part of a confidential conversation with a source. He said he did not want to be subpoenaed by Fitzgerald, who by then was threatening journalists who did not reveal confidential sources with civil contempt.

 

Woodward said he testified after his source contacted Fitzgerald and requested Woodward to cooperate. However, the source did not agree to modify the confidentiality agreement to allow Woodward to identify the source publicly.

 

In his deposition, Woodward also said that he had conversations with Scooter Libby after the June 2003 conversation with his confidential administration source, and testified that it is possible that he might have asked Libby further questions about Joe Wilson’s wife before her employment at the CIA and her identity were publicly known.

 

Woodward’s revelation was controversial because he had not told his editor at the Post about the conversation for more than two years, and also because he had publicly criticized the investigation. He had referred to Fitzgerald as a “junkyard dog prosecutor” on Larry King’s television show, and said he believed that when “all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great.". On another occasion, he said of the investigation that he thought there was “nothing to it,” and that Fitzgerald’s behavior had been “disgraceful.” In later interviews after his deposition, Woodward said he had meant by his “junkyard dog” comment to suggest colorfully that Fitzgerald was a tenacious prosecutor, and that the “disgraceful” comment concerned the tactic of putting journalists in prison to coerce them to reveal their confidential sources.

 

Woodward apologized to Leonard Downie, the editor of The Washington Post for not informing him earlier of the June 2003 conversation. News of his deposition sparked the latest round of debate about his status at the Post. One reporter described Woodward on an internal Post message board as the “800-pound elephant among us,” adding: “I admire the hell out of Bob, but this looks awful.”

 

Other professional activities

Woodward has continued to write books and report stories for The Washington Post, and serves as an assistant managing editor at the paper. He focuses on the presidency, intelligence, and Washington institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court, The Pentagon, and the Federal Reserve. He has also written Wired, about the Hollywood drug culture and the death of comic John Belushi.

 

Awards and recognitions

Woodward has twice contributed to collective journalistic efforts that were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1973, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Though the Prize was awarded to the entire Post staff, the citation specifically named his and Bernstein's reporting on Watergate as exemplary work. In addition, Woodward was the lead reporter for the Post's articles on the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks that won the National Reporting Pulitzer in 2002. He also was awarded the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency in 2003.

 

Woodward is widely regarded as one of the top reporters of the last half-century, and has earned trust and accolades from government officials and journalists of all political persuasions. In 2003, Al Hunt of The Wall Street Journal called Woodward "the most celebrated journalist of our age." The Weekly Standard called him "the best pure reporter of his generation, perhaps ever." In 2004, Bob Schieffer of CBS News said "Woodward has established himself as the best reporter of our time. He may be the best reporter of all time."

 

Style and commentary

In writing his books, Woodward collects detailed records, including interviews, documents, transcripts, and recordings. He then uses them to describe events as a story with an omniscient narrator, present tense and dialogue. His books read somewhat like fiction, and are often very visually descriptive.

 

While this style may have earned Woodward commercial success, many literary critics consider his prose awkward and his approach inappropriate for his subject matter. Nicholas von Hoffman complained that "the arrestingly irrelevant detail is [often] used" while Michael Massing thinks the books are "filled with long, at times tedious passages with no evident direction." Joan Didion said Woodward finds "[nothing] too insignificant for inclusion," including such details as shirts worn and food eaten in unimportant situations.

 

The narrative, reporting-driven style of Woodward's books also draws criticism for rarely making conclusions or passing judgment on the characters and actions that he recounts in such detail. Didion concluded that Woodward writes "books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent," and finds the books marked by "a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."

 

Some of Woodward's critics accuse him of abandoning critical inquiry to maintain his access to high-profile political actors. Anthony Lewis called the style "a trade in which the great grant access in return for glory." and Christopher Hitchens has accused both Woodward and George F. Will of acting as "stenographer[s] to the rich and powerful."

 

Woodward has said that his books "really are self portraits, because I go to people and I say — I check them and I double check them but — but who are you? What are you doing? Where do you fit in? What did you say? What did you feel?" Critics complain that this style allows the biases and beliefs of his sources to steer the narrative and that those who talk to Woodward are painted more favorably than those who don't. The Brethren, for example, painted a picture of the Supreme Court based on the comments of its clerks; some believe that, as a result, the book suggests that the Supreme Court Justices do little of the actual work. Brad DeLong says that accounts of the evolution of Clinton's economic policy in Woodward's books The Agenda (presented from Clinton's point of view) and Maestro (presented from Alan Greenspan's) are so inconsistent that the reader will "collapse to the floor in helpless laughter".

 

Woodward's dual role as journalist and author has opened him up to occasional criticism for sitting on information for publication in a book, rather than presenting it sooner when it might affect the events at hand. In The Commanders (1991), for instance, he indicated that Colin Powell had opposed Operation Desert Storm, yet Woodward did not publish this information before Congress voted on a war resolution, when it may have made a difference. And in Veil, he indicates that former CIA Director William Casey personally knew of arms sales to the Contras, but he did not reveal this until after the Congressional investigation.

 

Woodward has also been accused of exaggeration and fabrication by other journalists, most notably regarding "Deep Throat", his famous Watergate informant. Before he was revealed to be W. Mark Felt, some contended that Deep Throat was a composite character based on more than one Watergate source. Martin Dardis, the chief investigator for the Dade County State Attorney, who in 1972 discovered that the money found on the Watergate burglars came from the Committee to Re-elect the President, has complained that All the President's Men misrepresented him. Woodward was also accused of fabricating his deathbed interview with Casey, as described in Veil; critics say the interview simply could not have taken place as written in the book. Finally, an investigation by the New York Review of Books found that Woodward fabricated a sensational story about Justice William J. Brennan in The Brethren, among other issues.

 

Despite these criticisms and challenges, Woodward has been praised as an authoritative and balanced journalist. The New York Times Book Review said in 2004 that "No reporter has more talent for getting Washington’s inside story and telling it cogently." The publication of a Woodward book, perhaps more than any other contemporary author's, is treated as a major political event that dominates national news for days.

 

Personal

Woodward was born in Geneva, Illinois to Alfred Woodward, a judge. He was brought up in nearby Wheaton. He now lives in the Georgetown section of Washington. He is married to Elsa Walsh, a writer for The New Yorker, and has two daughters, one with Elsa and one with his first wife.

 

Books

Woodward has co-authored or authored ten #1 national best-selling non-fiction books, more than any other contemporary American writer. They are:

 

All the President's Men (1974) about the Watergate scandal;

The Final Days (1976) about Nixon's resignation;

The Brethren (1979) about the Supreme Court in the Warren Burger years;

Wired (1984) on the death of John Belushi and the Hollywood drug culture;

Veil (1987) about the CIA's "secret wars" during the reign of William J. Casey;

The Commanders (1991) on The Pentagon, the first Bush administration and the Gulf War;

The Agenda (1994) about Bill Clinton's first term

Shadow (1999) on the legacy of Watergate and the scandals that faced later Presidential administrations;

Bush at War (2002) about the path to war with Afghanistan following September 11;

Plan of Attack (2004) about how and why President George W. Bush decided to go to war with Iraq.

Other books, which have also been best-sellers but not #1, are:

 

The Choice (1996) about Clinton's re-election bid

Maestro (2000) about Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan

The Secret Man (2005) about Mark Felt's disclosure, after more than thirty years, that he was Deep Throat. The book was written before Felt admitted his title, as he was sickly and Bob expected that someway or another, it would come out. Since he still had some finishing to do, the book was done 10 days after.

Newsweek has excerpted five of Woodward's books in cover stories; 60 Minutes has done segments on five; and three have been made into movies.

 

Pop Culture References

On The Simpsons episode Whacking Day in the fourth season, Bart reads a book called "The Truth About Whacking Day", written by Bob Woodward.

 

In the movie The Skulls, starring Joshua Jackson as Lucas McNamera, Lucas' best friend Will Beckford (played by Hill Harper) tries to compare himself to the great Bob Woodward while reading the publication of his column in the school newspaper. Will was subsequently killed for pursuing his journalistic curiosities.

 

In the movie Dick, which is about Watergate, Woodward is played by actor/comedian Will Ferrell. In the film Woodward and Carl Bernstein, are depicted as two petty, bickering, childish near-incompetents who are small-mindedly competitive with each other.

 

Quotes

"I called my father and said I'm not going to law school, but have this job at a newspaper he had never heard of. And my father said probably the severest thing he has ever said to me. He said, 'You're crazy.' So he didn't think it was a good idea."

"You won't achieve understanding of a person or an issue in a day. Take your time, dig, go back."

 

Pentre Ifan is the name of an ancient manor in the community and parish of Nevern, Pembrokeshire, Wales. It is 11 miles (18 km) from Cardigan, Ceredigion, and 3 miles (4.8 km) east of Newport, Pembrokeshire. Pentre Ifan contains and gives its name to the largest and best preserved neolithic dolmen in Wales.

 

The Pentre Ifan monument is a scheduled monument and is one of three Welsh monuments to have received legal protection under the Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882. The dolmen is maintained and cared for by Cadw, the Welsh Historic Monuments Agency.

 

As it now stands, the Pentre Ifan Dolmen is a collection of seven principal stones. The largest is the huge capstone, 5 m (16 ft) long, 2.4 m (7.9 ft) width and 0.9 m (3.0 ft) thick. It is estimated to weigh 16 tonnes and rests on the tips of three other stones, some 2.5 m (8.2 ft) off the ground. There are six upright stones, three of which support the capstone. Of the remaining three, two portal stones form an entrance and the third, at an angle, appears to block the doorway.

 

The dolmen dates from around 3500 BC, and has traditionally been identified as a communal burial. Under this theory the existing stones formed the portal and main chamber of the tomb, which would originally have been covered by a large mound of stones about 30 m (98 ft) long and 17 m wide. Some of the kerbstones, marking the edge of the mound, have been identified during excavations. The stone chamber was at the southern end of the long mound, which stretched off to the north. Very little of the material that formed the mound remains. Some of the stones have been scattered, but at least seven are in their original position. An elaborate entrance façade surrounding the portal, which may have been a later addition. was built with carefully constructed dry stone walling. Individual burials are thought to have been made within the stone chamber, which would be re-used many times. No traces of bones were found in the tomb, raising the possibility that they were subsequently transferred elsewhere.

 

A major study by Cummings and Richards in 2014 produced a different explanation for the monument. They identify several distinctive attributes shared by the class of monument known as dolmens, all of which are particularly well exemplified at Pentre Ifan.

 

First, such monuments typically have a large capstone derived from a glacial erratic, far bigger than is required or sensible if the aim is to roof a chamber. Furthermore, the capstone has a flat underside. Sometimes, as here, this has been arrived at by splitting the rock; at other sites, such as Garn Turne, some 12 km to the south-west, it has been laboriously 'pecked' off using stone tools. The capstone is supported on the tapering tips of slender uprights. As at Pentre Ifan, there are often other stones within the group, but they play no part in holding up the capstone, and the resulting effect of the enormous stone appearing to float above the other stones would seem to be deliberate and desired. If these are the key elements of the monument then, it is argued, the stones were never designed to be buried within a mound, and they never formed a chamber to contain bones. What we see today is the monument as it was intended to be seen. It might therefore represent a more elaborate version of a standing stone. Its purpose could be simply to demonstrate the status and skill of the builders, or to add significance and gravitas to an already significant place.

 

The sheer size of the huge capstone that is supported by the larger dolmens makes it overwhelmingly likely that the stone was not brought in from elsewhere, but already stood as an independent glacial erratic on the same spot it now occupies. Evidence from the 1948 excavation is compatible with the idea of a large pit being dug at Pentre Ifan, to expose and work on the stone, perhaps splitting it to create a flat underside, It could then be levered vertically upwards a little at a time, using poles, ropes, and large numbers of people, and packed into place using a growing heap of boulders. Once at the required height, the supporting uprights could be introduced, and the boulders removed to leave only the uprights, and such other surrounding stones as were wanted.or for sacrificial ceremonies

 

Pentre Ifan was studied by early travellers and antiquarians, and rapidly became famous as an image of ancient Wales, from engravings of the romantic stones. George Owen wrote of it in enthusiastic terms in 1603, and Richard Tongue painted it in 1835.

 

The first United Kingdom legislation to protect ancient monuments was passed in 1882, and 'The Pentre Evan Cromlech' (as it was styled) was on the initial list of 68 protected sites – one of only three in Wales. On 8 June 1884, two years after the passing of the first Ancient Monuments Act, Augustus Pitt Rivers, Britain's first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, made a visit and produced sketch plans of the monument. The legal protection the Act gave was limited. It became an offence to remove stones or items from the site, but the owner of a monument was exempt from any prosecution. The Act however provided for the Commissioner of Works to become 'guardian' of a scheduled monument – in effect to own the monument, even though the land on which it stood remained in private ownership. Perhaps as result of Pitt Rivers' visit, this protection was put in place, and the Commissioner of Works and his various successor bodies have been guardians of Pentre Ifan ever since.

 

Archaeological excavations took place in 1936–37 and 1958–59, both led by William Francis Grimes. This identified rows of ritual pits which lay under the mound, and therefore must predate it. Kerbstones for the mound were also found, but not in a complete sequence, and aligned more to the pits than to the stone chamber. Very few items were found in the excavations, other than some flint flakes, and a small amount of Welsh (Western) pottery.

 

The dolmen is maintained and cared for by Cadw, the Welsh Historic Monuments Agency. The site is well kept, and entrance is free. It is about 11 miles (18 km) from Cardigan, and 3 miles (4.8 km) east of Newport, Pembrokeshire.

 

Pembrokeshire is a county in the south-west of Wales. It is bordered by Carmarthenshire to the east, Ceredigion to the northeast, and is otherwise surrounded by the sea.[note 1] Haverfordwest is the largest town and administrative headquarters of Pembrokeshire County Council.

 

The county is generally sparsely populated and rural, with an area of 200 square miles (520 km2) and a population of 123,400. After Haverfordwest, the largest settlements are Milford Haven (13,907), Pembroke Dock (9,753), and Pembroke (7,552). St Davids (1,841) is a city, the smallest by population in the UK. Welsh is spoken by 17.2 percent of the population, and for historic reasons is more widely spoken in the north of the county than in the south.

 

Pembrokeshire's coast is its most dramatic geographic feature, created by the complex geology of the area. It is a varied landscape which includes high sea cliffs, wide sandy beaches, the large natural harbour of Milford Haven, and several offshore islands which are home to seabird colonies. Most of it is protected by Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, and can be hiked on the 190-mile (310 km) Pembrokeshire Coast Path. The interior of Pembrokeshire is relatively flat and gently undulating, with the exception of the Preseli Mountains in the north.

 

There are many prehistoric sites in Pembrokeshire, particularly in the Preseli Mountains. During the Middle Ages several castles were built by the Normans, such as Pembroke and Cilgerran, and St David's Cathedral became an important pilgrimage site. During the Industrial Revolution the county remained relatively rural, with the exception of Milford Haven, which was developed as a port and Royal Navy dockyard. It is now the UK's third-largest port, primarily because of its two liquefied natural gas terminals. The economy of the county is now focused on agriculture, oil and gas, and tourism.

 

Human habitation of the region that is now Pembrokeshire extends back to between 125,000 and 70,000 years  and there are numerous prehistoric sites such as Pentre Ifan, and neolithic remains (12,000 to 6,500 years ago), more of which were revealed in an aerial survey during the 2018 heatwave; in the same year, a 1st-century Celtic chariot burial was discovered, the first such find in Wales. There may have been dairy farming in Neolithic times.

 

There is little evidence of Roman occupation in what is now Pembrokeshire. Ptolemy's Geography, written c. 150, mentioned some coastal places, two of which have been identified as the River Teifi and what is now St Davids Head, but most Roman writers did not mention the area; there may have been a Roman settlement near St Davids and a road from Bath, but this comes from a 14th-century writer. Any evidence for villas or Roman building materials reported by mediaeval or later writers has not been verified, though some remains near Dale were tentatively identified as Roman in character by topographer Richard Fenton in his Historical Tour of 1810. Fenton stated that he had "...reason to be of opinion that they had not colonized Pembrokeshire till near the decline of their empire in Britain".

 

Part of a possible Roman road is noted by CADW near Llanddewi Velfrey, and another near Wiston. Wiston is also the location of the first Roman fort discovered in Pembrokeshire, investigated in 2013.

 

Some artefacts, including coins and weapons, have been found, but it is not clear whether these belonged to Romans or to a Romanised population. Welsh tradition has it that Magnus Maximus founded Haverfordwest, and took a large force of local men on campaign in Gaul in 383 which, together with the reduction of Roman forces in south Wales, left a defensive vacuum which was filled by incomers from Ireland.

 

Between 350 and 400, an Irish tribe known as the Déisi settled in the region known to the Romans as Demetae.  The Déisi merged with the local Welsh, with the regional name underlying Demetae evolving into Dyfed, which existed as an independent petty kingdom from the 5th century.  In 904, Hywel Dda married Elen (died 943), daughter of the king of Dyfed Llywarch ap Hyfaidd, and merged Dyfed with his own maternal inheritance of Seisyllwg, forming the new realm of Deheubarth ("southern district"). Between the Roman and Norman periods, the region was subjected to raids from Vikings, who established settlements and trading posts at Haverfordwest, Fishguard, Caldey Island and elsewhere.

 

Dyfed remained an integral province of Deheubarth, but this was contested by invading Normans and Flemings who arrived between 1067 and 1111.  The region became known as Pembroke (sometimes archaic "Penbroke":), after the Norman castle built in the cantref of Penfro. In 1136, Prince Owain Gwynedd at Crug Mawr near Cardigan met and destroyed a 3,000-strong Norman/Flemish army and incorporated Deheubarth into Gwynedd.  Norman/Flemish influence never fully recovered in West Wales.  In 1138, the county of Pembrokeshire was named as a county palatine. Rhys ap Gruffydd, the son of Owain Gwynedd's daughter Gwenllian, re-established Welsh control over much of the region and threatened to retake all of Pembrokeshire, but died in 1197. After Deheubarth was split by a dynastic feud, Llywelyn the Great almost succeeded in retaking the region of Pembroke between 1216 and his death in 1240.  In 1284 the Statute of Rhuddlan was enacted to introduce the English common law system to Wales, heralding 100 years of peace, but had little effect on those areas already established under the Marcher Lords, such as Cemais in the north of the county.

 

Henry Tudor, born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, landed an army in Pembrokeshire in 1485 and marched to Cardigan.  Rallying support, he continued to Leicestershire and defeated the larger army of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. As Henry VII, he became the first monarch of the House of Tudor, which ruled England until 1603.

 

The Laws in Wales Act 1535 effectively abolished the powers of the Marcher Lords and divided the county into seven hundreds, roughly corresponding to the seven pre-Norman cantrefi of Dyfed. The hundreds were (clockwise from the northeast): Cilgerran, Cemais, Dewisland, Roose, Castlemartin, Narberth and Dungleddy and each was divided into civil parishes; a 1578 map in the British Library is the earliest known to show parishes and chapelries in Pembrokeshire. The Elizabethan era brought renewed prosperity to the county through an opening up of rural industries, including agriculture, mining and fishing, with exports to England and Ireland, though the formerly staple woollen industry had all but disappeared. 

 

During the First English Civil War (1642–1646) the county gave strong support to the Roundheads (Parliamentarians), in contrast to the rest of Wales, which was staunchly Royalist. In spite of this, an incident in Pembrokeshire triggered the opening shots of the Second English Civil War when local units of the New Model Army mutinied. Oliver Cromwell defeated the uprising at the Siege of Pembroke in July 1648.  On 13 August 1649, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland began when New Model Army forces sailed from Milford Haven.

 

In 1720, Emmanuel Bowen described Pembrokeshire as having five market towns, 45 parishes and about 4,329 houses, with an area of 420,000 acres (1,700 km2). In 1791 a petition was presented to the House of Commons concerning the poor state of many of the county's roads, pointing out that repairs could not be made compulsory by the law as it stood. The petition was referred to committee.  People applying for poor relief were often put to work mending roads. Workhouses were poorly documented. Under the Poor Laws, costs and provisions were kept to a minimum, but the emphasis was often on helping people to be self-employed. While the Poor Laws provided a significant means of support, there were many charitable and benefit societies. After the Battle of Fishguard, the failed French invasion of 1797, 500 French prisoners were held at Golden Hill Farm, Pembroke. From 1820 to 1878 one of the county's prisons, with a capacity of 86, was in the grounds of Haverfordwest Castle. In 1831, the area of the county was calculated to be 345,600 acres (1,399 km2) with a population of 81,424.

 

It was not until nearly the end of the 19th century that mains water was provided to rural south Pembrokeshire by means of a reservoir at Rosebush and cast iron water pipes throughout the district.

 

Throughout much of the 20th century (1911 to 1961) the population density in the county remained stable while it rose in England and Wales as a whole. There was considerable military activity in Pembrokeshire and offshore in the 20th century: a naval base at Milford Haven because German U-boats were active off the coast in World War I and, in World War II, military exercises in the Preseli Mountains and a number of military airfields. The wartime increase in air activity saw a number of aircraft accidents and fatalities, often due to unfamiliarity with the terrain. From 1943 to 1944, 5,000 soldiers from the United States Army's 110th Infantry Regiment were based in the county, preparing for D-Day. Military and industrial targets in the county were subjected to bombing during World War II. After the end of the war, German prisoners of war were accommodated in Pembrokeshire, the largest prison being at Haverfordwest, housing 600. The County of Pembroke War Memorial in Haverfordwest carries the names of 1,200 of those that perished in World War I.

 

In 1972, a second reservoir for south Pembrokeshire, at Llys y Fran, was completed.

 

Pembrokeshire's tourism portal is Visit Pembrokeshire, run by Pembrokeshire County Council. In 2015 4.3 million tourists visited the county, staying for an average of 5.24 days, spending £585 million; the tourism industry supported 11,834 jobs. Many of Pembrokeshire's beaches have won awards, including Poppit Sands and Newport Sands. In 2018, Pembrokeshire received the most coast awards in Wales, with 56 Blue Flag, Green Coast or Seaside Awards. In the 2019 Wales Coast Awards, 39 Pembrokeshire beaches were recognised, including 11 awarded Blue Flag status.

 

The Pembrokeshire coastline is a major draw to tourists; in 2011 National Geographic Traveller magazine voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the second best in the world and in 2015 the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park was listed among the top five parks in the world by a travel writer for the Huffington Post. Countryfile Magazine readers voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the top UK holiday destination in 2018, and in 2019 Consumers' Association members placed Tenby and St Davids in the top three best value beach destinations in Britain. With few large urban areas, Pembrokeshire is a "dark sky" destination. The many wrecks off the Pembrokeshire coast attract divers. The decade from 2012 saw significant, increasing numbers of Atlantic bluefin tuna, not seen since the 1960s, and now seen by some as an opportunity to encourage tourist sport fishing.

 

The county has a number of theme and animal parks (examples are Folly Farm Adventure Park and Zoo, Manor House Wildlife Park, Blue Lagoon Water Park and Oakwood Theme Park), museums and other visitor attractions including Castell Henllys reconstructed Iron Age fort, Tenby Lifeboat Station and Milford Haven's Torch Theatre. There are 21 marked cycle trails around the county.

 

Pembrokeshire Destination Management Plan for 2020 to 2025 sets out the scope and priorities to grow tourism in Pembrokeshire by increasing its value by 10 per cent in the five years, and to make Pembrokeshire a top five UK destination.

 

As the national sport of Wales, rugby union is widely played throughout the county at both town and village level. Haverfordwest RFC, founded in 1875, is a feeder club for Llanelli Scarlets. Village team Crymych RFC in 2014 plays in WRU Division One West. There are numerous football clubs in the county, playing in five leagues with Haverfordwest County A.F.C. competing in the Cymru Premier.

 

Triathlon event Ironman Wales has been held in Pembrokeshire since 2011, contributing £3.7 million to the local economy, and the county committed in 2017 to host the event for a further five years. Ras Beca, a mixed road, fell and cross country race attracting UK-wide competitors, has been held in the Preselis annually since 1977. The record of 32 minutes 5 seconds has stood since 1995. Pembrokeshire Harriers athletics club was formed in 2001 by the amalgamation of Cleddau Athletic Club (established 1970) and Preseli Harriers (1989) and is based in Haverfordwest.

 

The annual Tour of Pembrokeshire road-cycling event takes place over routes of optional length. The 4th Tour, in April 2015, attracted 1,600 riders including Olympic gold medallist Chris Boardman and there were 1,500 entrants to the 2016 event. Part of Route 47 of the Celtic Trail cycle route is in Pembrokeshire. The Llys y Fran Hillclimb is an annual event run by Swansea Motor Club, and there are several other county motoring events held each year.

 

Abereiddy's Blue Lagoon was the venue for a round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in 2012, 2013, and 2016; the Welsh Surfing Federation has held the Welsh National Surfing Championships at Freshwater West for several years, and Llys y Fran Country Park hosted the Welsh Dragonboat Championships from 2014 to 2017.

 

While not at major league level, cricket is played throughout the county and many villages such as Lamphey, Creselly, Llangwm, Llechryd and Crymych field teams in minor leagues under the umbrella of the Cricket Board of Wales.

 

Notable people

From mediaeval times, Rhys ap Gruffydd (c. 1132-1197), ruler of the kingdom of Deheubarth, was buried in St Davids Cathedral. and Gerald of Wales was born c. 1146 at Manorbier Castle. Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) was born in 1457 at Pembroke Castle.

 

The pirate Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart) (Welsh: Barti Ddu) was born in Casnewydd Bach, between Fishguard and Haverfordwest in 1682.

 

In later military history, Jemima Nicholas, heroine of the so-called "last invasion of Britain" in 1797, was from Fishguard, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton GCB, born in Haverfordwest, was killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and Private Thomas Collins is believed to be the only Pembrokeshire man that fought in the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879.

 

In the arts, siblings Gwen and Augustus John were both born in Pembrokeshire, as was the novelist Sarah Waters; singer Connie Fisher grew up in Pembrokeshire. The actor Christian Bale was born in Haverfordwest.

 

Stephen Crabb, a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Wales, was brought up in Pembrokeshire and is one of the county's two Members of Parliament, the other being Simon Hart,[90] who served as Secretary of State for Wales from 2019 to 2022.

The Journal asked writers and illustrators to contribute a series based on design icon Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design manifesto. Each writer wrote on one of Rams’ principles; each illustrator reacted to a writer’s essay. This is the seventh illustration from the ten-part series.

 

Steven Heller wrote on Rams’ sixth principle, Good design is honest. Mr Heller is a notable author, writer for Print Magazine and co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Emory Allen created the above illustration based on Mr Heller’s essay. Mr Allen works under the studio name Ocular Invasion. He currently works for the motion graphics and animation studio Make.

One of THE great writers of the last 50 years, David Mamet was born and raised on Chicago's South Side. His first critical recognition came during a burst of creativity in the mid 1970's with 3 plays in quick succession: The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo. With a keen eye for characters and dialogue, Mamet was the perfect writer for the DIY scene in Chicago that was turning out gritty, real, theater that was-and in some ways still is-blowing away anything in London or New York. Other well-known plays include Speed The Plow, Oleanna, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross. His best known screenplays include The Verdict, The Untouchables, House of Games, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Spanish Prisoner, and Wag the Dog. He's also directed more than half a dozen feature films, written numerous non-fiction articles, several pieces of short fiction, a book of poetry, and 2 novels. His new novel is simply titled "Chicago" and takes place during Al Capone's reign and the legendary beer wars of the late 1920's. (Personal note: Despite being intimidated to meet him, he was a very easy-going guy. Didn't hurt that I gave him a nice photograph I made of his wife 5 years ago, and we both are fascinated with similar subjects-gangsters and Torah study to be exact. Through that I was able to get a nice, genuine, light-hearted expression from a guy famous for the profane, rapid-fire tirades and dialogue he writes for his characters)

Explosion, Stromboli Volcano, Italia

 

© Olivier Grunewald / Wild Wonders of Europe

 

After studying photography for advertising, French photographer Olivier Grunewald returned to his first loves, mountains, nature - the great oudoors. In 1988, he opened a “studio” in mid-air in order to follow professional climbers, work that won him the Prix de la Fondation de la Vocation in France, on which he bases his first book, Escalade Passion, published by Atlas. Since then, Olivier Grunewald, with his wife, Bernadette Gilbertas, have trotted the globe in quest of extraordinary landscapes, exceptional light and wildlife in all its forms. His photographic work has led him into situations rich in emotion, suspended by rope from a tropical forest’s tallest tree, down the gaping mouth of fuming volcanoes, or knee-deep in snow under the glow of the northern lights.

 

His coverage of nature and Eco-tourism in collaboration with his wife Bernadette Gilbertas, journalist and writer for nature and ecology, has appeard in a variety of French magazines such as The Figaro Magazine, VSD, Ca M’intéresse, Terre Sauvage, Grands Reportages, as well as in foreign presse (Airone, Focus, GEO, International Wildlife, National Geographic Magazine, ...). They have publihed numerous books, on Iceland, Autralia, Namibia, Western North America. Their last books "Nature" is published in France in October 2004, and « Canyons », in october 2005. and« Volcanoes » in september 2007.

Their photographic work on the seaturtles of French Guyana, which won a prize at the World Press Photo Awards in 1995, was published all over the world. In 2002, World Press Photo again rewarded their work with a second place in the Science and Technology category for his coverage of northern lights. Once again, in february 2004, the World press has given Olivier the 2nd price in nature category, for his report on Kamtchatka volcanoes.

  

www.wild-wonders.com

www.gitzo.com

Mark Updegrove, Susan Glasser and Peter Baker

 

On December 13th, 2022, the LBJ Presidential Library held an evening discussion with longtime national journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, authors of the New York Times bestselling book The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021. Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for MSNBC. Susan Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a CNN global affairs analyst. Baker and Glass are married and live in Washington, D.C. LBJ Foundation president and CEO Mark K. Updegrove moderated the discussion.

 

LBJ Library photo by Jay Godwin

12/13/2022

Robert Hooke FRS (/hʊk/; 28 July [O.S. 18 July] 1635 – 3 March 1703) was an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath.

 

His adult life comprised three distinct periods: as a scientific inquirer lacking money; achieving great wealth and standing through his reputation for hard work and scrupulous honesty following the great fire of 1666, but eventually becoming ill and party to jealous intellectual disputes. These issues may have contributed to his relative historical obscurity.

 

He was at one time simultaneously the curator of experiments of the Royal Society and a member of its council, Gresham Professor of Geometry and a Surveyor to the City of London after the Great Fire of London, in which capacity he appears to have performed more than half of all the surveys after the fire. He was also an important architect of his time – though few of his buildings now survive and some of those are generally misattributed – and was instrumental in devising a set of planning controls for London whose influence remains today. Allan Chapman has characterised him as "England's Leonardo".[1]

 

Robert Gunther's Early Science in Oxford, a history of science in Oxford during the Protectorate, Restoration and Age of Enlightenment, devotes five of its fourteen volumes to Hooke.

 

Hooke studied at Wadham College during the Protectorate where he became one of a tightly knit group of ardent Royalists led by John Wilkins. Here he was employed as an assistant to Thomas Willis and to Robert Boyle, for whom he built the vacuum pumps used in Boyle's gas law experiments. He built some of the earliest Gregorian telescopes and observed the rotations of Mars and Jupiter. In 1665 he inspired the use of microscopes for scientific exploration with his book, Micrographia. Based on his microscopic observations of fossils, Hooke was an early proponent of biological evolution.[2][3] He investigated the phenomenon of refraction, deducing the wave theory of light, and was the first to suggest that matter expands when heated and that air is made of small particles separated by relatively large distances. He performed pioneering work in the field of surveying and map-making and was involved in the work that led to the first modern plan-form map, though his plan for London on a grid system was rejected in favour of rebuilding along the existing routes. He also came near to an experimental proof that gravity follows an inverse square law, and hypothesised that such a relation governs the motions of the planets, an idea which was subsequently developed by Isaac Newton.[4] Much of Hooke's scientific work was conducted in his capacity as curator of experiments of the Royal Society, a post he held from 1662, or as part of the household of Robert Boyle.

 

Much of what is known of Hooke's early life comes from an autobiography that he commenced in 1696 but never completed. Richard Waller mentions it in his introduction to The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, M.D. S.R.S., printed in 1705. The work of Waller, along with John Ward's Lives of the Gresham Professors and John Aubrey's Brief Lives, form the major near-contemporaneous biographical accounts of Hooke.

 

Robert Hooke was born in 1635 in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight to John Hooke and Cecily Gyles. Robert was the last of four children, two boys and two girls, and there was an age difference of seven years between him and the next youngest.[5] Their father John was a Church of England priest, the curate of Freshwater's Church of All Saints,[6] and his two brothers (Robert's uncles) were also ministers. Robert Hooke was expected to succeed in his education and join the Church. John Hooke also was in charge of a local school, and so was able to teach Robert, at least partly at home perhaps due to the boy's frail health. He was a Royalist and almost certainly a member of a group who went to pay their respects to Charles I when he escaped to the Isle of Wight. Robert, too, grew up to be a staunch monarchist.

 

As a youth, Robert Hooke was fascinated by observation, mechanical works, and drawing, interests that he would pursue in various ways throughout his life. He dismantled a brass clock and built a wooden replica that, by all accounts, worked "well enough", and he learned to draw, making his own materials from coal, chalk and ruddle (iron ore).

 

On his father's death in 1648, Robert was left a sum of forty pounds[5][7] that enabled him to buy an apprenticeship; with his poor health throughout his life but evident mechanical facility his father had it in mind that he might become a watchmaker or limner (a decorator of illuminated manuscripts), though Hooke was also interested in painting. Hooke was an apt student, so although he went to London to take up an apprenticeship, and studied briefly with Samuel Cowper and Peter Lely, he was soon able to enter Westminster School in London, under Dr. Richard Busby. Hooke quickly mastered Latin and Greek,[7] made some study of Hebrew, and mastered Euclid's Elements.[7] Here, too, he embarked on his lifelong study of mechanics.

 

It appears that Hooke was one of a group of students whom Busby educated in parallel to the main work of the school. Contemporary accounts say he was "not much seen" in the school, and this appears to be true of others in a similar position. Busby, an ardent and outspoken Royalist (he had the school observe a fast-day on the anniversary of the King's beheading), was by all accounts trying to preserve the nascent spirit of scientific inquiry that had begun to flourish in Carolean England but which was at odds with the literal Biblical teachings of the Protectorate. To Busby and his select students the Anglican Church was a framework to support the spirit of inquiry into God's work, those who were able were destined by God to explore and study His creation, and the priesthood functioned as teachers to explain it to those who were less able. This was exemplified in the person of George Hooper, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, whom Busby described as "the best scholar, the finest gentleman and will make the completest bishop that ever was educated at Westminster School".

 

In 1653, Hooke (who had also undertaken a course of twenty lessons on the organ) secured a chorister's place at Christ Church, Oxford.[8] He was employed as a "chemical assistant" to Dr Thomas Willis, for whom Hooke developed a great admiration. There he met the natural philosopher Robert Boyle, and gained employment as his assistant from about 1655 to 1662, constructing, operating, and demonstrating Boyle's "machina Boyleana" or air pump.[9] He did not take his Master of Arts until 1662 or 1663. In 1659 Hooke described some elements of a method of heavier-than-air flight to Wilkins, but concluded that human muscles were insufficient to the task.

 

Hooke himself characterised his Oxford days as the foundation of his lifelong passion for science, and the friends he made there were of paramount importance to him throughout his career, particularly Christopher Wren. Wadham was then under the guidance of John Wilkins, who had a profound impact on Hooke and those around him. Wilkins was also a Royalist, and acutely conscious of the turmoil and uncertainty of the times. There was a sense of urgency in preserving the scientific work which they perceived as being threatened by the Protectorate. Wilkins' "philosophical meetings" in his study were clearly important, though few records survive except for the experiments Boyle conducted in 1658 and published in 1660. This group went on to form the nucleus of the Royal Society. Hooke developed an air pump for Boyle's experiments based on the pump of Ralph Greatorex, which was considered, in Hooke's words, "too gross to perform any great matter."[10]

 

It is known that Hooke had a particularly keen eye, and was an adept mathematician, neither of which applied to Boyle. Gunther suggests that Hooke probably made the observations and may well have developed the mathematics of Boyle's law. Regardless, it is clear that Hooke was a valued assistant to Boyle and the two retained a mutual high regard.

 

A chance surviving copy of Willis' pioneering De anima brutorum, a gift from the author, was chosen by Hooke from Wilkins' library on his death as a memento at John Tillotson's invitation. This book is now in the Wellcome Library. The book and its inscription in Hooke's hand are a testament to the lasting influence of Wilkins and his circle on the young Hooke.

 

The Royal Society was founded in 1660, and in April 1661 the society debated a short tract on the rising of water in slender glass pipes, in which Hooke reported that the height water rose was related to the bore of the pipe (due to what is now termed capillary action). His explanation of this phenomenon was subsequently published in Micrography Observ. issue 6, in which he also explored the nature of "the fluidity of gravity". On 5 November 1661, Sir Robert Moray proposed that a Curator be appointed to furnish the society with Experiments, and this was unanimously passed with Hooke being named. His appointment was made on 12 November, with thanks recorded to Dr. Boyle for releasing him to the Society's employment.

 

In 1664, Sir John Cutler settled an annual gratuity of fifty pounds on the Society for the founding of a Mechanick Lecture, and the Fellows appointed Hooke to this task. On 27 June 1664 he was confirmed to the office, and on 11 January 1665 was named Curator by Office for life with an additional salary of £30 to Cutler's annuity.[11]

 

Hooke's role at the Royal Society was to demonstrate experiments from his own methods or at the suggestion of members. Among his earliest demonstrations were discussions of the nature of air, the implosion of glass bubbles which had been sealed with comprehensive hot air, and demonstrating that the Pabulum vitae and flammae were one and the same. He also demonstrated that a dog could be kept alive with its thorax opened, provided air was pumped in and out of its lungs, and noting the difference between venous and arterial blood. There were also experiments on the subject of gravity, the falling of objects, the weighing of bodies and measuring of barometric pressure at different heights, and pendulums up to 200 ft long (61 m).

 

Instruments were devised to measure a second of arc in the movement of the sun or other stars, to measure the strength of gunpowder, and in particular an engine to cut teeth for watches, much finer than could be managed by hand, an invention which was, by Hooke's death, in constant use.[12]

 

In 1663 and 1664, Hooke produced his microscopy observations, subsequently collated in Micrographia in 1665.

 

On 20 March 1664, Hooke succeeded Arthur Dacres as Gresham Professor of Geometry. Hooke received the degree of "Doctor of Physic" in December 1691.

 

There is a widely reported story that Dr. Hooke corresponded with Thomas Newcomen in connection with Newcomen's invention of the steam engine. This story was discussed by Rhys Jenkins, a past President of the Newcomen Society, in 1936.[14] Jenkins traced the origin of the story to an article "Steam Engines" by Dr. John Robison (1739–1805) in the third edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica”, which says There are to be found among Hooke's papers, in the possession of the Royal Society, some notes of observations, for the use of Newcomen, his countryman, on Papin's boasted method of transmitting to a great distance the action of an mill by means of pipes and that Hooke had dissuaded Newcomen from erecting a machine on this principle. Jenkins points out a number of errors in Robison's article, and questions whether the correspondent might in fact have been Newton, who Hooke is known to have corresponded with, the name being misread as Newcomen. A search by Mr. H W Dickinson of Hooke's papers held by the Royal Society, which had been bound together in the middle of the 18th century, i.e. before Robison's time, and carefully preserved since, revealed no trace of any correspondence between Hooke and Newcomen. Jenkins concluded ... this story must be omitted from the history of the steam engine, at any rate until documentary evidence is forthcoming.

 

In the intervening years since 1936 no such evidence has been found, but the story persists. For instance, in a book published in 2011 it is said that in a letter dated 1703 Hooke did suggest that Newcomen use condensing steam to drive the piston.

 

Hooke was irascible, at least in later life, proud, and prone to take umbrage with intellectual competitors, though he was by all accounts also a staunch friend and ally and was loyal always to the circle of ardent Royalists with whom he had his early training at Wadham College, particularly Christopher Wren. His reputation suffered after his death and this is popularly attributed to a dispute with Isaac Newton over credit for his work on gravitation, the planets and to a lesser degree light. His dispute with Oldenburg about whether Oldenburg had leaked or passed on details of Hooke's watch escapement to others is another well-known example.

 

Newton, as President of the Royal Society, did much to obscure Hooke, including, it is said, destroying (or failing to preserve) the only known portrait of the man. It did not help that the first life of Wren, Parentalis, was written by Wren's son, and tended to exaggerate Wren's work over all others. Hooke's reputation was revived during the twentieth century through studies of Robert Gunther and Margaret 'Espinasse. After a long period of relative obscurity he has now been recognised as one of the most important scientists of his age.[16]

 

Hooke was apt to use ciphers and guard his ideas. As curator of Experiments to the Royal Society he was responsible for demonstrating many ideas sent in to the Society, and there is evidence that he would subsequently assume some credit for these ideas. Hooke also was immensely busy and thus unable – or in some cases unwilling, pending a way of profiting from the enterprise via letters patent – to develop all of his own ideas. This was a time of immense scientific progress, and numerous ideas were developed in several places simultaneously.

 

None of this should distract from Hooke's inventiveness, his remarkable experimental facility, and his capacity for hard work. His ideas about gravitation, and his claim of priority for the inverse square law, are outlined below. He was granted a large number of patents for inventions and refinements in the fields of elasticity, optics, and barometry. The Royal Society's Hooke papers (recently discovered after disappearing when Newton took over) will open up a modern reassessment.

 

Much has been written about the unpleasant side of Hooke's personality, starting with comments by his first biographer, Richard Waller, that Hooke was "in person, but despicable" and "melancholy, mistrustful, and jealous."[12] Waller's comments influenced other writers for well over two centuries, so that a picture of Hooke as a disgruntled, selfish, anti-social curmudgeon dominates many older books and articles. For example, Arthur Berry said that Hooke "claimed credit for most of the scientific discoveries of the time."[17] Sullivan wrote that Hooke was "positively unscrupulous" and possessing an "uneasy apprehensive vanity" in dealings with Newton.[18] Manuel used the phrase "cantankerous, envious, vengeful" in his description.[19] More described Hooke having both a "cynical temperament" and a "caustic tongue."[20] Andrade was more sympathetic, but still used the adjectives "difficult", "suspicious", and "irritable" in describing Hooke.[21]

 

The publication of Hooke's diary in 1935[22] revealed other sides of the man that 'Espinasse, in particular, has detailed carefully. She writes that "the picture which is usually painted of Hooke as a morose and envious recluse is completely false."[23] Hooke interacted with noted craftsmen such as Thomas Tompion, the clockmaker, and Christopher Cocks (Cox), an instrument maker. Hooke often met Christopher Wren, with whom he shared many interests, and had a lasting friendship with John Aubrey. Hooke's diaries also make frequent reference to meetings at coffeehouses and taverns, and to dinners with Robert Boyle. He took tea on many occasions with his lab assistant, Harry Hunt. Within his family, Hooke took both a niece and a cousin into his home, teaching them mathematics.

 

Robert Hooke spent his life largely on the Isle of Wight, at Oxford, and in London. He never married, but his diary shows that he was not without affections, and more, for others. On 3 March 1703, Hooke died in London, having amassed a sizable sum of money, which was found in his room at Gresham College. He was buried at St Helen's Bishopsgate, but the precise location of his grave is unknown.

 

In 1660, Hooke discovered the law of elasticity which bears his name and which describes the linear variation of tension with extension in an elastic spring. He first described this discovery in the anagram "ceiiinosssttuv", whose solution he published in 1678 as "Ut tensio, sic vis" meaning "As the extension, so the force." Hooke's work on elasticity culminated, for practical purposes, in his development of the balance spring or hairspring, which for the first time enabled a portable timepiece – a watch – to keep time with reasonable accuracy. A bitter dispute between Hooke and Christiaan Huygens on the priority of this invention was to continue for centuries after the death of both; but a note dated 23 June 1670 in the Hooke Folio (see External links below), describing a demonstration of a balance-controlled watch before the Royal Society, has been held to favour Hooke's claim.

 

It is interesting from a twentieth-century vantage point that Hooke first announced his law of elasticity as an anagram. This was a method sometimes used by scientists, such as Hooke, Huygens, Galileo, and others, to establish priority for a discovery without revealing details.

 

Hooke became Curator of Experiments in 1662 to the newly founded Royal Society, and took responsibility for experiments performed at its weekly meetings. This was a position he held for over 40 years. While this position kept him in the thick of science in Britain and beyond, it also led to some heated arguments with other scientists, such as Huygens (see above) and particularly with Isaac Newton and the Royal Society's Henry Oldenburg. In 1664 Hooke also was appointed Professor of Geometry at Gresham College in London and Cutlerian Lecturer in Mechanics.[25]

 

On 8 July 1680, Hooke observed the nodal patterns associated with the modes of vibration of glass plates. He ran a bow along the edge of a glass plate covered with flour, and saw the nodal patterns emerge.[26][27] In acoustics, in 1681 he showed the Royal Society that musical tones could be generated from spinning brass cogs cut with teeth in particular proportions.

 

While many of his contemporaries believed in the aether as a medium for transmitting attraction or repulsion between separated celestial bodies, Hooke argued for an attracting principle of gravitation in Micrographia of 1665. Hooke's 1666 Royal Society lecture "On gravity"[29] added two further principles – that all bodies move in straight lines till deflected by some force and that the attractive force is stronger for closer bodies. Dugald Stewart, in his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind,[30] quoted Hooke's own words on his system of the world.

 

"I will explain," says Hooke, in a communication to the Royal Society in 1666, "a system of the world very different from any yet received. It is founded on the following positions. 1. That all the heavenly bodies have not only a gravitation of their parts to their own proper centre, but that they also mutually attract each other within their spheres of action. 2. That all bodies having a simple motion, will continue to move in a straight line, unless continually deflected from it by some extraneous force, causing them to describe a circle, an ellipse, or some other curve. 3. That this attraction is so much the greater as the bodies are nearer. As to the proportion in which those forces diminish by an increase of distance, I own I have not discovered it...."

 

Hooke's 1670 Gresham lecture explained that gravitation applied to "all celestial bodies" and added the principles that the gravitating power decreases with distance and that in the absence of any such power bodies move in straight lines.

 

Hooke published his ideas about the "System of the World" again in somewhat developed form in 1674, as an addition to "An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations".[31] Hooke clearly postulated mutual attractions between the Sun and planets, in a way that increased with nearness to the attracting body.

 

Hooke's statements up to 1674 made no mention, however, that an inverse square law applies or might apply to these attractions. Hooke's gravitation was also not yet universal, though it approached universality more closely than previous hypotheses.[32] Hooke also did not provide accompanying evidence or mathematical demonstration. On these two aspects, Hooke stated in 1674: "Now what these several degrees [of gravitational attraction] are I have not yet experimentally verified" (indicating that he did not yet know what law the gravitation might follow); and as to his whole proposal: "This I only hint at present", "having my self many other things in hand which I would first compleat, and therefore cannot so well attend it" (i.e. "prosecuting this Inquiry").[31]

 

In November 1679, Hooke initiated a remarkable exchange of letters with Newton[33] (of which the full text is now published).[34] Hooke's ostensible purpose was to tell Newton that Hooke had been appointed to manage the Royal Society's correspondence.[35] Hooke therefore wanted to hear from members about their researches, or their views about the researches of others; and as if to whet Newton's interest, he asked what Newton thought about various matters, giving a whole list, mentioning "compounding the celestial motions of the planetts of a direct motion by the tangent and an attractive motion towards the central body", and "my hypothesis of the lawes or causes of springinesse", and then a new hypothesis from Paris about planetary motions (which Hooke described at length), and then efforts to carry out or improve national surveys, the difference of latitude between London and Cambridge, and other items. Newton's reply offered "a fansy of my own" about a terrestrial experiment (not a proposal about celestial motions) which might detect the Earth's motion, by the use of a body first suspended in air and then dropped to let it fall. The main point was to indicate how Newton thought the falling body could experimentally reveal the Earth's motion by its direction of deviation from the vertical, but he went on hypothetically to consider how its motion could continue if the solid Earth had not been in the way (on a spiral path to the centre). Hooke disagreed with Newton's idea of how the body would continue to move.[36] A short further correspondence developed, and towards the end of it Hooke, writing on 6 January 1679|80 to Newton, communicated his "supposition ... that the Attraction always is in a duplicate proportion to the Distance from the Center Reciprocall, and Consequently that the Velocity will be in a subduplicate proportion to the Attraction and Consequently as Kepler Supposes Reciprocall to the Distance."[37] (Hooke's inference about the velocity was actually incorrect)[38]

 

In 1686, when the first book of Newton's 'Principia' was presented to the Royal Society, Hooke claimed that Newton had had from him the "notion" of "the rule of the decrease of Gravity, being reciprocally as the squares of the distances from the Center". At the same time (according to Edmond Halley's contemporary report) Hooke agreed that "the Demonstration of the Curves generated therby" was wholly Newton's.[34]

 

A recent assessment about the early history of the inverse square law is that "by the late 1660s," the assumption of an "inverse proportion between gravity and the square of distance was rather common and had been advanced by a number of different people for different reasons".[39] Newton himself had shown in the 1660s that for planetary motion under a circular assumption, force in the radial direction had an inverse-square relation with distance from the center.[40] Newton, faced in May 1686 with Hooke's claim on the inverse square law, denied that Hooke was to be credited as author of the idea, giving reasons including the citation of prior work by others before Hooke.[34] Newton also firmly claimed that even if it had happened that he had first heard of the inverse square proportion from Hooke, which it had not, he would still have some rights to it in view of his mathematical developments and demonstrations, which enabled observations to be relied on as evidence of its accuracy, while Hooke, without mathematical demonstrations and evidence in favour of the supposition, could only guess (according to Newton) that it was approximately valid "at great distances from the center".[34]

 

On the other hand, Newton did accept and acknowledge, in all editions of the 'Principia', that Hooke (but not exclusively Hooke) had separately appreciated the inverse square law in the solar system. Newton acknowledged Wren, Hooke and Halley in this connection in the Scholium to Proposition 4 in Book 1.[41] Newton also acknowledged to Halley that his correspondence with Hooke in 1679–80 had reawakened his dormant interest in astronomical matters, but that did not mean, according to Newton, that Hooke had told Newton anything new or original: "yet am I not beholden to him for any light into that business but only for the diversion he gave me from my other studies to think on these things & for his dogmaticalness in writing as if he had found the motion in the Ellipsis, which inclined me to try it."[34]

 

One of the contrasts between the two men was that Newton was primarily a pioneer in mathematical analysis and its applications as well as optical experimentation, while Hooke was a creative experimenter of such great range, that it is not surprising to find that he left some of his ideas, such as those about gravitation, undeveloped. This in turn makes it understandable how in 1759, decades after the deaths of both Newton and Hooke, Alexis Clairaut, mathematical astronomer eminent in his own right in the field of gravitational studies, made his assessment after reviewing what Hooke had published on gravitation. "One must not think that this idea ... of Hooke diminishes Newton's glory", Clairaut wrote; "The example of Hooke" serves "to show what a distance there is between a truth that is glimpsed and a truth that is demonstrated"

 

Hooke made tremendously important contributions to the science of timekeeping, being intimately involved in the advances of his time; the introduction of the pendulum as a better regulator for clocks, the balance spring to improve the timekeeping of watches, and the proposal that a precise timekeeper could be used to find the longitude at sea.

 

In 1655, according to his autobiographical notes, Hooke began to acquaint himself with astronomy, through the good offices of John Ward. Hooke applied himself to the improvement of the pendulum and in 1657 or 1658, he began to improve on pendulum mechanisms, studying the work of Giovanni Riccioli, and going on to study both gravitation and the mechanics of timekeeping.

 

Henry Sully, writing in Paris in 1717, described the anchor escapement as an admirable invention of which Dr. Hooke, formerly professor of geometry in Gresham College at London, was the inventor.[44] William Derham also attributes it to Hooke.

 

Hooke recorded that he conceived of a way to determine longitude (then a critical problem for navigation), and with the help of Boyle and others he attempted to patent it. In the process, Hooke demonstrated a pocket-watch of his own devising, fitted with a coil spring attached to the arbour of the balance. Hooke's ultimate failure to secure sufficiently lucrative terms for the exploitation of this idea resulted in its being shelved, and evidently caused him to become more jealous of his inventions. There is substantial evidence to state with reasonable confidence, as Ward, Aubrey, Waller and others all do, that Hooke developed the balance spring independently of and some fifteen years before Christiaan Huygens, who published his own work in Journal de Scavans in February 1675.

 

In 1665 Hooke published Micrographia, a book describing observations made with microscopes and telescopes, as well as some original work in biology. Hooke coined the term cell for describing biological organisms, the term being suggested by the resemblance of plant cells to cells of a honeycomb.[46] The hand-crafted, leather and gold-tooled microscope he used to make the observations for Micrographia, originally constructed by Christopher White in London, is on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC.

 

Micrographia also contains Hooke's, or perhaps Boyle and Hooke's, ideas on combustion. Hooke's experiments led him to conclude that combustion involves a substance that is mixed with air, a statement with which modern scientists would agree, but that was not widely understood, if at all, in the seventeenth century. Hooke went on to conclude that respiration also involves a specific component of the air.[47] Partington even goes so far as to claim that if "Hooke had continued his experiments on combustion it is probable that he would have discovered oxygen".

 

One of the observations in Micrographia was of fossil wood, the microscopic structure of which he compared to ordinary wood. This led him to conclude that fossilised objects like petrified wood and fossil shells, such as Ammonites, were the remains of living things that had been soaked in petrifying water laden with minerals.[49] Hooke believed that such fossils provided reliable clues to the past history of life on earth, and, despite the objections of contemporary naturalists like John Ray who found the concept of extinction theologically unacceptable, that in some cases they might represent species that had become extinct through some geological disaster.[50]

 

Charles Lyell wrote the following in his Principles of Geology (1832).

 

'The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke M.D.,'... appeared in 1705, containing 'A Discourse of Earthquakes'... His treatise... is the most philosophical production of that age, in regard to the causes of former changes in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature. 'However trivial a thing,' he says, 'a rotten shell may appear to some, yet these monuments of nature are more certain tokens of antiquity than coins or medals, since the best of those may be counterfeited or made by art and design, as may also books, manuscripts, and inscriptions, as all the learned are now sufficiently satisfied has often been actually practised,' &c.; 'and though it must be granted that it is very difficult to read them and to raise a chronology out of them, and to state the intervals of the time wherein such or such catastrophes and mutations have happened, yet it is not impossible.

 

One of the more-challenging problems tackled by Hooke was the measurement of the distance to a star (other than the Sun). The star chosen was Gamma Draconis and the method to be used was parallax determination. After several months of observing, in 1669, Hooke believed that the desired result had been achieved. It is now known that Hooke's equipment was far too imprecise to allow the measurement to succeed.[51] Gamma Draconis was the same star James Bradley used in 1725 in discovering the aberration of light.

 

Hooke's activities in astronomy extended beyond the study of stellar distance. His Micrographia contains illustrations of the Pleiades star cluster as well as of lunar craters. He performed experiments to study how such craters might have formed.[52] Hooke also was an early observer of the rings of Saturn,[53] and discovered one of the first observed double-star systems, Gamma Arietis, in 1664.

 

A lesser-known contribution, however one of the first of its kind, was Hooke's scientific model of human memory. Hooke in a 1682 lecture to the Royal Society proposed a mechanistic model of human memory, which would bear little resemblance to the mainly philosophical models before it.[55] This model addressed the components of encoding, memory capacity, repetition, retrieval, and forgetting—some with surprising modern accuracy.[56] This work, overlooked for nearly 200 years, shared a variety of similarities with Richard Semon's work of 1919/1923, both assuming memories were physical and located in the brain.[57][58][59] The model's more interesting points are that it (1) allows for attention and other top-down influences on encoding; (2) it uses resonance to implement parallel, cue-dependent retrieval; (3) it explains memory for recency; (4) it offers a single-system account of repetition and priming, and (5) the power law of forgetting can be derived from the model's assumption in a straightforward way.[56] This lecture would be published posthumously in 1705 as the memory model was unusually placed in a series of works on the nature of light. It has been speculated that this work saw little review as the printing was done in small batches in a post-Newtonian age of science and was most likely deemed out of date by the time it was published. Further interfering with its success was contemporary memory psychologists' rejection of immaterial souls, which Hooke invoked to some degree in regards to the processes of attention, encoding and retrieval.

 

Hooke was Surveyor to the City of London and chief assistant to Christopher Wren, in which capacity he helped Wren rebuild London after the Great Fire in 1666, and also worked on the design of London's Monument to the fire, the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Montagu House in Bloomsbury, and the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital (which became known as 'Bedlam'). Other buildings designed by Hooke include The Royal College of Physicians (1679), Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, Ramsbury Manor in Wiltshire[60] and the parish church of St Mary Magdalene at Willen in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. Hooke's collaboration with Christopher Wren also included St Paul's Cathedral, whose dome uses a method of construction conceived by Hooke. Hooke also participated in the design of the Pepys Library, which held the manuscripts of Samuel Pepys' diaries, the most frequently cited eyewitness account of the Great Fire of London.[61]

 

Hooke and Wren both being keen astronomers, the Monument was designed to serve a scientific function as a telescope for observing transits, though Hooke's characteristically precise measurements after completion showed that the movement of the column in the wind made it unusable for this purpose. The legacy of this can be observed in the construction of the spiral staircase, which has no central column, and in the observation chamber which remains in place below ground level.

 

In the reconstruction after the Great Fire, Hooke proposed redesigning London's streets on a grid pattern with wide boulevards and arteries, a pattern subsequently used in the renovation of Paris, Liverpool, and many American cities. This proposal was thwarted by arguments over property rights, as property owners were surreptitiously shifting their boundaries. Hooke was in demand to settle many of these disputes, due to his competence as a surveyor and his tact as an arbitrator.

 

For an extensive study of Hooke's architectural work, see the book by Cooper.

 

No authenticated portrait of Robert Hooke exists. This situation has sometimes been attributed to the heated conflicts between Hooke and Newton, although Hooke's biographer Allan Chapman rejects as a myth the claims that Newton or his acolytes deliberately destroyed Hooke's portrait. German antiquarian and scholar Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach visited the Royal Society in 1710 and his account of his visit specifically mentions him being shown the portraits of 'Boyle and Hoock' (which were said to be good likenesses), but while Boyle's portrait survives, Hooke's has evidently been lost.[63] In Hooke's time, the Royal Society met at Gresham College, but within a few months of Hooke's death Newton became the Society's president and plans were laid for a new meeting place. When the move to new quarters finally was made a few years later, in 1710, Hooke's Royal Society portrait went missing, and has yet to be found.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke

Haverfordwest Castle is a castle located in the town centre at Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, south Wales, located in a naturally defensive position at the end of a strong, isolated ridge. The castle was established during Norman times in 1120 but much of the architecture remaining today is dated to 1290. For centuries the castle was an English stronghold. There are several other notable castles in area; Wiston Castle lies 6 miles (9.7 km) to the northeast and Pembroke Castle lies 12 miles (19 km) to the south.

 

Pembrokeshire Records indicate that there was an Iron Age hill fort on the site of the castle although there is no physical evidence to suggest this on the present location. Haverfordwest was believed to have been a Danish settlement prior to the Norman conquest of West Wales in 1093/94. The Flemish settled in the area in 1108 to protect the main Norman stronghold at Pembroke Castle from Welsh raiders from the north.

 

The vast majority of sources indicate that the structure was originally a Norman architecture stone keep and bailey fortress, founded by the Englishman Gilbert de Clare, Marcher Earl of Pembroke in 1120. While this date is generally consistent, although some indicate 1110 or 1113, Pembrokeshire Records insist that the castle was actually originally built by Tancred the Fleming, husband of Gwladus (the aunt of Gerald of Wales), so the original medieval town and castle would have been Flemish not Norman. In any case, Gilbert de Clare appointed Tancred's son, Richard fitz-Tancred, as Castellan.

 

The original castle is believed to have been first attacked (unsuccessfully) by Gruffydd ap Rhys, Prince of Deheubarth, in 1135 – 1136. In 1173 the castle had its first royal visit by Henry II of England who passed by the town on coming back from a trip to Ireland. In 1188 Gerald of Wales mentions visiting the castle with Archbishop Baldwin during his progress around Wales preaching for the 3rd Crusade that Richard I the Lion Heart led to the Holy Land.

 

By 1200, many of the original timber buildings had been replaced with the first stone buildings, including a rectangular north eastern tower to serve as the castle's keep. At the same time, Robert fitz-Richard, son of Richard fitz-Tancred, had established Haverfordwest Priory, to which he retired in 1210; That year, King John passed Haverford in order to sail to Ireland, so as to crush a rebellion by the Normans there. In 1213 the King persuaded William Marshal, who had inherited the surrounding Marcher Earldom of Pembroke (in jure uxoris), to garrison the castle in return for an exorbitant sum of money; William Marshall was already extremely wealthy.

 

William Marshal was responsible for replacing most of the original timber walls, towers and gatehouse with stone in the 1210s, and even by 1220 little remained of the original castle. Today all that remains of the 1120 establishment is a large square keep in the north-east corner of the inner ward. This mass reconstruction to strengthen the castle was likely due to the persistent attacks during this period.

 

In 1217, Llywelyn Fawr (Llywelyn the Great), Prince of Wales threatened William Marshal and in 1220 he burned the town but failed to take the castle. Following the burning of the town, it was rebuilt greater than before and developed quickly in the 13th century as a commercial centre due to its position at the centre of Pembrokeshire and its naval links. In 1248, Humphrey II de Bohun acquired the castle and resisted an attack in 1257 by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Gwynedd (Llywelyn the Last). In 1265, Haverfordwest castle was taken by William de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, during the Second Barons' War, but in 1274 royalty intervened and granted it back to the de Bohun family, to the next generation, Humphrey III de Bohun.

 

In 1284 King Edward I and Queen Eleanor of Castile visited the castle for the first time during a royal pilgrimage to St Davids. Eleanor was said to be in love with the castle. Four years later she borrowed a huge amount of money in those times to purchase the castle from the de Bohun family and loaned £407 (an extreme amount in those days) to fully rebuild the castle and complete its transition fully into stone. A massive scale reconstruction took place, and it was completed a year later in 1290, shortly before she died, although it long became known as the "Queen's Castle at Haverford". Today much of what remains is dated to Queen Eleanor's 1290 version, including the extensive curtain wall. The castle remained in Royal possession after Eleanor's death and it was granted out to various wealthy tenants. In the 14th century, the castle was occupied by many owners, amongst them was Edward, the Black Prince, from 1359 to 1367. The castle was owned by the crown from 1381 to 1385, who paid for restoration works of the castle. These works proved important later, as in 1405 the castle was strong enough to fend off an attack during Owain Glyndŵr's War of Welsh independence. The town walls around the high ground near the castle also did much to protect the castle from invaders, although nothing remains of these town walls today. Over the centuries the castle was visited by numerous nobles and monarchs such as King Richard II and Oliver Cromwell.

 

By the 16th century, however, the castle had become dilapidated and subsequently was re-fortified during the English Civil War. In 1644 Haverfordwest Castle is documented as being occupied by the Royalists, but they abandoned it on misinterpreting the noises of cows for a Parliamentary army. It was recaptured and held for the king for a year, who finally surrendered after the Battle of Colby Moor nearby. Oliver Cromwell sent letters to the castle, ordering it to be destroyed in July 1648 and threatened to imprison the townsfolk unless it was demolished. These letters were only unearthed in 1986 and are currently on display in the town museum.

 

The derelict medieval castle was converted to a prison in 1779, although Giraldus Cambrensis records that part of the castle was used as a prison as early as 1188.

 

In 1820 a new prison building was erected within the castle grounds, mainly within the inner bailey. It had a capacity for 86 prisoners. In 1878 the remaining inmates were transferred to the gaol in Carmarthen. The building has subsequently been used as a police station and council offices. Today it houses the A museum. A cell door, leg irons, the original lock from the castle gate and numerous artifacts are on display. Today the castle is operated by the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority and is open to the public.

 

In 2010 there were plans to put the prison building on the market, with new council offices being built in the Prendergast area of Haverfordwest.

 

In January 2008 an extensive archaeological excavation was conducted at Haverfordwest Castle.

 

The original entrance to the castle lay on the west side, guarded by a gatehouse but no trace of this survives. Round towers are located on the north-west and south-west corners, and in the south-east corner there is a square tower with an additional projecting turret. The south-west and south-east towers have three storeys, with the south-east tower possessing a basement and postern gate which could serve as a counter-attack during a siege. A large hall lies the south of the castle with great, high windows and scaling ladders. Little remains of the original medieval defences in the outer ward of the castle, although the extensive curtain wall has been upkept and still remains along with a considerable part of the north side, including a semicircular turret and a square tower to the east.

 

Haverfordwest is the county town of Pembrokeshire, Wales, and the most populous urban area in Pembrokeshire with a population of 14,596 in 2011. It is also a community, being the second most populous community in the county, with 12,042 people, after Milford Haven. The suburbs include the former parish of Prendergast, Albert Town and the residential and industrial areas of Withybush (housing, retail parks, hospital, airport and showground).

 

Haverfordwest is located in a strategic position, being at the lowest bridging point of the Western Cleddau prior to the opening of the Cleddau Bridge in 1975.

 

Haverfordwest is a market town, the county town of Pembrokeshire and an important road network hub between Milford Haven, Pembroke Dock, Fishguard and St David's as a result of its position at the tidal limit of the Western Cleddau. The majority of the town, comprising the old parishes of St. Mary, St. Martin and St. Thomas, lies on the right (west) bank of the river. On the left bank are the suburbs of Prendergast and Cartlett. At this point, a pair of sandstone ridges extending from east to west and separated by a deep, narrow valley, are cut through by the Western Cleddau. This leaves two high spurs on the west side of the river. On the northern spur, the castle and its surrounding settlement form the core of St Martin's parish. On the southern spur, the High Street ascends steeply from the river and forms the core of St Mary's parish. From the foot of each spur, ancient bridges cross the river to Prendergast: St Martin's Bridge ("the Old Bridge") and St Mary's Bridge ("the New Bridge", built in 1835). St Thomas's parish occupies the south side of the southern spur. From these core areas, the town has spread, mainly along the ridges. In addition to the four ancient parish churches, the remains of an Augustinian priory are visible at the southern edge of the town.

 

The name of the town means "ford used by heifers" or "ford used by goats" from Old English hæfer. In local dialect, it is pronounced "Harford". "West" was added in the 15th century, to distinguish the town from Hereford. It is marked as Herfordwest on a 1578 parish map of Pembrokeshire. The Welsh name is said by B. G. Charles to be "merely a corruption of the English name".

 

Haverfordwest has been English-speaking for centuries. South Pembrokeshire is known as 'Little England Beyond Wales', but because the markets traded with Welsh farmers in the north and east, there has always been a significant Welsh-speaking influence. The suburb of Prendergast seems to have originated as an extramural Welsh dormitory, dating from the times when all agricultural trade had to pass through the borough, and the fearful Normans before the destruction of Anglo-Norman power in 1136 tried to prevent Welshmen bearing arms from entering within the castle walls after nightfall.

 

Scores of Iron Age and Roman coinage and artefact discoveries, and excavations by the Dyfed Archaeological Trust under the direction of Heather James at Carmarthen (Moridunum) in the 1980s, point to significant Roman penetration to this westernmost part of Wales. The strategic position of Haverfordwest with its defensive bluff overlooking the lowest fordable point on the western Cleddau and accessible to sea traffic would have required a Roman presence, probably modest in scale, from the 1st century AD to protect supplies to and from the coast, e.g. the Roman legionary headquarters at Caerleon were roofed with slates from the lower slopes of the Preseli Hills. In 1992, aerial photography identified a Roman road running to the west of Carmarthen, past Wiston to Poyston Cross, raising the possibility of Roman fortlets at strategic river crossings at Whitland and Haverfordwest. Edward Llwyd's note to Camden's Britannia (ed. 1695) refers to a valuable find of silver coins at Llanboidy, the latest coin being one of Domitian struck in AD 91. In the 1920s Sir Mortimer Wheeler partially excavated a Roman dwelling or villa at Wolfscastle; work was restarted in 2002 by Professor Merroney. James Phillips, in The History of Pembrokeshire (published 1909), records a find of Roman silver coins in Haverfordwest, the earliest dated coin a Valerian and the latest a Claudius Gothicus. The museum in which the coins were deposited has been "scattered to the winds" and the whereabouts of the coins is unknown.

 

Phillips claimed that the pre-Norman name of Haverfordwest was Caer Alun, so named by the Emperor Maximus (Macsim Gwledig). His sources are not given but the Cambro-Briton in 1822 also recorded that Maximus, the last Roman Emperor of Britain, a man who for a time divided the Roman Empire with Theodosius I, on withdrawing Roman legions from Britain granted civic status and Celtic names to a number of pacified Romano-British settlements, including Southampton, Chichester, Old Sarum near Salisbury, Carmarthen (Caerfyrddin) and Haverfordwest (Caer Alun). Maximus had married Elen, a Welsh noblewoman, and they had three sons. Phillips claims that the name actually given to the town was Caer Elen, in honour of his wife (the name later changing to Caer Alun).

 

The ecclesiastical centre of the area (perhaps the seat of a bishop in the Age of the Saints) was probably one of the several churches of the local St Ismael, most probably St. Ishmael's. This occurred around 1110.

 

The proposition that Haverfordwest Castle was founded by Tancred, a Flemish Marcher Lord,[11] is questionable. The Marcher Lords were not Flemish but Norman barons originally along the Marches (Anglo-Welsh border). The castle is recorded as having been founded in 1100 by the Norman Gilbert de Clare. The Flemings, said to have arrived in three groups in 1107, 1111 and 1151, are likely to have participated in its later development for their own and the Normans' protection from the Welsh warlords. It is recorded that the Constable of the castle in 1207 was Itohert, son of Richard Tancard, possibly a descendant of the first Tancred.

 

The Flemish presence, reputed to result from floods in the Low Countries, was more likely to have consisted initially of Flemish mercenaries originally in the invading army of William the Conqueror, who in reward for their part in William's victory were granted lands in parts of Northern Britain, and in Wales in the Gower, and Geraldus Cambrensis recorded their presence in the Hundred of Roose in Pembrokeshire.

 

A Fleming, Wizo, who died in 1130 founded at Wiston a motte and bailey fortification, the forerunner of the stone castle, for protection against the Welsh warlords: the Flemings were reportedly unpopular wherever they settled. The precarious position of Normans and Flemings was demonstrated in 1136 when the Normans, having already lost 500 men in battle at Loughor, re-recruited from Lordships from all over South Wales and led by Robert fitz Martin at Crug Mawr near Cardigan attacked Owain Gwynedd and his army. Routed, they fled over the Teifi Bridge which collapsed; the retreating Normans drowning under the weight of their armour. Their leader Richard de Clare had previously been intercepted and killed by Iorwerth ab Owen. Wiston and the castle were overrun in 1147 by Hywel Sais, son of Lord Rhys. Ranulf Higden, in his Polychronicus, records the Flemings as extinct in Pembrokeshire by 1327 but Flemish mercenaries reappear in 1400 when at the behest of Henry IV they joined an army of 1,500 English settlers who marched north from Pembrokeshire to attack the army of Owain Glyndŵr at Mynydd Hyddgen. The attack was repulsed with heavy casualties and legend has it that English prisoners were spared but surviving Flemish mercenaries were massacred or sold into slavery.

 

St Mary's Church originated at the end of the 12th century and the current (Grade I listed) building was constructed between the 13th and 15th centuries and prominently visible at the top of the High Street.

 

Haverfordwest rapidly grew, initially around the castle and St Martin's Church (the settlement being called Castletown), then spreading into the High Street area. It immediately became the capital of the hundred of Roose (part of Little England beyond Wales), and because of its pivotal position, the commercial centre of western Dyfed, which it has remained to this day. In common with other British towns, its growth was rapid during the period up to 1300, and its extent by then was much the same as it was in the early 19th century. A large town by the standards of the time, its population was probably around 4,000–5,000. It received its first marcher charter from William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke sometime between 1213 and 1219, and obtained the lucrative trading privileges of an English borough. It traded both by land and sea and had a busy tidal quay on the river below the "New" Bridge. At least ten guilds operated, and there was significant woollen cloth manufacture. In 1545, the town was designated a county corporate by Henry VIII, with the aim of supporting a campaign against piracy in local waters. It was one of only two such counties corporate in Wales (the other being Carmarthen), and remained officially "The Town and County of Haverfordwest" until the abolition of the borough in 1974.

 

In common with other large towns in Europe, Haverfordwest was hit hard by the Black Death in 1348, suffering both depopulation (perhaps by more than 50%) and diminution of trade. Large parts of the town were abandoned, and it did not start to recover until the Tudor period. At the end of the 17th century, the town was still significantly smaller than in 1300. In 1405, the town was burned by the French allies of Owain Glyndwr, although in its early history Haverfordwest suffered less than most towns in Wales from such depredations.

 

During the English Civil War, the burgesses of the borough supported Parliament, while the ruling gentry were Royalist. As a result, there was considerable conflict, and the town changed hands five times. There followed a period of stagnation in which the comparative status of the town declined.

 

Some 1,200 men of Pembrokeshire lost their lives in World War I, and Haverfordwest was the location chosen for the County of Pembroke War Memorial, unveiled in 1921. Its current location is Picton Place, close by County Hall, and it is Grade II listed. Haverfordwest was bombed for the first time during World War II on 24 September 1940. The City Road and New Road areas were hit, although there had been little preparation and no warning siren sounded. There were no casualties.

 

Haverfordwest today has the air of a typical small country market town, but the centre still conveys the feel of the important mediaeval borough. The once run-down riverside area has been renovated and Bridge Street has been pedestrianised and improved.

 

Haverford Township, Haverford and Havertown in Pennsylvania, United States, are all named after Haverfordwest.

 

In October 2022, the remains of 307 people, including children, were unearthed by archaeologists working on the remnants of a medieval priory found beneath the old Ocky White building, a former department store which closed in 2013. It is believed that the graveyard could have been used until the early 18th century.

 

There are two tiers of local government covering Haverfordwest, at community (town) and county level: Haverfordwest Town Council and Pembrokeshire County Council. The town council is based at the Old Wool Market on Quay Street. Pembrokeshire County Council is also based in Haverfordwest, at County Hall on Freemens Way.

 

For local government purposes the community of Haverfordwest comprises five wards: Castle, Prendergast, Portfield, Priory and Garth. The community has its own town council and mayor.

 

Pembrokeshire County Council conducted an extensive review of community boundaries in 2007 which made a number of submissions to the boundary commission for Wales. These submissions included a number of recommendations for the extension of the Haverfordwest community boundary where there had been perceived community overspill due to housing developments. These suggestions were mostly implemented, with one significant exception leading to an increase in the number of electors in the Haverfordwest community. One area of contention concerned the status of the village of Merlin's Bridge which continues to have its own community council despite its close proximity to Haverfordwest and a degree of community overspill. As such the conurbation of Haverfordwest and Merlin's Bridge is the most populous urban area in Pembrokeshire though Haverfordwest's community boundaries mean it is only the second most populous community in the county after Milford Haven.

 

Haverfordwest is twinned with Oberkirch, Germany.

 

Haverfordwest is part of the Preseli Pembrokeshire Senedd constituency and UK Parliamentary constituency. The local Senedd Member is Paul Davies of the Conservative Party and the local Member of Parliament is Stephen Crabb, also a Conservative.

 

Haverfordwest was an ancient borough, receiving its first charter from Henry II in 1169. The borough was given the right to appoint its own sheriff in 1479, and in 1545 was declared to be a county corporate. The borough was reformed to become a municipal borough under the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. The borough covered all of the parish of St Mary, parts of the parishes of St Martin, St Thomas, Prendergast, and Uzmaston, and an extra-parochial area (deemed to be a parish from 1866) called Furzy Park and Portfield. Under the Local Government Act 1894, parishes which straddled borough boundaries were split into separate parishes for the parts inside and outside the borough. The part of Uzmaston within the borough therefore became a parish called Cartlett, the part of Prendergast outside the borough became a parish called North Prendergast, and the parts of St Martin and St Thomas parishes outside the borough became parishes called St Martin Hamlet and St Thomas Hamlet respectively. The parishes outside the borough were all included in the Haverfordwest Rural District. The six parishes within the borough after 1894 were therefore Cartlett, Furzy Park and Portfield, Prendergast, St Mary, St Martin, and St Thomas. These were urban parishes and so did not have their own parish councils, with the lowest level representative body being the Haverfordwest Borough Council.

 

Haverfordwest's status as a county corporate from 1545 made it independent from Pembrokeshire. When elected county councils were established in 1889 the town was brought back into Pembrokeshire for local government purposes, being under the control of Pembrokeshire County Council and losing its separate police force at the same time. For other purposes the town retained its independence from the county, having its own Lord Lieutenant until 1931, and keeping its own Quarter Sessions until 1951. The status of county corporate was finally abolished in 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972. One remaining legacy from Haverfordwest's former status as a county corporate is that it retains the right to appoint its own sheriff.

 

Haverfordwest had a medieval guildhall which stood at the top (west end) of High Street in front of St Mary's Church. The guildhall served as the meeting place for both the borough corporation and the Pembrokeshire Quarter Sessions until the 1830s. In 1837 the county authorities built themselves Shire Hall at the bottom (east end) of High Street. The guildhall was demolished and the borough corporation met instead in a room above the north porch of St Mary's Church until that room was demolished in 1861. In 1871 the borough acquired newly built premises at 1 St Mary's Lane to serve as the council's offices and meeting place. In 1954 the borough council moved to Picton House at 2 Picton Place, an 1830s house on the bank of the Western Cleddau, and remained based there until the council's abolition in 1974.

 

Haverfordwest Municipal Borough was abolished in 1974, becoming part of the district of Preseli (renamed Preseli Pembrokeshire in 1987) within the county of Dyfed. A community covering the former borough was established at the same time, with its council taking the name Haverfordwest Town Council. Preseli Pembrokeshire was abolished in 1996 and the area became part of a re-established Pembrokeshire. Haverfordwest Town Council continued to use the former borough council's premises at Picton House as its headquarters until 2020, when it moved to the Old Wool Market, a converted late eighteenth century wool market and warehouse building on the quayside.

 

The 2011 census recorded a population of 12,042 living within the community boundary. The urban area extends beyond the community boundary in various places, notably at Merlin's Bridge to the south of the town, which forms a separate community but is deemed by the Office for National Statistics to form part of the Haverfordwest built-up area. The population of the Haverfordwest built-up area was 14,596 in 2011.

 

In accordance with its status as a sub-regional hub-town, Haverfordwest continues to serve as Pembrokeshire's principal commercial and retail centre. The development of the riverside shopping centre in Withybush on the outskirts of the town includes Marks & Spencer in 2010 and Debenhams in 2013.

 

A new town library opened in 2018 in the former Riverside Market building.

 

Concerns about the relative decline of the historic town centre compared to the growth of the retail centre at Withybush led to Welsh historian John Davies expressing his concern that Haverfordwest is becoming "a medieval town surrounded by tin sheds".

 

Schools and colleges in Haverfordwest:

Haverfordwest Grammar School, 1488–1978, became a public school in the 1920s, making it one of only two public schools in Wales at that time.

Haverfordwest High VC School, an English-medium secondary school, was formed in 2018 by the merger of Sir Thomas Picton School and Tasker Milward School.

Pembrokeshire College, an affiliated college of the University of Glamorgan, is situated in the Merlin's Bridge suburb of the town. The college serves as the principal centre of further and higher education in Pembrokeshire.

Ysgol Caer Elen, a Welsh-medium school for pupils aged 3 to 16, opened in 2018, replacing Ysgol Gymraeg Glan Cleddau. The new school cost £28 million to build and has the capacity for 315 primary and 600 secondary pupils. The nursery has the capacity for 45 children.

Redhill Preparatory School is an independent school established in 2001 which includes a Montessori learning component for younger pupils.

Waldo Williams Primary School opened in 2019, combining the former Mt Airey and Haverfordwest Church in Wales VC schools. It is named after the poet Waldo Williams (1904–1971).

Mary Immaculate Primary School, a Catholic primary school.

 

Haverfordwest County play association football in the Cymru Premier (the top tier of Welsh football) at Bridge Meadow Stadium, while Merlins Bridge play in the local Pembrokeshire League. Haverfordwest RFC, which formed in 1885, play rugby union at their Pembroke Road ground, and Haverfordwest Cricket Club play at Dale Road.

 

In 2009, Haverfordwest's sports and leisure provision benefited from significant investment, with the opening of a new £8 million leisure centre situated at St. Thomas Green.

 

The kayaking club venture to sea as well as using the rivers.

 

Haverfordwest High VC School benefits from a wide range of sporting facilities, including a purpose-built sports centre with a hockey pitch, artificial turf and a full-sized athletics track.

 

Withybush General Hospital is one of the main hospitals of West Wales and part of the Hywel Dda University Health Board, formerly Pembrokeshire & Derwen NHS Trust. The hospital has most services, but paediatric and maternity services have been moved to Glangwili General Hospital, Carmarthen.

 

Haverfordwest is served by Haverfordwest Airport.

 

Haverfordwest railway station is on the West Wales Line. It is served by Transport for Wales services to Manchester Piccadilly and Milford Haven.

 

Haverfordwest bus station is located beside Riverside Quay Shopping Centre. It has six bus stops with two additional bays for coach drop off/pickup. It is served by Edwards Coaches, First Cymru, National Express and Richards Brothers.

 

Forming one of the major "road hubs" of West Wales, the town is at the junction of the A40, A4076 and A487 roads and several rural B roads, including the B4329 running northwards to Eglwyswrw across the Preseli Mountains. The A40 connects Haverfordwest with Carmarthen to the east and Fishguard to the north; the A4076 connects Haverfordwest with Milford Haven and Pembroke Dock to the south; the A487 connects Haverfordwest with St Davids to the northwest.

 

Notable people

Augustus Anson, VC (1835–1877), member of the Anson family and recipient of the Victoria Cross, born at Slebech Hall.

Christian Bale (born 1974), actor who played the protagonist in Empire of the Sun and Batman in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy, was born in Haverfordwest

Stephen Crabb (born 1973), politician, MP for Preseli Pembrokeshire since 2005; brought up in Haverfordwest.

Captain Francis Cromie CB, DSO (1882–1918), Royal Navy commander and the first member of the British military to lose his life in Russia after the revolution, attended Haverfordwest Grammar School. A a street in the town and house at the Grammar School were named after him

Geraint Wyn Davies (born 1957), a Welsh-born Canadian actor, spent his early life in the town, where his father was the Congregational Church minister.

Connie Fisher (born 1983), actress and singer, the winner of the BBC talent show How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, lived in Haverfordwest from the age of six.

June and Jennifer Gibbons (born 1963), the selective mute twins, whose story gained international interest after Marjorie Wallace documented their story, lived in Haverfordwest for much of their childhood.

George Herbert Harries (1860–1934), an American businessman, newspaper editor and U.S. Army major general; born in the town.

Terry Higgins (1945–1982), among the first people known to die of an AIDS-related illness in the UK, lived in Haverfordwest as a child. The Terrence Higgins Trust is named after him.

Rhys Ifans (born 1967), actor, starred in the 1997 black comedy Twin Town and played Hugh Grant's delusional flatmate in Notting Hill, was born in Haverfordwest

Elis James (born 1980), stand-up comedian and actor, was born in Haverfordwest and raised in Carmarthen.

Sir William James, 1st Baronet (1721–1783), born at Bolton Hill Mill, near Haverfordwest; 18th C. naval officer.

Gwen John (1876–1939), artist, was born in Haverfordwest; her younger brother Augustus John (1878–1961), also an artist, was born in nearby Tenby and lived in Haverfordwest.

Zoe Lyons (born 1971), comedian, born in Haverfordwest.

Chelsea Manning (born 1989), American activist and whistleblower, lived in Haverfordwest as a child.

James Miller (1968–2003), a Welsh cameraman, producer and director; killed by Israel Defense Forces gunfire; born in the town.

William Owen (1791–1879), local architect, Mayor of Haverfordwest on four occasions and High Sheriff of Pembrokeshire.

Sir John Perrot (1528–1592), said to be an illegitimate son of Henry VIII, was born in Haverfordwest.

Fiona Phillips (born 1961), TV presenter, lived in Haverfordwest from the age of 18.

Greg Pickersgill (born 1951), an influential science fiction fan, was born in Haverfordwest and still lives there.

The hardcore punk rock band Picture Frame Seduction was formed in the Sir Thomas Picton School in 1978.

Sir Thomas Picton GCB (1758–1815), a British army general, was born in Haverfordwest and killed at the Battle of Waterloo.

Juliette Pochin (born 1971), a Welsh classically trained mezzo-soprano singer, born in Haverfordwest

Gruff Rhys (born 1970), singer of indie rock band Super Furry Animals, was born here.

John Lort Stokes (1811–1885), an officer in the Royal Navy who travelled on HMS Beagle; born at nearby Scotchwell.

Graham McPherson (born 1961), aka Suggs, lead singer of Madness, attended Haverfordwest Grammar School for Boys in the early 1970s.

George Trefgarne, 1st Baron Trefgarne (1894–1960), politician, barrister, businessman and editor of the Daily Dispatch; born in the town.

Lucy Walter (ca.1630 – 1658), a mistress of Charles II, was born at Roch Castle near Haverfordwest.

Waldo Williams (1904–1971), Welsh-language poet and pacifist, was born in Haverfordwest.

 

Sport

Henry Baird DSO (1878–1950), cricketer and Army officer; recipient of the Distinguished Service Order for actions in the Second Boer War.

Simon Davies (born 1979), a footballer who played for Fulham and with 58 caps for Wales, was born in Haverfordwest.

Dominic Day (born 1985), a Welsh rugby union player with 28 international caps

Mark Delaney (born 1976), a retired footballer who played for Cardiff City, Aston Villa and 36 times for Wales, was born in Haverfordwest.

Simon Halliday (born 1960), an England rugby union international with 23 caps, was born in Haverfordwest.

Angharad James (born 1994), a footballer with 102 caps for Wales

Ben Llewellin (born 1994), a Welsh sports shooter, silver medallist at the 2018 Commonwealth Games.

Peter Morgan (born 1959), a councillor, mayor and rugby player (Llanelli, Wales and British Lions) born locally and went to school in Haverfordwest.

 

People and military units that have honoured with the Freedom of the Town of Haverfordwest include:

Individuals

Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson: 1802

Admiral Sir Thomas Foley: 1802

Military units

HMS Goldcrest: 1964

14 Signal Regiment: 4 March 2009

 

Pembrokeshire is a county in the south-west of Wales. It is bordered by Carmarthenshire to the east, Ceredigion to the northeast, and is otherwise surrounded by the sea. Haverfordwest is the largest town and administrative headquarters of Pembrokeshire County Council.

 

The county is generally sparsely populated and rural, with an area of 200 square miles (520 km2) and a population of 123,400. After Haverfordwest, the largest settlements are Milford Haven (13,907), Pembroke Dock (9,753), and Pembroke (7,552). St Davids (1,841) is a city, the smallest by population in the UK. Welsh is spoken by 17.2 percent of the population, and for historic reasons is more widely spoken in the north of the county than in the south.

 

Pembrokeshire's coast is its most dramatic geographic feature, created by the complex geology of the area. It is a varied landscape which includes high sea cliffs, wide sandy beaches, the large natural harbour of Milford Haven, and several offshore islands which are home to seabird colonies. Most of it is protected by Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, and can be hiked on the 190-mile (310 km) Pembrokeshire Coast Path. The interior of Pembrokeshire is relatively flat and gently undulating, with the exception of the Preseli Mountains in the north.

 

There are many prehistoric sites in Pembrokeshire, particularly in the Preseli Mountains. During the Middle Ages several castles were built by the Normans, such as Pembroke and Cilgerran, and St David's Cathedral became an important pilgrimage site. During the Industrial Revolution the county remained relatively rural, with the exception of Milford Haven, which was developed as a port and Royal Navy dockyard. It is now the UK's third-largest port, primarily because of its two liquefied natural gas terminals. The economy of the county is now focused on agriculture, oil and gas, and tourism.

 

Human habitation of the region that is now Pembrokeshire extends back to between 125,000 and 70,000 years  and there are numerous prehistoric sites such as Pentre Ifan, and neolithic remains (12,000 to 6,500 years ago), more of which were revealed in an aerial survey during the 2018 heatwave; in the same year, a 1st-century Celtic chariot burial was discovered, the first such find in Wales. There may have been dairy farming in Neolithic times.

 

There is little evidence of Roman occupation in what is now Pembrokeshire. Ptolemy's Geography, written c. 150, mentioned some coastal places, two of which have been identified as the River Teifi and what is now St Davids Head, but most Roman writers did not mention the area; there may have been a Roman settlement near St Davids and a road from Bath, but this comes from a 14th-century writer. Any evidence for villas or Roman building materials reported by mediaeval or later writers has not been verified, though some remains near Dale were tentatively identified as Roman in character by topographer Richard Fenton in his Historical Tour of 1810. Fenton stated that he had "...reason to be of opinion that they had not colonized Pembrokeshire till near the decline of their empire in Britain".

 

Part of a possible Roman road is noted by CADW near Llanddewi Velfrey, and another near Wiston. Wiston is also the location of the first Roman fort discovered in Pembrokeshire, investigated in 2013.

 

Some artefacts, including coins and weapons, have been found, but it is not clear whether these belonged to Romans or to a Romanised population. Welsh tradition has it that Magnus Maximus founded Haverfordwest, and took a large force of local men on campaign in Gaul in 383 which, together with the reduction of Roman forces in south Wales, left a defensive vacuum which was filled by incomers from Ireland.

 

Between 350 and 400, an Irish tribe known as the Déisi settled in the region known to the Romans as Demetae.  The Déisi merged with the local Welsh, with the regional name underlying Demetae evolving into Dyfed, which existed as an independent petty kingdom from the 5th century.  In 904, Hywel Dda married Elen (died 943), daughter of the king of Dyfed Llywarch ap Hyfaidd, and merged Dyfed with his own maternal inheritance of Seisyllwg, forming the new realm of Deheubarth ("southern district"). Between the Roman and Norman periods, the region was subjected to raids from Vikings, who established settlements and trading posts at Haverfordwest, Fishguard, Caldey Island and elsewhere.

 

Dyfed remained an integral province of Deheubarth, but this was contested by invading Normans and Flemings who arrived between 1067 and 1111.  The region became known as Pembroke (sometimes archaic "Penbroke":), after the Norman castle built in the cantref of Penfro. In 1136, Prince Owain Gwynedd at Crug Mawr near Cardigan met and destroyed a 3,000-strong Norman/Flemish army and incorporated Deheubarth into Gwynedd.  Norman/Flemish influence never fully recovered in West Wales.  In 1138, the county of Pembrokeshire was named as a county palatine. Rhys ap Gruffydd, the son of Owain Gwynedd's daughter Gwenllian, re-established Welsh control over much of the region and threatened to retake all of Pembrokeshire, but died in 1197. After Deheubarth was split by a dynastic feud, Llywelyn the Great almost succeeded in retaking the region of Pembroke between 1216 and his death in 1240.  In 1284 the Statute of Rhuddlan was enacted to introduce the English common law system to Wales, heralding 100 years of peace, but had little effect on those areas already established under the Marcher Lords, such as Cemais in the north of the county.

 

Henry Tudor, born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, landed an army in Pembrokeshire in 1485 and marched to Cardigan.  Rallying support, he continued to Leicestershire and defeated the larger army of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. As Henry VII, he became the first monarch of the House of Tudor, which ruled England until 1603.

 

The Laws in Wales Act 1535 effectively abolished the powers of the Marcher Lords and divided the county into seven hundreds, roughly corresponding to the seven pre-Norman cantrefi of Dyfed. The hundreds were (clockwise from the northeast): Cilgerran, Cemais, Dewisland, Roose, Castlemartin, Narberth and Dungleddy and each was divided into civil parishes; a 1578 map in the British Library is the earliest known to show parishes and chapelries in Pembrokeshire. The Elizabethan era brought renewed prosperity to the county through an opening up of rural industries, including agriculture, mining and fishing, with exports to England and Ireland, though the formerly staple woollen industry had all but disappeared. 

 

During the First English Civil War (1642–1646) the county gave strong support to the Roundheads (Parliamentarians), in contrast to the rest of Wales, which was staunchly Royalist. In spite of this, an incident in Pembrokeshire triggered the opening shots of the Second English Civil War when local units of the New Model Army mutinied. Oliver Cromwell defeated the uprising at the Siege of Pembroke in July 1648.  On 13 August 1649, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland began when New Model Army forces sailed from Milford Haven.

 

In 1720, Emmanuel Bowen described Pembrokeshire as having five market towns, 45 parishes and about 4,329 houses, with an area of 420,000 acres (1,700 km2). In 1791 a petition was presented to the House of Commons concerning the poor state of many of the county's roads, pointing out that repairs could not be made compulsory by the law as it stood. The petition was referred to committee.  People applying for poor relief were often put to work mending roads. Workhouses were poorly documented. Under the Poor Laws, costs and provisions were kept to a minimum, but the emphasis was often on helping people to be self-employed. While the Poor Laws provided a significant means of support, there were many charitable and benefit societies. After the Battle of Fishguard, the failed French invasion of 1797, 500 French prisoners were held at Golden Hill Farm, Pembroke. From 1820 to 1878 one of the county's prisons, with a capacity of 86, was in the grounds of Haverfordwest Castle. In 1831, the area of the county was calculated to be 345,600 acres (1,399 km2) with a population of 81,424.

 

It was not until nearly the end of the 19th century that mains water was provided to rural south Pembrokeshire by means of a reservoir at Rosebush and cast iron water pipes throughout the district.

 

Throughout much of the 20th century (1911 to 1961) the population density in the county remained stable while it rose in England and Wales as a whole. There was considerable military activity in Pembrokeshire and offshore in the 20th century: a naval base at Milford Haven because German U-boats were active off the coast in World War I and, in World War II, military exercises in the Preseli Mountains and a number of military airfields. The wartime increase in air activity saw a number of aircraft accidents and fatalities, often due to unfamiliarity with the terrain. From 1943 to 1944, 5,000 soldiers from the United States Army's 110th Infantry Regiment were based in the county, preparing for D-Day. Military and industrial targets in the county were subjected to bombing during World War II. After the end of the war, German prisoners of war were accommodated in Pembrokeshire, the largest prison being at Haverfordwest, housing 600. The County of Pembroke War Memorial in Haverfordwest carries the names of 1,200 of those that perished in World War I.

 

In 1972, a second reservoir for south Pembrokeshire, at Llys y Fran, was completed.

 

Pembrokeshire's tourism portal is Visit Pembrokeshire, run by Pembrokeshire County Council. In 2015 4.3 million tourists visited the county, staying for an average of 5.24 days, spending £585 million; the tourism industry supported 11,834 jobs. Many of Pembrokeshire's beaches have won awards, including Poppit Sands and Newport Sands. In 2018, Pembrokeshire received the most coast awards in Wales, with 56 Blue Flag, Green Coast or Seaside Awards. In the 2019 Wales Coast Awards, 39 Pembrokeshire beaches were recognised, including 11 awarded Blue Flag status.

 

The Pembrokeshire coastline is a major draw to tourists; in 2011 National Geographic Traveller magazine voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the second best in the world and in 2015 the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park was listed among the top five parks in the world by a travel writer for the Huffington Post. Countryfile Magazine readers voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the top UK holiday destination in 2018, and in 2019 Consumers' Association members placed Tenby and St Davids in the top three best value beach destinations in Britain. With few large urban areas, Pembrokeshire is a "dark sky" destination. The many wrecks off the Pembrokeshire coast attract divers. The decade from 2012 saw significant, increasing numbers of Atlantic bluefin tuna, not seen since the 1960s, and now seen by some as an opportunity to encourage tourist sport fishing.

 

The county has a number of theme and animal parks (examples are Folly Farm Adventure Park and Zoo, Manor House Wildlife Park, Blue Lagoon Water Park and Oakwood Theme Park), museums and other visitor attractions including Castell Henllys reconstructed Iron Age fort, Tenby Lifeboat Station and Milford Haven's Torch Theatre. There are 21 marked cycle trails around the county.

 

Pembrokeshire Destination Management Plan for 2020 to 2025 sets out the scope and priorities to grow tourism in Pembrokeshire by increasing its value by 10 per cent in the five years, and to make Pembrokeshire a top five UK destination.

 

As the national sport of Wales, rugby union is widely played throughout the county at both town and village level. Haverfordwest RFC, founded in 1875, is a feeder club for Llanelli Scarlets. Village team Crymych RFC in 2014 plays in WRU Division One West. There are numerous football clubs in the county, playing in five leagues with Haverfordwest County A.F.C. competing in the Cymru Premier.

 

Triathlon event Ironman Wales has been held in Pembrokeshire since 2011, contributing £3.7 million to the local economy, and the county committed in 2017 to host the event for a further five years. Ras Beca, a mixed road, fell and cross country race attracting UK-wide competitors, has been held in the Preselis annually since 1977. The record of 32 minutes 5 seconds has stood since 1995. Pembrokeshire Harriers athletics club was formed in 2001 by the amalgamation of Cleddau Athletic Club (established 1970) and Preseli Harriers (1989) and is based in Haverfordwest.

 

The annual Tour of Pembrokeshire road-cycling event takes place over routes of optional length. The 4th Tour, in April 2015, attracted 1,600 riders including Olympic gold medallist Chris Boardman and there were 1,500 entrants to the 2016 event. Part of Route 47 of the Celtic Trail cycle route is in Pembrokeshire. The Llys y Fran Hillclimb is an annual event run by Swansea Motor Club, and there are several other county motoring events held each year.

 

Abereiddy's Blue Lagoon was the venue for a round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in 2012, 2013, and 2016; the Welsh Surfing Federation has held the Welsh National Surfing Championships at Freshwater West for several years, and Llys y Fran Country Park hosted the Welsh Dragonboat Championships from 2014 to 2017.

 

While not at major league level, cricket is played throughout the county and many villages such as Lamphey, Creselly, Llangwm, Llechryd and Crymych field teams in minor leagues under the umbrella of the Cricket Board of Wales.

 

Notable people

From mediaeval times, Rhys ap Gruffydd (c. 1132-1197), ruler of the kingdom of Deheubarth, was buried in St Davids Cathedral. and Gerald of Wales was born c. 1146 at Manorbier Castle. Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) was born in 1457 at Pembroke Castle.

 

The pirate Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart) (Welsh: Barti Ddu) was born in Casnewydd Bach, between Fishguard and Haverfordwest in 1682.

 

In later military history, Jemima Nicholas, heroine of the so-called "last invasion of Britain" in 1797, was from Fishguard, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton GCB, born in Haverfordwest, was killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and Private Thomas Collins is believed to be the only Pembrokeshire man that fought in the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879.

 

In the arts, siblings Gwen and Augustus John were both born in Pembrokeshire, as was the novelist Sarah Waters; singer Connie Fisher grew up in Pembrokeshire. The actor Christian Bale was born in Haverfordwest.

 

Stephen Crabb, a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Wales, was brought up in Pembrokeshire and is one of the county's two Members of Parliament, the other being Simon Hart, who served as Secretary of State for Wales from 2019 to 2022.

 

British postcard by Palm Pictures, no. C 26. Photo: Universal. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980). Caption: Blues Brothers "Saint Helen".

 

Dan Aykroyd (1952) is a Canadian film actor and comedian who co-wrote Saturday Night Live, for which he won an Emmy Award. A true lover of the blues, he was a host of the radio show 'House of Blues' under the alias Elwood Blues. He would later use this name in the film The Blues Brothers (John Landis, 1980), in which he starred alongside John Belushi. He also starred in such comedies as Trading Places (John Landis, 1983) opposite Eddy Murphy, Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman, 1984) with Bill Murray, and My Stepmother Is an Alien (Richard Benjamin, 1988) with Kim Basinger. In 1989, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the drama Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford, 1989).

 

John Belushi (1949) was hired in 1973 as a writer for the National Lampoon's Radio Hour which became the National Lampoon Show in 1975. John's big break came that same year when he joined the ground-breaking TV variety series Saturday Night Live (1975) which made him a star. His unpredictable, aggressively physical style of humor flowered on SNL. Director John Landis cast him in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) as the notorious, beer-swilling "Bluto" and he stole the movie. John and Dan Aykroyd appeared in Steven Spielberg's 1941 (1979) and in John Landis' The Blues Brothers (1980). John's love for blues and soul music inspired the "Blues Brothers". He and Aykroyd first appeared as Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues, a pair of white soul men dressed in black suits, skinny ties, fedora hats and Rayban sunglasses, as a warm-up act before the telecasts of Saturday Night Live (1975). Building on the success of their acts and the release of their album "A Briefcase Full of Blues", John and Dan Aykroyd starred in the movie, which gave John a chance to act with his favorite musical heroes including Ray Charles, James Brown and Aretha Franklin. In 1982, Belushi was found dead of a drugs overdose in his hotel room at the age of 33.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

and as a result, your view of your life, its colors and shape,

should be transformed.

       

(i would like to write the fortunes that are widely distributed inside of cookies.

yes, a fortune writer. for cookies.)

   

From TRUE ACTION, May 1959: Behold the deadly "HOT COCKTAIL GIRLS"!!! Artwork by Charles Copeland for a story by Walter Wager, one of the regular writers for the Magazine Management men's adventure mags featured in our WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH anthology (on Amazon here -> amzn.to/13DONWK).

The Building is located in The Crossroads in Kansas City, Missouri - In the early 20th century, it was The Main KCPD Police Station. Earnest Hemingway was a Writer for the Kansas City Star and he covered the Police Beat from this building.

Bottom edge of a copy of one of the software manuals I write. As we produce them in relatively small volume, they usually come straight off the printer and are bound with plastic combs, or put into ring binders. I am a technical writer for a sofware company and produce user manuals, training manuals, online help, as well as any other marketing materials that need words.

 

Taken with iPhone 4S with the magnetic snap-on macro lens.

 

Entry for Macro Monday 31st October 2011: "My Work".

Back on January 31 when I was out on the ice of Lake Winnebago shooting the iceboaters I ran into Barry Newman, a writer for the Wall Street Journal doing a story about the event. He noticed my kite and camera rig and one thing led to another and today I have one of my shots in the Wall Street Journal. Hey its only the largest paper in the country with a circulation of more than 2 million. Try this link to see the on-line version.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703357104575045811...

St James's Church, Manorbier is a Grade I-listed parish church in Manorbier, Pembrokeshire, Wales. The church dates from the 12th century, and has been considerably altered over the years, though medieval ceiling paintings in the porch survive. The church has a slender tower of the local type and a bellcote. The chancel was built in about 1250 on older foundations with the transepts added in the same period.

 

There are three military graves in the churchyard dating between 1918 and 1920 that are looked after by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

 

Manorbier is a village, community and parish on the south coast of Pembrokeshire, Wales. The name means the 'Manor of Pŷr'. The community includes Jameston, Lydstep and Manorbier Newton.

 

An electoral ward with the same name exists. It stretches inland to St Florence and at the 2011 Census, the population was 2,083. The area is served by the West Wales Line stopping at Manorbier railway station.

 

Manorbier is within the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park and is a popular tourist attraction with Manorbier Castle, St James's Church, the sandy beach, cliffs, and part of the Wales Coast Path.

 

Fossils can be found along the stream bed, although some are of poor quality, and along the cliffs to the side of the beach the rock formations are revealed as vertical beds. The evidence of early human habitation consists of many flint microliths from the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages, housed in local museums. The cromlech known as the King's Quoit is south of Manorbier bay and beach.

 

Later evidence points to occupation of The Dak with the finding of a perforated mace head as well as Bronze Age burial mounds on the Ridgeway. Fortifications also seem to have been prominent including an Iron Age enclosure near Manorbier station and the site of a multivallate, meaning multiple ditches, promontory fort at Old Castle Head where there are remains of hut platforms within the ditches. A well-restored lime kiln is in Mud Lane behind the castle. To the east of Manorbier, on the side of the road to Lydstep, is an area of strip lynchets dating to early Anglo Saxon times and perhaps as early as the Bronze Age.

 

The Norman knight Odo de Barri was granted the lands of Manorbier, Penally and Begelly in gratitude for his military help in conquering Pembrokeshire after 1103. The first Manorbier Castle was motte and bailey style, with the stone walls being added in the next century by later Normans.

 

St James's parish church dates from the 12th century and is a Grade I listed building. A large number of other buildings and structures in the parish are listed.

 

From 1933 to 1 September 1946, a mixed civil and military airfield was operational. During World War II it was a Royal Air Force airfield, RAF Manorbier. The site is now a firing range employed by the Royal Artillery as a testing range for high-velocity missiles.

 

Notable people

Giraldus Cambrensis (ca. 1146 – ca. 1223), also known as Gerald of Wales was a Cambro-Norman priest, historian and son of William de Barri, was born in the village and called it "the pleasantest place in Wales".

 

Manorbier railway station on the Pembroke Dock branch of the West Wales Line is operated by Transport for Wales Rail, who also manage the station. Trains stop here on request every two hours in each direction, westwards to Pembroke Dock and eastwards to Tenby, Whitland, Carmarthen and Swansea.

 

Manorbier is twinned with Vernou-la-Celle-sur-Seine, France.

 

Pembrokeshire is a county in the south-west of Wales. It is bordered by Carmarthenshire to the east, Ceredigion to the northeast, and is otherwise surrounded by the sea. Haverfordwest is the largest town and administrative headquarters of Pembrokeshire County Council.

 

The county is generally sparsely populated and rural, with an area of 200 square miles (520 km2) and a population of 123,400. After Haverfordwest, the largest settlements are Milford Haven (13,907), Pembroke Dock (9,753), and Pembroke (7,552). St Davids (1,841) is a city, the smallest by population in the UK. Welsh is spoken by 17.2 percent of the population, and for historic reasons is more widely spoken in the north of the county than in the south.

 

Pembrokeshire's coast is its most dramatic geographic feature, created by the complex geology of the area. It is a varied landscape which includes high sea cliffs, wide sandy beaches, the large natural harbour of Milford Haven, and several offshore islands which are home to seabird colonies. Most of it is protected by Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, and can be hiked on the 190-mile (310 km) Pembrokeshire Coast Path. The interior of Pembrokeshire is relatively flat and gently undulating, with the exception of the Preseli Mountains in the north.

 

There are many prehistoric sites in Pembrokeshire, particularly in the Preseli Mountains. During the Middle Ages several castles were built by the Normans, such as Pembroke and Cilgerran, and St David's Cathedral became an important pilgrimage site. During the Industrial Revolution the county remained relatively rural, with the exception of Milford Haven, which was developed as a port and Royal Navy dockyard. It is now the UK's third-largest port, primarily because of its two liquefied natural gas terminals. The economy of the county is now focused on agriculture, oil and gas, and tourism.

 

Human habitation of the region that is now Pembrokeshire extends back to between 125,000 and 70,000 years  and there are numerous prehistoric sites such as Pentre Ifan, and neolithic remains (12,000 to 6,500 years ago), more of which were revealed in an aerial survey during the 2018 heatwave; in the same year, a 1st-century Celtic chariot burial was discovered, the first such find in Wales. There may have been dairy farming in Neolithic times.

 

There is little evidence of Roman occupation in what is now Pembrokeshire. Ptolemy's Geography, written c. 150, mentioned some coastal places, two of which have been identified as the River Teifi and what is now St Davids Head, but most Roman writers did not mention the area; there may have been a Roman settlement near St Davids and a road from Bath, but this comes from a 14th-century writer. Any evidence for villas or Roman building materials reported by mediaeval or later writers has not been verified, though some remains near Dale were tentatively identified as Roman in character by topographer Richard Fenton in his Historical Tour of 1810. Fenton stated that he had "...reason to be of opinion that they had not colonized Pembrokeshire till near the decline of their empire in Britain".

 

Part of a possible Roman road is noted by CADW near Llanddewi Velfrey, and another near Wiston. Wiston is also the location of the first Roman fort discovered in Pembrokeshire, investigated in 2013.

 

Some artefacts, including coins and weapons, have been found, but it is not clear whether these belonged to Romans or to a Romanised population. Welsh tradition has it that Magnus Maximus founded Haverfordwest, and took a large force of local men on campaign in Gaul in 383 which, together with the reduction of Roman forces in south Wales, left a defensive vacuum which was filled by incomers from Ireland.

 

Between 350 and 400, an Irish tribe known as the Déisi settled in the region known to the Romans as Demetae.  The Déisi merged with the local Welsh, with the regional name underlying Demetae evolving into Dyfed, which existed as an independent petty kingdom from the 5th century.  In 904, Hywel Dda married Elen (died 943), daughter of the king of Dyfed Llywarch ap Hyfaidd, and merged Dyfed with his own maternal inheritance of Seisyllwg, forming the new realm of Deheubarth ("southern district"). Between the Roman and Norman periods, the region was subjected to raids from Vikings, who established settlements and trading posts at Haverfordwest, Fishguard, Caldey Island and elsewhere.

 

Dyfed remained an integral province of Deheubarth, but this was contested by invading Normans and Flemings who arrived between 1067 and 1111.  The region became known as Pembroke (sometimes archaic "Penbroke":), after the Norman castle built in the cantref of Penfro. In 1136, Prince Owain Gwynedd at Crug Mawr near Cardigan met and destroyed a 3,000-strong Norman/Flemish army and incorporated Deheubarth into Gwynedd.  Norman/Flemish influence never fully recovered in West Wales.  In 1138, the county of Pembrokeshire was named as a county palatine. Rhys ap Gruffydd, the son of Owain Gwynedd's daughter Gwenllian, re-established Welsh control over much of the region and threatened to retake all of Pembrokeshire, but died in 1197. After Deheubarth was split by a dynastic feud, Llywelyn the Great almost succeeded in retaking the region of Pembroke between 1216 and his death in 1240.  In 1284 the Statute of Rhuddlan was enacted to introduce the English common law system to Wales, heralding 100 years of peace, but had little effect on those areas already established under the Marcher Lords, such as Cemais in the north of the county.

 

Henry Tudor, born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, landed an army in Pembrokeshire in 1485 and marched to Cardigan.  Rallying support, he continued to Leicestershire and defeated the larger army of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. As Henry VII, he became the first monarch of the House of Tudor, which ruled England until 1603.

 

The Laws in Wales Act 1535 effectively abolished the powers of the Marcher Lords and divided the county into seven hundreds, roughly corresponding to the seven pre-Norman cantrefi of Dyfed. The hundreds were (clockwise from the northeast): Cilgerran, Cemais, Dewisland, Roose, Castlemartin, Narberth and Dungleddy and each was divided into civil parishes; a 1578 map in the British Library is the earliest known to show parishes and chapelries in Pembrokeshire. The Elizabethan era brought renewed prosperity to the county through an opening up of rural industries, including agriculture, mining and fishing, with exports to England and Ireland, though the formerly staple woollen industry had all but disappeared. 

 

During the First English Civil War (1642–1646) the county gave strong support to the Roundheads (Parliamentarians), in contrast to the rest of Wales, which was staunchly Royalist. In spite of this, an incident in Pembrokeshire triggered the opening shots of the Second English Civil War when local units of the New Model Army mutinied. Oliver Cromwell defeated the uprising at the Siege of Pembroke in July 1648.  On 13 August 1649, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland began when New Model Army forces sailed from Milford Haven.

 

In 1720, Emmanuel Bowen described Pembrokeshire as having five market towns, 45 parishes and about 4,329 houses, with an area of 420,000 acres (1,700 km2). In 1791 a petition was presented to the House of Commons concerning the poor state of many of the county's roads, pointing out that repairs could not be made compulsory by the law as it stood. The petition was referred to committee.  People applying for poor relief were often put to work mending roads. Workhouses were poorly documented. Under the Poor Laws, costs and provisions were kept to a minimum, but the emphasis was often on helping people to be self-employed. While the Poor Laws provided a significant means of support, there were many charitable and benefit societies. After the Battle of Fishguard, the failed French invasion of 1797, 500 French prisoners were held at Golden Hill Farm, Pembroke. From 1820 to 1878 one of the county's prisons, with a capacity of 86, was in the grounds of Haverfordwest Castle. In 1831, the area of the county was calculated to be 345,600 acres (1,399 km2) with a population of 81,424.

 

It was not until nearly the end of the 19th century that mains water was provided to rural south Pembrokeshire by means of a reservoir at Rosebush and cast iron water pipes throughout the district.

 

Throughout much of the 20th century (1911 to 1961) the population density in the county remained stable while it rose in England and Wales as a whole. There was considerable military activity in Pembrokeshire and offshore in the 20th century: a naval base at Milford Haven because German U-boats were active off the coast in World War I and, in World War II, military exercises in the Preseli Mountains and a number of military airfields. The wartime increase in air activity saw a number of aircraft accidents and fatalities, often due to unfamiliarity with the terrain. From 1943 to 1944, 5,000 soldiers from the United States Army's 110th Infantry Regiment were based in the county, preparing for D-Day. Military and industrial targets in the county were subjected to bombing during World War II. After the end of the war, German prisoners of war were accommodated in Pembrokeshire, the largest prison being at Haverfordwest, housing 600. The County of Pembroke War Memorial in Haverfordwest carries the names of 1,200 of those that perished in World War I.

 

In 1972, a second reservoir for south Pembrokeshire, at Llys y Fran, was completed.

 

Pembrokeshire's tourism portal is Visit Pembrokeshire, run by Pembrokeshire County Council. In 2015 4.3 million tourists visited the county, staying for an average of 5.24 days, spending £585 million; the tourism industry supported 11,834 jobs. Many of Pembrokeshire's beaches have won awards, including Poppit Sands and Newport Sands. In 2018, Pembrokeshire received the most coast awards in Wales, with 56 Blue Flag, Green Coast or Seaside Awards. In the 2019 Wales Coast Awards, 39 Pembrokeshire beaches were recognised, including 11 awarded Blue Flag status.

 

The Pembrokeshire coastline is a major draw to tourists; in 2011 National Geographic Traveller magazine voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the second best in the world and in 2015 the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park was listed among the top five parks in the world by a travel writer for the Huffington Post. Countryfile Magazine readers voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the top UK holiday destination in 2018, and in 2019 Consumers' Association members placed Tenby and St Davids in the top three best value beach destinations in Britain. With few large urban areas, Pembrokeshire is a "dark sky" destination. The many wrecks off the Pembrokeshire coast attract divers. The decade from 2012 saw significant, increasing numbers of Atlantic bluefin tuna, not seen since the 1960s, and now seen by some as an opportunity to encourage tourist sport fishing.

 

The county has a number of theme and animal parks (examples are Folly Farm Adventure Park and Zoo, Manor House Wildlife Park, Blue Lagoon Water Park and Oakwood Theme Park), museums and other visitor attractions including Castell Henllys reconstructed Iron Age fort, Tenby Lifeboat Station and Milford Haven's Torch Theatre. There are 21 marked cycle trails around the county.

 

Pembrokeshire Destination Management Plan for 2020 to 2025 sets out the scope and priorities to grow tourism in Pembrokeshire by increasing its value by 10 per cent in the five years, and to make Pembrokeshire a top five UK destination.

 

As the national sport of Wales, rugby union is widely played throughout the county at both town and village level. Haverfordwest RFC, founded in 1875, is a feeder club for Llanelli Scarlets. Village team Crymych RFC in 2014 plays in WRU Division One West. There are numerous football clubs in the county, playing in five leagues with Haverfordwest County A.F.C. competing in the Cymru Premier.

 

Triathlon event Ironman Wales has been held in Pembrokeshire since 2011, contributing £3.7 million to the local economy, and the county committed in 2017 to host the event for a further five years. Ras Beca, a mixed road, fell and cross country race attracting UK-wide competitors, has been held in the Preselis annually since 1977. The record of 32 minutes 5 seconds has stood since 1995. Pembrokeshire Harriers athletics club was formed in 2001 by the amalgamation of Cleddau Athletic Club (established 1970) and Preseli Harriers (1989) and is based in Haverfordwest.

 

The annual Tour of Pembrokeshire road-cycling event takes place over routes of optional length. The 4th Tour, in April 2015, attracted 1,600 riders including Olympic gold medallist Chris Boardman and there were 1,500 entrants to the 2016 event. Part of Route 47 of the Celtic Trail cycle route is in Pembrokeshire. The Llys y Fran Hillclimb is an annual event run by Swansea Motor Club, and there are several other county motoring events held each year.

 

Abereiddy's Blue Lagoon was the venue for a round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in 2012, 2013, and 2016; the Welsh Surfing Federation has held the Welsh National Surfing Championships at Freshwater West for several years, and Llys y Fran Country Park hosted the Welsh Dragonboat Championships from 2014 to 2017.

 

While not at major league level, cricket is played throughout the county and many villages such as Lamphey, Creselly, Llangwm, Llechryd and Crymych field teams in minor leagues under the umbrella of the Cricket Board of Wales.

 

Notable people

From mediaeval times, Rhys ap Gruffydd (c. 1132-1197), ruler of the kingdom of Deheubarth, was buried in St Davids Cathedral. and Gerald of Wales was born c. 1146 at Manorbier Castle. Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) was born in 1457 at Pembroke Castle.

 

The pirate Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart) (Welsh: Barti Ddu) was born in Casnewydd Bach, between Fishguard and Haverfordwest in 1682.

 

In later military history, Jemima Nicholas, heroine of the so-called "last invasion of Britain" in 1797, was from Fishguard, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton GCB, born in Haverfordwest, was killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and Private Thomas Collins is believed to be the only Pembrokeshire man that fought in the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879.

 

In the arts, siblings Gwen and Augustus John were both born in Pembrokeshire, as was the novelist Sarah Waters; singer Connie Fisher grew up in Pembrokeshire. The actor Christian Bale was born in Haverfordwest.

 

Stephen Crabb, a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Wales, was brought up in Pembrokeshire and is one of the county's two Members of Parliament, the other being Simon Hart,[90] who served as Secretary of State for Wales from 2019 to 2022.

French postcard by Editions P.I., offered by Les Carbones Korès 'Carboplane' no. 1067A. Photo: Paramount, 1959.

 

American actress Shirley MacLaine (1934) is among Hollywood's most unique stars. With her auburn hair cut impishly short, she made her film debut in Hitchcock's black comedy The Trouble With Harry (1955). She earned Oscar nominations for Some Came Running (1959), for Billy Wilder's The Apartment, and for Irma La Douce (1963). Later triumphs included Sweet Charity! (1969), The Turning Point (1977), Being There (1979) and Terms of Endearment (1983). And she's still going strong.

 

Shirley MacLaine was born Shirley MacLean Beaty in 1934 in Richmond, USA. She was the daughter of drama coach and former actress Kathlyn MacLean Beaty and Ira O. Beaty, a professor of psychology and philosophy. Her younger brother, Warren Beatty, also grew up to be an important Hollywood figure as an actor/director/producer and screenwriter. MacLaine took dance lessons from age two, first performed publicly at age four, and at 16 went to New York, making her Broadway debut as a chorus girl in Me and Juliet (1953). When not scrambling for theatrical work, MacLaine worked as a model. Her big break came in 1954 when she was understudying Broadway actress Carol Haney in The Pajama Game. Haney fractured her ankle, MacLaine replaced her and was spotted, and offered a movie contract by producer Hal Wallis. Her film debut was Alfred Hitchcock's black comedy The Trouble With Harry (1955). Later that year, she co-starred opposite Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the comedy Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955). In her next feature, Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1956), she appeared as an Indian princess. The film was completed not too long before her daughter, Sachi Parker (born Stephanie), was born. Father was her husband Steve Parker, whom she had married in 1954 and would divorce in 1982.

 

Shirley MacLaine earned her first Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a pathetic tart who shocks a conservative town by showing up on the arm of young war hero Frank Sinatra in Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1959). She then got the opportunity to show off her long legs and dancing talents in Can-Can (Walter Lang, 1960). Prior to that, she appeared in a bit part with Rat Packers Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Peter Lawford in Oceans Eleven (Lewis Milestone, 1960). MacLaine, the only female member of the famed group, would later recount her experiences with them in her seventh book My Lucky Stars. In 1960, she won her second Oscar nomination for Billy Wilder's comedy/drama The Apartment, and the third nomination for Irma La Douce (Billy Wilder, 1963), both opposite Jack Lemmon. MacLaine's career was in high gear during the 1960s, with her appearing in everything from dramas to madcap comedies to musicals such as What a Way to Go! (J. Lee Thompson, 1964) and Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity! (1969). In addition to her screen work, she actively participated in Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign and served as a Democratic Convention delegate. She was similarly involved in George McGovern's 1972 campaign.

 

Bored by sitting around on movie sets all day awaiting her scenes, Shirley MacLaine started writing down her thoughts and was thus inspired to add writing to her list of talents. She published her first book, Don't Fall Off the Mountain in 1970. She next tried her hand at series television in 1971, starring in the comedy Shirley's World (1971-72) as a globe-trotting photographer. The role reflected her real-life reputation as a world traveller, and these experiences resulted in her second book Don't Fall Off the Mountain and the documentary The Other Half of the Sky - A China Memoir (1975) which she scripted, produced, and co-directed with Claudia Weill. MacLaine returned to Broadway in 1976 with a spectacular one-woman show A Gypsy in My Soul, and the following year entered a new phase in her career playing a middle-aged former ballerina who regrets leaving dance to live a middle-class life in The Turning Point (Herbert Ross, 1977). It meant her fourth Best Actress Oscar nomination. MacLaine was also memorable starring as a lonely political wife opposite Peter Sellers' simple-minded gardener in Being There (Hal Asby, 1979), but did not again attract too much attention until she played the over-protective, eccentric widow Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, 1983). After 20 years in the film industry, she finally took home the Best Actress Oscar for this role. In 1983, she also published the candid Out on a Limb, bravely risking public ridicule by describing her experiences and theories concerning out-of-body travel and reincarnation.

 

Shirley MacLaine's film appearances were sporadic through the mid-'80s, although she did appear in a few television specials. In 1988, she came back strong with three great roles in Madame Sousatzka (John Schlesinger, 1988), Steel Magnolias (Herbert Ross, 1989), and particularly Postcards from the Edge (Mike Nichols, 1990), in which she played a fading star clinging to her own career while helping her daughter (Meryl Streep), a drug-addicted, self-destructive actress. Through the '90s, MacLaine specialized in playing rather crusty and strong-willed eccentrics, such as her title character in the comedy Guarding Tess (Hugh Wilson, 1994). In 1997, MacLaine stole scenes as a wise grande dame who helps pregnant, homeless Ricki Lake in Mrs. Winterbourne (Richard Benjamin, 1997), and the same year revived Aurora Greenway in The Evening Star (Robert Harling, 1997), the critically maligned sequel to Terms of Endearment. MacLaine's onscreen performances were few and far between in the first half of the next decade, but in 2005 she returned in relatively full force, appearing in three features. She took on a pair of grandmother roles in the comedy-dramas In Her Shoes (Curtis Hanson, 2005) and Rumor Has It... (Rob Reiner, 2005), and was a perfect fit for the part of Endora in the big-screen take on the classic sitcom Bewitched (Nora Ephron, 2005). In the coming years, McLaine would continue to give critically acclaimed performances in movies like Coco Chanel (Christian Duguay, 2008), Valentine's Day, (Garry Marshall, 2010), and Bernie (Richard Linklater, 2011). For a long time, MacLaine did seminars on her books, but in the mid-'90s stopped giving talks, claiming she did not want "to be anyone's guru." She does, however, continue writing and remains a popular writer. For 2015, four new films with her are announced or in pre-production.

 

Sources: AllMovie, Wikipedia, and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

The Blackpool Tower Company was founded by London based Standard Contract & Debenture Corporation in 1890, when it bought an Aquarium on Central Promenade with the intention of building a replica Eiffel Tower on the site. John Bickerstaffe, a former Mayor of Blackpool, was asked to become Chairman of the new company and its shares went on sale in July 1891. The Standard Corporation kept 30,000 £1 shares for itself and offered £150,000 worth of shares to the public, although initially only two-thirds of these shares were taken up. This lack of interest forced the Tower Company to ask for further cash contributions from its existing shareholders, but the poor financial situation of the Standard Corporation, worsened by the falling share price, rendered it unable to pay. Bickerstaffe’s remedy for the potential collapse of the venture was to buy any shares available, until his original holding of £500 amounted to £20,000. He also released the Standard Corporation from their share commitments. When the Tower opened in 1894 its success justified the overall investment of nearly £300,000, and the Company made a £30,000 profit in 1896]

 

Two Lancashire architects, James Maxwell and Charles Tuke, designed the Tower and oversaw the laying of its foundation stone on 29 September 1891] By the time the Tower finally opened on 14 May 1894, both men had died. Heenan & Froude of Worcester were appointed structural engineers, supplying and constructing both the main tower, the electric lighting and the steel front pieces for the aquariums. A new system of hydraulic riveting was used, based on the technology of Fielding & Platt of Gloucester.

 

The total cost for the design and construction of the tower and buildings was about £290,000.[6] Five million Accrington bricks, 2,500 tonnes of iron and 93 tonnes of cast steel were used to construct the tower. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, Blackpool Tower is not free-standing. Its base is hidden by the building which houses Blackpool Tower Circus. The building occupies a total of 5,050 square metres (54,400 sq ft)] At the summit of the tower there is a flagpole.

A time capsule is buried beneath the foundation.

 

The designed presaged of its time. As a writer for the BBC noted: "In heavy winds the building will gently sway, what a magnificent Victorian engineering masterpiece.

 

When the tower opened, 3,000 customers took the first rides to the top] Tourists paid sixpence for admission, sixpence more for a ride in the lifts to the top, and a further sixpence for the circus. The first members of the public to ascend the tower had been local journalists in September 1893 using constructors' ladders. In 1897 the top of the tower caught fire, and the platform was seen on fire from up to fifty miles away.

 

The tower was not painted properly during the first thirty years and became corroded, leading to discussions about demolishing it. However, it was decided to rebuild it instead, and between 1921 and 1924 all the steelwork in the structure was replaced and renewed.

 

On 22 December 1894 Norwegian ship Abana was sailing from Liverpool to Savannah, Georgia but was caught up in a storm, and mistook the recently built Blackpool Tower for a lighthouse. Abana was first seen off North Pier, and later drifted to Little Bispham where she was wrecked, and can still be seen at low tide. The ship's bell still hangs in St Andrews Church in Cleveleys.

 

In 1940, during the Second World War, the crow's-nest was removed to allow the structure to be used as a Royal Air Force radar station known as RAF Tower, which proved unsuccessful.

 

In 1949 a post box was opened at the top of the tower.

The hydraulic lifts to the top of the tower were replaced in 1956–57 and the winding-gear replaced by electric.

 

The top of the tower was painted silver in 1977 as part of Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee celebrations. A giant model of King Kong was placed on the side of the tower in 1984.[1] In 1985 escapologist Karl Bartoni and his bride were married suspended in a cage from the tower.

 

The lifts and winding gear were again replaced in 1992. The same year the tower complex was renamed Tower World and was opened by Diana, Princess of Wales.] The tower is usually painted in dark red, except for its centenary year in 1994 when it was painted gold by abseiling painters. In 1998 a "Walk of Faith" glass floor panel was opened at the top of the tower. Made up of two sheets of laminated glass, it weighs half a tonne and is two inches thick.[10] In October 2007 a laser beam installed on the tower for the duration of the annual Illuminations was criticised by astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, presenter of The Sky at Night television programme, who said, "Light pollution is a huge problem. I am not saying we should turn all the lights out, that is not practical, but there are some things which are very unnecessary. The Blackpool Tower light is certainly something I do not think we should be doing. I very much oppose it." The beam could be seen 30 miles (48 km) away; Moore called for it to be stopped. The Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston said the laser has added to a spiralling problem affecting astronomy.

 

The tower has transmitters for local FM station Radio Wave 96.5 and some non-broadcast services.

 

The tower continued to be owned by the Bickerstaffe family until 1964, when the Blackpool Tower Company was sold to EMI.

Since then it has been owned by Trust House Forte, First Leisure and Leisure Parcs Ltd, owned by Trevor Hemmings. In March 2010 it was announced that Blackpool Council had bought Blackpool Tower and the Merlin Entertainment Group would manage it and add various attractions including a new Dungeon attraction, and a new observation deck called Blackpool Tower Eye will operate at the top of the tower. The company will also manage the Blackpool Louis Tussauds waxwork museum to be rebranded as Madame Tussauds.[

 

01.25.2008

 

Strike a pose....

 

Lauren Weisberger

The Devil Wears Prada

2006, Anchor

432 pages

Book bought in: Moab, Utah – USA

 

In this review, the book has not been compared to the movie; I wanted to review the book in itself.

 

As a horribly unfashionable person myself (at least, that’s what I believe, as Prada does nothing for me and I can’t for the life of me walk in heels, oh, and I like my hips), picking up The Devil Wears Prada with all of its fashion stereotypes meant indulging in a guilty pleasure.

 

Andy, a freshly graduated aspiring writer, ends up landing an unlikely job as junior assistent to Miranda Priestly, fashion editor and bitch extraordinaire. I say unlikely, because Andy doesn’t care about fashion; she hopes one year as Miranda’s assistant will open the doors to her future as a writer for The New Yorker, a magazine the polar opposite of Miranda’s Runway magazine.

 

While taking on the most ridiculous tasks (from drycleaning to coffeeruns to more coffeeruns because the other coffee had slightly cooled off), Andy tries to keep herself afloat in the superficial pool that is the fashion industry according to Miranda, trying not to let everything take its toll on her personal life – though inevitably, Andy’s carreer does wreak havoc in certain relationships.

 

Although Andy might have done herself a favour if she’d put up an ‘Whatever, it’s temporary, I’ll just suck it up’ attitude instead of allowing herself to rage on the inside, Miranda really is a foul woman and I sympathised with Andy.

 

I couldn’t quite muster up any sympathy for her boyfriend Alex or her best friend Lily, as I found both of them to be the selfish ones, as opposed to Andy.

 

This book is satirical to the max, definitely what I longed for when I started the first page (re: fashion stereotypes), though I somehow feel cheated.

 

Here I was, a naive unfashionable person, and having finished this book I somehow seem to know a whole lot more about Prada and Manolo’s than I really care for.

 

Weisberger, with her no-mercy descriptions of her various shallow characters, wants me to be repulsed by the fashion industry and its rather ridiculous standards, but in the meantime she is effectively trying to seduce me into admiring, and perhaps even desiring this pair of Jimmy Choo’s. I remember completely drooling over eleborate descriptions of Andy’s make-up case, sponsored by Runway. What? Why? That wasn’t supposed to happen. This was supposed to be... satire, mocking the fear of eating three calories more, stuff like that.

 

...I feel dirty. Quite possibly, a little cheap too.

 

Lauren Weisberger: Choo’s your alliance.

 

3/5.

January 26th 2007 I mean 2008. Haha. I still confuse years.

 

No group invites, admin or other, wanted.

No group awards.

No other group images.

Thanks.

 

Copyright © Karin Elizabeth. All rights reserved. This photo is public only so you ("the public") may view it; it is not to be used as free stock. Use without written consent by the author (that would be me) is illegal and punishable by law; I will take action. So, contact me beforehand if you are interested in using this image or any of my others (non-)commercially.

 

R&R series with photos and text © 2008 Karin Elizabeth.

Please contact me if you'd like to use this review.

Prof. Dr. Matthew Meštrović , the son of the sculptor Ivan Meštrović, is an American journalist and university professor of Modern European history ; former president of the Croatian National congress ; Croatian Politician, M.P. and Ambassador. For more :

www.flickr.com/photos/93051314@N00/92563350/in/set-721575...

 

IVAN MESTROVIC (1883 – 1962) , Croatian (Yugoslav) and American Sculptor , Architect and Writer . For more : www.flickr.com/photos/93051314@N00/sets/72157594148443846/

 

Ivan Mestrovic Museum ( the former artist's 17th century family house and studio) in the Upper town (Gornji grad) , Zagreb.

www.mdc.hr/mestrovic/atelijer/index-en.htm

  

Uploading these WAY late. Sorry. Moving to new PC after being on the same Win7-Pro machine for like 8+ years (I don't like change!), and it's been a mini-nightmare. Caught these a couple weeks ago at my local BNSF / Santa Fe yard.

 

====================

 

FYI.

 

These were shot with a 7.5mm fisheye lens because of the location, and poorly corrected so they look somewhat normal...

 

====================

 

Decided to head out to my local yard on a Saturday, got there at 9:30 and I was the only one out at the freight side platform. After a half hour I noticed someone down at the other end that I thought I recognized. Messaged him, and yep, it was him. My dude PasadenaSubColin.

 

We were both out there to just enjoy the day, me catching freights, and him freights & Metrolinks. He's a good dude to have around, as he lets me know when something cool is on its way into the yard, and I appreciate that he's all plugged into the grid to give the "heads up" when something's coming soon.

 

Well, this time I had, or rather found out, the "Heads Up" about 15 mins before he let me in on what would be the joke of the day. There apparently was a bicentennial engine coming through the depot today on its way to a RR museum in Perris, CA. The 5704!!!!! Big whoop.... One dude chatted me up asking if I knew when "IT" was supposed to come through. I had no idea what he was talking about and told him I don't follow trains. :-)

 

15-20 mins. later Colin messages me an FYI, that there's a "Special" train about to roll through. I've been in this situation before. I'm there benching graff, and all of the sudden 20 cars pull up and a bunch of "Railfans" jump out of their cars, run over, take a few photos of the "Special" car(s), engine or train, and when it's gone, they're gone. I feel like these are the people who only get out of bed when something "cool" is rolling through town. I really doubt they care about day-to-day operations of the RR. And honestly there's no way they give a shit about the graff.

 

Most people out at the tracks are cool, but there's a certain group of people who seem to have zero social skills when something "Special" is coming through, and we had at least one on this day. Some dude that kept walking past us, standing in my spot, like he was going to shoot from there when I got there at 9:30, and he got there at Noon. Walking past us by inches, and not saying a word, head down... Walking in front of cameras that were filming, hanging around my backpack and gear while I was like 30 feet away, just weird, un-cool shit. I'm not down with any of this. But I don't want to burn this spot as a bencher and didn't start any trouble, even though I wanted to punch this dude.. GRRR!

 

Will not be posting flicks of this special train car. Sorry. I saw it, I flicked it, but the whole experience was crap, and it was just one engine, big deal. I was there for the graff that you're seeing me post.

 

Was hot, no clouds, and at my end of the platform I had a 2ft. x 3ft. spot of slowly moving shade that was cast by one of the platform lights. After a while Colin and I were sharing this tiny moving spot of shade. No worries, we get along just fine.

 

BTW: PasadenaSubColin is a FOAMER!!!!!!!! ;-p

 

Managed to re-flick a few cars that I caught at the beginning of the month at the other end of the valley. Anyway........ I'll be back to try and ID these pieces soon. Might take me a little longer than usual as, like I said before, new computer, new crap to deal with..

 

Stay safe out there homies.

 

And..... As always, Thanks to the writers!

 

For freight graffiti slideshows/videos hit up my YouTube channel here: www.youtube.com/SilenceSeven

 

Please Subscribe to the YouTube, every little bit helps.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmOoso4tYDk

 

this video shot yesterday has become viral..

  

#dargahismailshahbabaparel

#kadimalirafaee

#Firozeshakir

 

I met the Rafaee Bilal Baba and Kadim Ali Baba for some reason they were staying outside the gates of the Dargah of Ismail Shah Baba Parel.

They had come after the Urus of Abdur Rehman Shah Baba Qadri got over at Dongri.

They are here for the Urus of Hussain Shah Baba Chishty..

In the Ismail Shah Baba Dargah complex.

There is a RafaeeSilsila Dhuni inside.

SarkarAliBaba will be coming Tom.

The Urus here gets over on 24 Jan

 

I shoot the Rafaee lifestyle culture as a photographer and as a documentarist ,,,,see the story of their life positively ...

 

PLEASE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE TO MY CHANNEL

I SHOOT ONLY ORIGINAL CONTENT ,,, MADE IN INDIA

 

Thank you

 

After reading comments on this video that cannot be published without me viewing it ,,,I deleted most of them for its hate content blocked and reported the comment writer for cyber bullying spamming and harassment ,,,

 

I shot his video as I am documenting Sufism and Rafaee Silsila ..now I am not a Islamic Channel I dont shoot videos to preach ,,I am not their guardian or their caretaker why must I answer if he prays Namaz or not ,,

Namaz is the essential aspect of Islam he should realize it ..

but unlike those who recite namaz and kill innocent pople as suicide bomber who destroy Shia and Sufi shrines kill students in Peshawar ,, why dont you question them you gutless brainless fools .

Ws it not the namazis that killed Imam Hussaiin with his head bowed in prayers ..was it not a namazi who killed Imam Ali..

Pleas dont take me for a bigger fool than you ..

I am not forcing you to see my video..

 

I shot a man a dwarf who could not understand Mumbai..

Later he apologized to me for talking badly about the people of Mumbai .It was out of anger as his Pir Bhais mobile phone was stolen..

It could happen to anyone ,,

 

So one must learn to forgive and forget ,,

I could have got him a role in a film.. in place of Rajpal Yadav..

Bless you all

San Bernardino Santa Fe / BNSF Yard with Keith of "Railroad Fans of the Cajon Pass" @cajonpassrailroadfans @railfanscajonpass

 

Overcast, and weather reports said it was going to rain, but let's be real, I live in Southern California, and rain isn't something we see on a regular basis.

 

Met up with Keith at 9AM out in front of the depot. The plan was to take him on a little tour of the museum there, as it's only open on Saturdays between 10am-3pm. Walking across the parking lot towards the museum, there were a whole lot more cars than usual. Well, they were having their railroad swap meet deal. Dozens of folding tables full of model trains, and all kind of other train related stuff. Cool.

 

After a half hour of looking at all the cool model trains and the museum, we finally got out trackside to watch the real trains. We were out there for a few hours, saw a lot of great trains. A few autoracks rolling through and I'm sure Keith was catching some cool video of the freights and the Metrolinks' for his YouTube.

 

About 3PM? it started sprinkling a little bit, and then it started coming down pretty hard. On the platform there's a couple little covered benches with gutters, etc. We hunkered down, and the rain let up pretty quick, and then it started again, then stopped and started. This went on for the rest of the time we were there.

 

Overall, pretty fun day. Caught a lot of great pieces rolling by and got to hang out with Keith for the day (Sans Buddy).

 

Honestly, I prefer to be out there by myself, but it's a nice change to be out there with someone else to talk shop with and share stories.

 

As always, thanks to the writers for giving me something to go out and hunt. *Man Hugs* & Thanks to the Santa Fe Depot for being cool with people hanging out and catching freights on "film".

The final resting place of Terrance 'Spike' Milligan CBE KBE, my favourite writer, comic, human being. I guess as I didn't know him I don't know how cruel he could be.

 

Please read 'Goodbye Soldier'.

 

Terence Alan Patrick Seán Milligan KBE (16 April 1918 – 27 February 2002), known as Spike Milligan, was an Anglo-Irish comedian, writer, musician, poet and playwright. Milligan was the co-creator and the principal writer of The Goon Show, in which he also performed. Aside from comedy, Milligan played the trumpet, saxophone, piano, guitar and bass drum.

 

Milligan was born in Ahmednagar, India, on 16 April 1918, the son of an Irish-born father, Captain Leo Alphonso Milligan, MSM, RA, who was serving in the British Indian Army. His mother, Florence Mary Winifred Kettleband, was born in England. He spent his childhood in Poona (India) and later in Rangoon (Yangon), capital of Burma (Myanmar). He was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Poona, and St Paul's Christian Brothers, de la Salle, Rangoon.

 

He lived most of his life in England and served in the British Army, in the Royal Artillery in World War II.

 

During most of the late 1930s and early 1940s Milligan performed as an amateur jazz vocalist and trumpeter before, during and after being called up for military service in the fight against Nazi Germany, but even then he wrote and performed comedy sketches as part of concerts to entertain troops. After his call-up, but before being sent abroad, he and fellow musician Harry Edgington (nicknamed Edge-ying-Tong which gave birth to one of Milligan's most memorable musical creations, the Ying Tong Song) would compose surreal stories, filled with puns and skewed logic, as a way of staving off the boredom of life in barracks.

 

During World War II he served as a signaller in the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery, D Battery, as Gunner Milligan, 954024 with the First Army in the North African campaign and then in the succeeding Italian campaign. He rose to the rank of Lance Bombardier and was about to be promoted to Bombardier when he was wounded in action in Italy. Subsequently hospitalised for a mortar wound to the right leg and shell shock, he was demoted by an unsympathetic commanding officer (identified in his war diaries as Major Evan 'Jumbo' Jenkins) back to Gunner. It was Milligan's opinion that Major Jenkins did not like him due to the fact that Milligan constantly kept the morale of his fellow soldiers up, whereas Major Jenkins' approach was to take an attitude towards the troops similar to that of Lord Kitchener. An incident also mentioned was when Major Jenkins had invited Gunners Milligan and Edgington to his bivouac to play some jazz with him, only to discover that the musicianship of the aforementioned gunners was far superior to his own ability to play the military tune 'Whistling Rufus' (albeit badly).

 

After his hospitalisation, Milligan drifted through a number of rear-echelon military jobs in Italy, eventually becoming a full-time entertainer. He played the guitar with a jazz and comedy group called The Bill Hall Trio in concert parties for the troops. After being demobilised, Milligan remained in Italy playing with the Trio but returned to England soon after. While he was with the Central Pool of Artists (a group he described as composed "of bomb-happy squaddies") he began to write parodies of their mainstream plays, that displayed many of the key elements of what would later become The Goon Show ( originally called Crazy People) with Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Michael Bentine.

 

Milligan returned to jazz in the late 1940s and made a precarious living with the Hall trio and other musical comedy acts. He was also trying to break into the world of radio, as either a performer or as a script writer. His first success in radio was as writer for comedian Derek Roy's show. Milligan soon became involved with a relatively radical comedy project, The Goon Show. Known during its first season as Crazy People, or in full, "The Junior Crazy Gang featuring those Crazy People, the Goons!", the name was an attempt to make the programme palatable to BBC officials by connecting it with the popular group of comedians known as The Crazy Gang.[2]

 

Milligan was the primary author of The Goon Show scripts (though many were written jointly with Larry Stephens, Eric Sykes and others) as well as a star performer.

 

Milligan had a number of acting parts in theatre, film and television series; one of his last screen appearances was in the BBC dramatisation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, and he was (almost inevitably) noted as an ad-libber. One of Milligan's most famous ad-lib incidents occurred during a visit to Australia in the late 1960s. He was interviewed live on air and remained in the studio for the news broadcast that followed (read by Rod McNeil), during which Milligan constantly interjected, adding his own name to news items. As a result, he was banned from making any further live appearances on the ABC. The ABC also changed its national policy so that talent had to leave the studio after interviews were complete. A tape of the bulletin survives and has been included in an ABC Radio audio compilation, also on the BBC tribute CD, Vivat Milligna [sic].

 

Milligan also wrote verse, considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense. His poetry has been described by comedian Stephen Fry as "absolutely immortal - greatly in the tradition of Lear"[3]. His most famous poem, On the Ning Nang Nong, was voted the UK's favourite comic poem in 1998 in a nationwide poll, ahead of other nonsense poets including Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear[4]. This nonsense verse, set to music, became a favourite Australia-wide, performed week after week by the ABC children's programme Playschool. Milligan included it on his album No One's Gonna Change Our World in 1969 to aid the World Wildlife Fund. In December 2007 it was reported that, according to OFSTED, it is amongst the ten most commonly taught poems in primary schools in the UK.[5]

 

While depressed, Milligan wrote serious poetry. He also wrote a novel Puckoon, parodying the style of Dylan Thomas[citation needed], and a very successful series of war memoirs, including Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (book) (1971), "Rommel?" "Gunner Who?": A Confrontation in the Desert (1974), Monty: His Part in My Victory (1976) and Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall (1978). Milligan's seven volumes of memoirs cover the years from 1939 to 1950 (his call-up, war service, first breakdown, time spent entertaining in Italy, and return to the UK).

 

He wrote comedy songs, including "Purple Aeroplane", which was a parody of The Beatles' song "Yellow Submarine". Glimpses of his bouts with depression which led to the nervous breakdowns, can be found in his serious poetry, which is compiled in Open Heart University.

 

Spike Milligan also co-wrote the one-act play The Bed-Sitting Room, with John Antrobus. It premiered at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. It was adapted to a longer play, which made its debut at the Mermaid Theatre, London.

 

Milligan contributed occasional cartoons to the satirical magazine Private Eye. Most were visualizations of one-line jokes. For example, a young boy sees the Concorde and asks his father "What's that?". The reply is "That's a flying groundnut scheme, son."

 

After their retirement, Milligan's parents and his younger brother Desmond moved to Australia. His mother lived the rest of her long life in the coastal village of Woy Woy on the New South Wales Central Coast, just north of Sydney. As a result, Milligan became a regular visitor to Australia and made a number of radio and TV programmes there, including The Idiot Weekly with Bobby Limb. He also wrote several books including 'Puckoon' during a visit to his mother's house in Woy Woy. In July 2007, it was proposed that the suspension bridge on the cyclepath from Woy Woy to Gosford be named after him.

 

He suffered from severe bipolar disorder for most of his life, having at least ten major mental breakdowns, several lasting over a year. He spoke candidly about his condition and its effect on his life:

  

I have got so low that I have asked to be hospitalised and for deep narcosis (sleep). I cannot stand being awake. The pain is too much... Something has happened to me, this vital spark has stopped burning - I go to a dinner table now and I don't say a word, just sit there like a dodo. Normally I am the centre of attention, keep the conversation going - so that is depressing in itself. It's like another person taking over, very strange. The most important thing I say is 'good evening' and then I go quiet

 

The Prince of Wales was a noted fan, and Milligan caused a stir by calling him a "little grovelling bastard" on live television in 1994.[9] He later faxed the prince, saying "I suppose a knighthood is out of the question?" In reality he and the Prince were very close friends,[8] and he was finally made a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) (honorary because of his Irish citizenship) in 2000. He had been made an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1992.

 

He was a strident campaigner on environmental matters, particularly arguing against unnecessary noise, such as the use of muzak.

 

In 1971, Milligan caused controversy by attacking an art exhibition at the Hayward Gallery with a hammer.[10] The exhibit consisted of catfish, oysters and shrimp that were to be electrocuted as part of the exhibition. He was a strong opponent of cruelty against animals and, during an appearance on Room 101, chose fox hunting as a pet hate, and succeeded in banishing it to the eponymous room.

 

In 1996, he successfully campaigned for the restoration of London's Elfin Oak.

 

He was also a public opponent of domestic violence, dedicating one of his books to Erin Pizzey.

 

Milligan had three children with his first wife June (Marchini) Marlow: Laura, Seán and Síle. They were married in 1952 and divorced in 1960. He had one daughter with his second wife, Patricia Ridgeway (known as Paddy): the actress Jane Milligan (b. 1964). Milligan and Patricia were married in June 1962 with George Martin as best man. The marriage ended in 1978 with her death. In 1975 Milligan fathered a son, James, in an affair with Margaret Maughan. Another child, a daughter Romany, is suspected to have been born at the same time by a Canadian journalist named Roberta Watt. His last wife was Shelagh Sinclair, to whom he was married from 1983 to his death on 27 February 2002. Four of his children have recently collaborated with documentary makers on a new multi-platform programme called I Told You I Was Ill: The Life and Legacy of Spike Milligan (2005) and accompanying website[11].

 

In October 2008 an array of Milligan's personal effects were to be sold at auction by his third wife, Shelagh, who was moving into a smaller home. These included a grand piano salvaged from a demolition and apparently played every morning by Paul McCartney, a neighbour in Rye in East Sussex[12].

 

Even late in life, Milligan's black humour had not deserted him. After the death of friend Harry Secombe from cancer, he said, "I'm glad he died before me, because I didn't want him to sing at my funeral." A recording of Secombe singing was played at Milligan's memorial service. He also wrote his own obituary, in which he stated repeatedly that he "wrote the Goon show and died".

 

Milligan died from liver disease, at the age of 83, on 27 February 2002, at his home in Rye, East Sussex. On the day of his funeral, 8 March 2002, his coffin was carried to St Thomas's Church in Winchelsea, Sussex, and was draped in the flag of the Republic of Ireland.[13] He had once quipped that he wanted his headstone to bear the words "I told you I was ill." He was buried at St Thomas's Church cemetery in Winchelsea, East Sussex, but the Chichester Diocese refused to allow this epitaph.[14] A compromise was reached with the Irish translation, "Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite", and additionally in English, "Love, light, peace".

 

From the 1960s onwards Milligan was a regular correspondent with Robert Graves. Milligan's letters to Graves usually addressed a question to do with classical studies. The letters form part of Graves' bequest to St. John's College, Oxford.

 

The film of Puckoon, starring Sean Hughes and including Milligan's daughter, the actress Jane Milligan, was released after his death.

 

Milligan lived for several years in Holden Road, Woodside Park and at The Crescent, Barnet, and was a strong supporter of the Finchley Society. His old house in Woodside Park is now demolished, but there is a blue plaque in his memory on the new house on the site. The Finchley Society is trying to get a statue of him erected in Finchley. There is also a campaign to erect a statue in the London Borough of Lewisham where he grew up (see Honor Oak). After coming to the UK from India in the 1930s he lived at 50 Riseldine Road, Brockley and attended Brownhill Boys' school (later to become Catford Boys' School which was demolished in 1994). Lynsey De Paul is a patron of the Spike Milligan Statue Memorial Fund. There is a plaque and bench located at the Wadestown Library, Wellington New Zealand in an area called Spike Milligan corner.

 

In a BBC poll in August 1999, Spike Milligan was voted the "funniest person of the last 1000 years". Also, in a 2005 poll to find The Comedians' Comedian, he was voted among the top 50 comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.

 

Milligan has been portrayed twice in films. In the adaptation of his novel Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall, he was played by Jim Dale, while Milligan himself played his own father. He was also portrayed by Edward Tudor-Pole in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004). In a 2008 stage play, Surviving Spike, Milligan was played by the entertainer Michael Barrymore.

 

On 9 June 2006 it was reported that Professor Richard Wiseman had identified Milligan as the writer of the world's funniest joke as decided by the Laughlab project. Professor Wiseman said the joke contained all three elements of what makes a good gag: anxiety, a feeling of superiority, and an element of surprise.[15]

 

Members of Monty Python greatly admired him, and gave Milligan a cameo role in their 1979 film, Monty Python's Life of Brian, when Milligan happened to be holidaying in Tunisia, near where the Pythons were filming. Graham Chapman gave him a minor part in Yellowbeard.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Milligan

The House of the Tragic Poet (also called The Homeric House or The Iliadic House) is a typical 2nd century BC Roman house in Pompeii, Italy. The house, or villa, is famous for its elaborate mosaic floors and frescoes depicting scenes from Greek mythology.

 

Discovered in November 1824 by the archaeologist Antonio Bonucci, the House of the Tragic Poet has interested scholars and writers for generations. Although the size of the house itself is in no way remarkable, its interior decorations are not only numerous but of the highest quality among other frescoes and mosaics from ancient Pompeii. Because of the mismatch between the size of the house and the quality of its decoration, much has been wondered about the lives of the homeowners. Unfortunately, little is known about the family members, who were likely killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_the_Tragic_Poet

Pembroke is a town and community in Pembrokeshire, Wales, with a population of 7,552. The names of both the town and the county (of which the county town is Haverfordwest) have a common origin; both are derived from the Cantref of Penfro: Pen, "head" or "end", and bro, "region", "country", "land", which has been interpreted to mean either "Land's End" or "headland".

 

Pembroke features a number of historic buildings, town walls, complexes and Pembroke Castle which was the birthplace of Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII of England.

 

Pembroke Castle, the substantial remains of a stone medieval fortress founded by the Normans in 1093, stands at the western tip of a peninsula surrounded by water on three sides. The castle was the seat of the powerful Earls of Pembroke and the birthplace of King Henry VII of England. Gerald de Windsor was the first recorded Constable of Pembroke. Pembroke town and castle and its surroundings are linked with the early Christian church. Following the final extension of the castle about 1254 the town was extended and defensive perimeter walls erected around the edge of the town. The walls survive on their medieval foundations, although much rebuilt over the centuries. A great many of the town's original medieval burgage plots survive and are divided by early stone walls that are of significant national importance.

 

Monkton Priory, sited on a hill across the river from the castle, founded in 1098 by Arnulf de Montgomery and granted by him to the Benedictine order, has very early foundations and retains much of the Norman walls of the nave. The choir and sanctuary were renovated in the nineteenth century. Monkton Hall, close by the Priory church, is regarded as the oldest domestic building in Pembrokeshire and possibly Wales and is thought to have been the guesthouse for visitors to the Priory.

 

The first stone building in the town was a defensive tower, now known as the Medieval Chapel, at 69a Main Street and built on a cliff edge. There are the remains of a great hall to the north and recently filled-in arched cellars. The building was thought to have been later used as an early church as the layout is the same as St. Govan's Chapel and was used by John Wesley in 1764 to preach Methodism. In 1866 it became the brewery for the York Tavern which was briefly Oliver Cromwell's headquarters at the end of the Siege of Pembroke during the English Civil War.

 

The town's main bridge across the River Pembroke, which also acts as a dam, crosses and constrains the millpond. The first bridge was constructed to house a tide mill, originally granted to the Knight's Templar in 1199. The last mill building was destroyed by fire in 1956.

 

On both banks of the Pembroke River to the west of the castle are many remains of early activities. The North Shore Quarries are relatively complete as are the remains of medieval and Elizabethan slipways where wooden vessels were built before the industrial dockyard and admiralty town was built on the grid pattern of Pembroke Dock. There is a very early complete graving dock in what was Hancock's Yard.

 

During the English Civil War, the strategic maritime shire was primarily in the control of the parliamentary forces which aspired to prevent communication to Ireland.

 

At Pennar Flats there was an early submarine base used for experiments in submarine warfare. Three of the houses on the then foreshore, part of the shipyard before the Admiralty Dock Yard was built, are still standing but are heavily altered.[citation needed]

 

The ferry port of Pembroke Dock is 3 miles (4.8 km) to the northwest of Pembroke. It was established in 1814.

 

Pembroke town stands on the South Pembrokeshire limestone peninsula by the estuary of the River Cleddau, flanked on all sides by woodland and arable farmland. The town is 8 miles (13 km) south of the county town of Haverfordwest.

 

The town is centred on Main Street, which is the only street that is inside the original Pembroke town walls. Outside the walls, residential estates have been built to the north towards Pembroke Dock, to the east towards Lamphey, and to the south. To the west of the town lies the village of Monkton, which is included as part of the community of Pembroke. At the 2001 census, the community had a population of 7,214.

 

The conurbation of Pembroke Dock and Pembroke has a combined population of 15,890 and as such is one of the major population centres of West Wales.

 

There are two tiers of local government covering Pembroke, at community (town) and county level: Pembroke Town Council and Pembrokeshire County Council. Pembroke Town Council is based at Pembroke Town Hall. The community of Pembroke covers an area of 4.58 square miles (1,190 ha) and includes the Pembroke St Mary North, St Mary South, St Michael and Monkton wards.

 

For representation on the county council, the four wards comprising Pembroke community each elect one councillor.

 

Pembroke is part of the Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire Senedd constituency and UK Parliamentary constituency.

 

The local Member of Parliament (MP) is Simon Hart, a Conservative.

 

Pembroke was an ancient borough, with evidence of borough charters dating back to at least 1168. The borough covered the two parishes of Pembroke St Mary and Pembroke St Michael plus part of the parish of Monkton (also known as Pembroke St Nicholas). The borough was reformed to become a municipal borough in 1836. The borough included a sizeable rural area within its boundaries as well as the built up area of Pembroke itself. The town of Pembroke Dock, which developed from the early nineteenth century as a separate urban area was nevertheless within the borough boundaries of Pembroke, falling within the parish of Pembroke St Mary. The part of the parish of Monkton outside the borough boundaries became a separate parish called Hundleton in 1894.

 

As Pembroke Dock grew through the nineteenth century it began to rival the old town of Pembroke for position as the main settlement within the borough. By 1895 Pembroke Borough Council had adopted the practice of holding its meetings alternately at Pembroke Town Hall and at Pembroke Dock, where the council had established its main administrative offices at 37 Bush Street (renumbered 71 Bush Street in 1906). The council remained based at 71 Bush Street (and later also expanded into neighbouring 73 Bush Street) until the early 1970s when it acquired Llanion Park, part of the Llanion Barracks at Pembroke Dock, to serve as its headquarters.

 

Pembroke Borough Council was abolished under the Local Government Act 1972, with the area becoming part of the new district of South Pembrokeshire within the county of Dyfed on 1 April 1974. A community was established to cover the area of the former borough, with its council taking the name Pembroke Town Council. South Pembrokeshire District Council took over Llanion Park at Pembroke Dock to serve as its headquarters.

 

On 1 April 1986 the community of Pembroke was split into a Pembroke Dock community and a reduced Pembroke community, with Pembroke Town Council thereafter just covering the old town of Pembroke itself.

 

South Pembrokeshire was abolished in 1996, with the area becoming part of a re-established Pembrokeshire.

 

Primary and pre-school (ages 3–11) education in Pembroke is served by two state schools. In Pembroke town, Golden Grove CP School is a dual stream school established in 2002 following the amalgamation of Golden Manor Infants School and Grove Junior School. In Monkton, pupils can attend Monkton Priory CP School.

 

Secondary education is provided by Pembroke School (in Welsh: Ysgol Benfro), a mixed 11–18 comprehensive school of 1,600 pupils with a sixth form of about 200. The school was formed in 1972 as a result of the amalgamation of the former grammar school and secondary modern school. The school takes pupils from the Pembroke family of schools, which as well as Golden Grove and Monkton Priory includes community primary schools in Lamphey, Orielton, Pennar and Pembroke Dock, voluntary controlled primary schools in Angle, Cosheston and Stackpole, and St. Mary's Catholic Primary School in Pembroke Dock.

 

Pembroke 21C community association was founded in 2004, and is based out of the Foundry House building on the Commons, which they operate as a community centre. Activities carried out by 21C include organising the annual Pembroke Festival, running the town's fortnightly farmers' market and producing a quarterly newsletter which is distributed to all households in the town. Pembroke Rugby Club organises the town's annual carnival, which is usually held in June. Pembroke Library shares a building with the Tourist Information Centre on Commons Road and offers a full lending service and internet access.

 

Pembroke has been twinned with the towns of Bergen, Lower Saxony, Germany, since 1977 and Pembroke, Malta, since 2002.

 

Notable people

King Henry VII (1457–1509), King of England, born in Pembroke Castle.

William Lort Mansel (1753–1820), an English churchman and Cambridge fellow.

Frank Goodden (1889–1917), a pioneering British aviator and test pilot

Mervyn Johns (1899–1992), a Welsh stage, film and TV character actor.

W. F. Grimes CBE (1905–1988), a Welsh archaeologist, studied the prehistory of Wales.

Daniel Jones, OBE (1912–1993), a Welsh composer of classical music.

John Cooke CB, OBE (1922–2011), a British doctor and senior Royal Air force officer.

Peter Bishop (1953–2022), an English painter of mountain landscape of north Wales and an art historian.

 

Sport

William Bowen (1862–1925), a Welsh international rugby union player, capped 13 times for Wales.

Henry Davies (1865–1934), a Welsh horse racing jockey and first-class cricketer.

W. J. A. Davies OBE (1890–1967), a Welsh rugby union footballer, capped 22 times for England

Reg Thomas (1907–1946), a Welsh middle-distance runner, he competed at the 1928 and 1932 Summer Olympics

David Gwynne-James (1937−2011), a Welsh first-class cricketer, British Army officer and military historian.

Scott Gammer (born 1976), a Welsh former professional boxer, British heavyweight title-holder from 2006 to 2007

Jonathan Thomas (born 1982), a Welsh rugby union coach and former player, capped 67 times for Wales.

 

Pembroke Rugby Club is on Upper Lamphey Road. The ground is called Crickmarren. The club plays in WRU Division Five West. Pembroke's main game of the season is often the local derby with rivals the Pembroke Dock Harlequins. Pembroke produced Ospreys and Welsh international Jonathan Thomas, Welsh international Dominic Day and Scotland international Luke Hamilton.

 

Other sporting clubs in the area include the football team Monkton Swifts.

 

The town is home to Pembroke Cricket Club. The cricket club plays its home games at its Treleet ground on Upper Lamphey Road, opposite the rugby club. The club currently has a 1st and a 2nd team playing in divisions 2 and 4 of the Pembrokeshire league. The club colours are green and gold.

 

In February 2012, it was revealed that Pembroke was the UK's second-slowest broadband town. The average internet download speed in Pembroke was just over 1.6 Mbit/s (1600 kbit/s) compared to the UK average of 12.0 Mbit/s (12000 kbit/s) at the time.

 

BT's telephone exchange, which serves Pembroke and Pembroke Dock, was upgraded in 2014 under the Superfast Cymru programme and new cabinets were built to provide FTTC technology. Additional exchanges across Pembrokeshire are also being upgraded under the programme, with a goal of bringing superfast broadband to 96% of Wales by spring 2016.

 

Pembrokeshire is a county in the south-west of Wales. It is bordered by Carmarthenshire to the east, Ceredigion to the northeast, and is otherwise surrounded by the sea. Haverfordwest is the largest town and administrative headquarters of Pembrokeshire County Council.

 

The county is generally sparsely populated and rural, with an area of 200 square miles (520 km2) and a population of 123,400. After Haverfordwest, the largest settlements are Milford Haven (13,907), Pembroke Dock (9,753), and Pembroke (7,552). St Davids (1,841) is a city, the smallest by population in the UK. Welsh is spoken by 17.2 percent of the population, and for historic reasons is more widely spoken in the north of the county than in the south.

 

Pembrokeshire's coast is its most dramatic geographic feature, created by the complex geology of the area. It is a varied landscape which includes high sea cliffs, wide sandy beaches, the large natural harbour of Milford Haven, and several offshore islands which are home to seabird colonies. Most of it is protected by Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, and can be hiked on the 190-mile (310 km) Pembrokeshire Coast Path. The interior of Pembrokeshire is relatively flat and gently undulating, with the exception of the Preseli Mountains in the north.

 

There are many prehistoric sites in Pembrokeshire, particularly in the Preseli Mountains. During the Middle Ages several castles were built by the Normans, such as Pembroke and Cilgerran, and St David's Cathedral became an important pilgrimage site. During the Industrial Revolution the county remained relatively rural, with the exception of Milford Haven, which was developed as a port and Royal Navy dockyard. It is now the UK's third-largest port, primarily because of its two liquefied natural gas terminals. The economy of the county is now focused on agriculture, oil and gas, and tourism.

 

Human habitation of the region that is now Pembrokeshire extends back to between 125,000 and 70,000 years  and there are numerous prehistoric sites such as Pentre Ifan, and neolithic remains (12,000 to 6,500 years ago), more of which were revealed in an aerial survey during the 2018 heatwave; in the same year, a 1st-century Celtic chariot burial was discovered, the first such find in Wales. There may have been dairy farming in Neolithic times.

 

There is little evidence of Roman occupation in what is now Pembrokeshire. Ptolemy's Geography, written c. 150, mentioned some coastal places, two of which have been identified as the River Teifi and what is now St Davids Head, but most Roman writers did not mention the area; there may have been a Roman settlement near St Davids and a road from Bath, but this comes from a 14th-century writer. Any evidence for villas or Roman building materials reported by mediaeval or later writers has not been verified, though some remains near Dale were tentatively identified as Roman in character by topographer Richard Fenton in his Historical Tour of 1810. Fenton stated that he had "...reason to be of opinion that they had not colonized Pembrokeshire till near the decline of their empire in Britain".

 

Part of a possible Roman road is noted by CADW near Llanddewi Velfrey, and another near Wiston. Wiston is also the location of the first Roman fort discovered in Pembrokeshire, investigated in 2013.

 

Some artefacts, including coins and weapons, have been found, but it is not clear whether these belonged to Romans or to a Romanised population. Welsh tradition has it that Magnus Maximus founded Haverfordwest, and took a large force of local men on campaign in Gaul in 383 which, together with the reduction of Roman forces in south Wales, left a defensive vacuum which was filled by incomers from Ireland.

 

Between 350 and 400, an Irish tribe known as the Déisi settled in the region known to the Romans as Demetae.  The Déisi merged with the local Welsh, with the regional name underlying Demetae evolving into Dyfed, which existed as an independent petty kingdom from the 5th century.  In 904, Hywel Dda married Elen (died 943), daughter of the king of Dyfed Llywarch ap Hyfaidd, and merged Dyfed with his own maternal inheritance of Seisyllwg, forming the new realm of Deheubarth ("southern district"). Between the Roman and Norman periods, the region was subjected to raids from Vikings, who established settlements and trading posts at Haverfordwest, Fishguard, Caldey Island and elsewhere.

 

Dyfed remained an integral province of Deheubarth, but this was contested by invading Normans and Flemings who arrived between 1067 and 1111.  The region became known as Pembroke (sometimes archaic "Penbroke":), after the Norman castle built in the cantref of Penfro. In 1136, Prince Owain Gwynedd at Crug Mawr near Cardigan met and destroyed a 3,000-strong Norman/Flemish army and incorporated Deheubarth into Gwynedd.  Norman/Flemish influence never fully recovered in West Wales.  In 1138, the county of Pembrokeshire was named as a county palatine. Rhys ap Gruffydd, the son of Owain Gwynedd's daughter Gwenllian, re-established Welsh control over much of the region and threatened to retake all of Pembrokeshire, but died in 1197. After Deheubarth was split by a dynastic feud, Llywelyn the Great almost succeeded in retaking the region of Pembroke between 1216 and his death in 1240.  In 1284 the Statute of Rhuddlan was enacted to introduce the English common law system to Wales, heralding 100 years of peace, but had little effect on those areas already established under the Marcher Lords, such as Cemais in the north of the county.

 

Henry Tudor, born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, landed an army in Pembrokeshire in 1485 and marched to Cardigan.  Rallying support, he continued to Leicestershire and defeated the larger army of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. As Henry VII, he became the first monarch of the House of Tudor, which ruled England until 1603.

 

The Laws in Wales Act 1535 effectively abolished the powers of the Marcher Lords and divided the county into seven hundreds, roughly corresponding to the seven pre-Norman cantrefi of Dyfed. The hundreds were (clockwise from the northeast): Cilgerran, Cemais, Dewisland, Roose, Castlemartin, Narberth and Dungleddy and each was divided into civil parishes; a 1578 map in the British Library is the earliest known to show parishes and chapelries in Pembrokeshire. The Elizabethan era brought renewed prosperity to the county through an opening up of rural industries, including agriculture, mining and fishing, with exports to England and Ireland, though the formerly staple woollen industry had all but disappeared. 

 

During the First English Civil War (1642–1646) the county gave strong support to the Roundheads (Parliamentarians), in contrast to the rest of Wales, which was staunchly Royalist. In spite of this, an incident in Pembrokeshire triggered the opening shots of the Second English Civil War when local units of the New Model Army mutinied. Oliver Cromwell defeated the uprising at the Siege of Pembroke in July 1648.  On 13 August 1649, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland began when New Model Army forces sailed from Milford Haven.

 

In 1720, Emmanuel Bowen described Pembrokeshire as having five market towns, 45 parishes and about 4,329 houses, with an area of 420,000 acres (1,700 km2). In 1791 a petition was presented to the House of Commons concerning the poor state of many of the county's roads, pointing out that repairs could not be made compulsory by the law as it stood. The petition was referred to committee.  People applying for poor relief were often put to work mending roads. Workhouses were poorly documented. Under the Poor Laws, costs and provisions were kept to a minimum, but the emphasis was often on helping people to be self-employed. While the Poor Laws provided a significant means of support, there were many charitable and benefit societies. After the Battle of Fishguard, the failed French invasion of 1797, 500 French prisoners were held at Golden Hill Farm, Pembroke. From 1820 to 1878 one of the county's prisons, with a capacity of 86, was in the grounds of Haverfordwest Castle. In 1831, the area of the county was calculated to be 345,600 acres (1,399 km2) with a population of 81,424.

 

It was not until nearly the end of the 19th century that mains water was provided to rural south Pembrokeshire by means of a reservoir at Rosebush and cast iron water pipes throughout the district.

 

Throughout much of the 20th century (1911 to 1961) the population density in the county remained stable while it rose in England and Wales as a whole. There was considerable military activity in Pembrokeshire and offshore in the 20th century: a naval base at Milford Haven because German U-boats were active off the coast in World War I and, in World War II, military exercises in the Preseli Mountains and a number of military airfields. The wartime increase in air activity saw a number of aircraft accidents and fatalities, often due to unfamiliarity with the terrain. From 1943 to 1944, 5,000 soldiers from the United States Army's 110th Infantry Regiment were based in the county, preparing for D-Day. Military and industrial targets in the county were subjected to bombing during World War II. After the end of the war, German prisoners of war were accommodated in Pembrokeshire, the largest prison being at Haverfordwest, housing 600. The County of Pembroke War Memorial in Haverfordwest carries the names of 1,200 of those that perished in World War I.

 

In 1972, a second reservoir for south Pembrokeshire, at Llys y Fran, was completed.

 

Pembrokeshire's tourism portal is Visit Pembrokeshire, run by Pembrokeshire County Council. In 2015 4.3 million tourists visited the county, staying for an average of 5.24 days, spending £585 million; the tourism industry supported 11,834 jobs. Many of Pembrokeshire's beaches have won awards, including Poppit Sands and Newport Sands. In 2018, Pembrokeshire received the most coast awards in Wales, with 56 Blue Flag, Green Coast or Seaside Awards. In the 2019 Wales Coast Awards, 39 Pembrokeshire beaches were recognised, including 11 awarded Blue Flag status.

 

The Pembrokeshire coastline is a major draw to tourists; in 2011 National Geographic Traveller magazine voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the second best in the world and in 2015 the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park was listed among the top five parks in the world by a travel writer for the Huffington Post. Countryfile Magazine readers voted the Pembrokeshire Coast the top UK holiday destination in 2018, and in 2019 Consumers' Association members placed Tenby and St Davids in the top three best value beach destinations in Britain. With few large urban areas, Pembrokeshire is a "dark sky" destination. The many wrecks off the Pembrokeshire coast attract divers. The decade from 2012 saw significant, increasing numbers of Atlantic bluefin tuna, not seen since the 1960s, and now seen by some as an opportunity to encourage tourist sport fishing.

 

The county has a number of theme and animal parks (examples are Folly Farm Adventure Park and Zoo, Manor House Wildlife Park, Blue Lagoon Water Park and Oakwood Theme Park), museums and other visitor attractions including Castell Henllys reconstructed Iron Age fort, Tenby Lifeboat Station and Milford Haven's Torch Theatre. There are 21 marked cycle trails around the county.

 

Pembrokeshire Destination Management Plan for 2020 to 2025 sets out the scope and priorities to grow tourism in Pembrokeshire by increasing its value by 10 per cent in the five years, and to make Pembrokeshire a top five UK destination.

 

As the national sport of Wales, rugby union is widely played throughout the county at both town and village level. Haverfordwest RFC, founded in 1875, is a feeder club for Llanelli Scarlets. Village team Crymych RFC in 2014 plays in WRU Division One West. There are numerous football clubs in the county, playing in five leagues with Haverfordwest County A.F.C. competing in the Cymru Premier.

 

Triathlon event Ironman Wales has been held in Pembrokeshire since 2011, contributing £3.7 million to the local economy, and the county committed in 2017 to host the event for a further five years. Ras Beca, a mixed road, fell and cross country race attracting UK-wide competitors, has been held in the Preselis annually since 1977. The record of 32 minutes 5 seconds has stood since 1995. Pembrokeshire Harriers athletics club was formed in 2001 by the amalgamation of Cleddau Athletic Club (established 1970) and Preseli Harriers (1989) and is based in Haverfordwest.

 

The annual Tour of Pembrokeshire road-cycling event takes place over routes of optional length. The 4th Tour, in April 2015, attracted 1,600 riders including Olympic gold medallist Chris Boardman and there were 1,500 entrants to the 2016 event. Part of Route 47 of the Celtic Trail cycle route is in Pembrokeshire. The Llys y Fran Hillclimb is an annual event run by Swansea Motor Club, and there are several other county motoring events held each year.

 

Abereiddy's Blue Lagoon was the venue for a round of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series in 2012, 2013, and 2016; the Welsh Surfing Federation has held the Welsh National Surfing Championships at Freshwater West for several years, and Llys y Fran Country Park hosted the Welsh Dragonboat Championships from 2014 to 2017.

 

While not at major league level, cricket is played throughout the county and many villages such as Lamphey, Creselly, Llangwm, Llechryd and Crymych field teams in minor leagues under the umbrella of the Cricket Board of Wales.

 

Notable people

From mediaeval times, Rhys ap Gruffydd (c. 1132-1197), ruler of the kingdom of Deheubarth, was buried in St Davids Cathedral. and Gerald of Wales was born c. 1146 at Manorbier Castle. Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) was born in 1457 at Pembroke Castle.

 

The pirate Bartholomew Roberts (Black Bart) (Welsh: Barti Ddu) was born in Casnewydd Bach, between Fishguard and Haverfordwest in 1682.

 

In later military history, Jemima Nicholas, heroine of the so-called "last invasion of Britain" in 1797, was from Fishguard, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton GCB, born in Haverfordwest, was killed at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and Private Thomas Collins is believed to be the only Pembrokeshire man that fought in the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879.

 

In the arts, siblings Gwen and Augustus John were both born in Pembrokeshire, as was the novelist Sarah Waters; singer Connie Fisher grew up in Pembrokeshire. The actor Christian Bale was born in Haverfordwest.

 

Stephen Crabb, a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Wales, was brought up in Pembrokeshire and is one of the county's two Members of Parliament, the other being Simon Hart,[90] who served as Secretary of State for Wales from 2019 to 2022.

A Namiki fountain pen poses by some colorful glass marbles. This is my favorite pen for journaling. The beauty of the maki-e work on the pen seems to inspire creativity on the part of the writer.

 

For the Macro Monday imagination theme.

 

Details: Handheld, 50mm, lightness adjustment

Who's in the Bonanza Cemetery

Bonanza Gravesites

 

AH SAM

Died 1894, Gunshot wound. - Shot by the Chinese cook at the Blacks Mine. Reported in the Silver Messenger, September 11, 1894.

AH YOUNG

Worked as a cook on the Stanley Gold Dredge. When he died of a heart attack, he was buried there, then exhumed and transported to the Bonanza graveyard. He received his residence paper #136652 from Helena, Montana.

ANDERSON, CHRIS

Native of Sweden. Approximately 53 years old. Died at Custer, Idaho on December 9, 1903.

BAIRD, EDWARD

Born, 1837 - Died June 3, 1897, Old timer in the area who had been a soldier. Died by his own hand, suicide by gunshot, as reported by the Silver Messenger June 3, 1897.

BARKER, MARTIN

Died in Custer, Idaho at the Nevada House on Monday, March 25, 1889 of spinal meningitis at age 35. He was a prospector on Sheep Mountain and Seafoam areas. Owned Vanity, Mountain King, Ella Day, MKH, and other claims. Born in Bash County, Kentucky.

BELLAMY, HARRY

Birthplace unknown. Born 1850 - Died at Custer, Idaho on December 2, 1912.

BENEFIEL, EMMA

Born 1843, wife of John R. Benefiel of Custer. Died on October 13, 1880.

BENERELLI, ELIZA

Died October 1880 at age (38 or 88). Buried in Bonanza.Sacred to the Memory of Eliza Emma, wife of J.R. Benerelli".

BURTON, ESTELLA M.

Born October 23, 1851. Died at Custer, Idaho on May 1, 1903.

BURTON, JAMES W.

Died November 21, 1895 at Custer, Idaho. Age 55. Was scratched while unloading a truck, consequently, he died of blood poisoning. He was a merchant, postmaster, and GAR of Lincolin Post #15 of Challis.

CAREY, MIKE

Born 1850 in Ireland - died at Custer, Idaho on October 21, 1897.

CEARLEY, JAMES L.

Born in North Carolina in 1839. Died at Custer, Idaho on March 17, 1902. Killed in an accident at the Lucky Boy Mine. Had nine children, served as a lieutenant of the volunteers in the Nez Pierce War.

CEARLEY, JAMES JR.

Born 1882 at Bonanza. Worked at Clayton Silver Mine. Died from Miner's Lung at Bonanza, Idaho on May 8, 1937. Died sitting in front of the small house at the lower end of Bonanza.

CENTAURAS, HENRY

Born in Hanover, Germany in 1847. Mined along the Salmon River from Sunbeam Dam to Burnt Creek. Made a stake and returned to Germany where it is reported the fortune was taken away by authorities. He returned to Idaho and started mining again to make another fortune. He died at Custer, Idaho on July 16, 1921.

CENTAUR AS, HERMAN

Born 1849 in Hanover, Germany. Died 1923.

CENTAURAS, MARGARET(MYERS)

Born in Hamburg, Germany on March 28, 1855. Came to the United States at age 17. Married Herman Centauras in 1878. Lived for 42 years in Custer County. Died of pneumonia on May 1, 1929 at Challis, Idaho. Taken to Bonanza Cemetery for burial.

CENTAURAS, MAY (MARY) Born October 23, 1883 - Died September 18, 1900 at age 17. Died of typhoid fever.

CERAMELINE, ANDREA

Born in Italy. Died July 8, 1910 when the air shaft to the Sunbeam mine plugged with ice and snow, Andrea climbed up from inside and placed a charge of black powder at the plug. He miscalculated the time necessary to reach safety and was killed in the explosion.

CEREGHINO, JOSEPH

Native of Italy. Born in 1848 - died at Bonanza, Idaho on October 31, 1905. Left three sisters living in Italy.

CLAUDE, JOSEPH

Born 1834. First mining death at Golconda Mine, by injuries due to falling rock on September 15, 1879. Buried one mile west of Bonanza.

CLAWSON, CALVIN C.

Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1840. Died at his home between Custer and Bonanza, Idaho on May 15, 1911. Had been a writer for the Silver Messenger under the non de plume of Graph; for 30 years. Crossed the plains with oxen teams in 1866. Came to Custer County in 1878.

CLAWSON, CZARINA (LLEWELLYN)

Born January 29, 1840 at Morgantown, West Virginia. Died at family home between Custer and Bonanza, Idaho on February 14, 1905. Was of Welsh descent.

CRAFTS, TREVOR

Born September 1881. His father owned Blacks Mine.

CROGEN, A.M.

Died 1896.

CROSS, JULIUS W.

Born October 1865 in Indiana. Died at Custer, Idaho on December 2, 1905.

DAVENPORT, ALICE LEONA

Born January 1928 - Died September 1935 in Hailey, Idaho from blood poisoning. This was caused from a cut on her foot or a black widow spider bite.

DAVIS, JOHN D.

Died February 14, 1904. Killed by a snowslide on the trail to the Charles Dickens Mine.

DeLAVILLIE, GODFREY POQUETTE

Native of Canada. Born in 1820. Died at Bonanza, Idaho on November 19, 1905 from injuries suffered in a fall at his sawmill on West Fork.

DUDLEY, JOHN P.

Born 1847 in Kentucky - Died March 14, 1907 at Custer, Idaho.

DUNN, MARGARET "BIDDY"

Born in Ireland in 1856. Came to the United States when she was two years old. Lived in Massachusetts, came to Custer in 1885, ran the Nevada House. Died November 9, 1908.

DUNN, WILLIAM Born 1843 - Died on July 6, 1907.

DUVALL,JOHN

Born 1833 in Missouri - Died August 1, 1890 at Custer, Idaho. He mined near Custer.

ERNST BABY

Was born and died 1899 in Bonanza. Child of George and Susie (Williams) Born 1843 - Died on July 6, 1907.

GEER, JASPER

Son of D. & M. Geer. Two years, five months and four days old.

GEER W.

Son of D.&; M. Geer. Four years and 9 months old.

HARDY, GEORGE

Born 1876 - died of suicide by knife at Custer, Idaho, August 5, 1902.

HARVEY, JOHN

Died 1917 at Custer, Idaho.

Born 1876 - died of suicide by knife at Custer, Idaho, August 5, 1902. Died 1917 at Custer, Idaho.

HARVEY, LOUISE

(French Louise)

Wife of John Harvey. Died from injuries sustained in a fall. - 1909 - (Some question on date of death, Silver Messenger mentions her at Thanksgiving 1911.)

HIENS, GEORGE

Died at Custer, Idaho on September 17, 1898

JOHNSON, KATHY

Born July 6, 1880 - Died 1891. The daughter of Peter and Annie (Ryan).

KNAPP, HENRY M.

Born 1823 in Florida. Died at Sunbeam, Idaho on December 2, 1909 of senility.

LAYTON, WILLIAM

(Banjo Bill) Birthplace and age unknown. Died at Custer, Idaho on October 20, 1897.

LAUNDRY, GEORGE

Birthplace and age unknown. Died at Custer, Idaho on March 3,1905.

LEE, JOHN H.

Born July 1847 in Illinois - Died January 24, 1888. Age 41 years and 6 months. Owned a store in Custer, had resided in Rockey Bar, Idaho earlier.

MacNAMER, TIMOTHY

Born in Baltimore, Maryland August 1829 - Died at Bonanza, Idaho on July 12, 1910.

McCULLOUGH, PETER

Native of Indiana. Born 1873 - Died in a snowslide at the Montana Mine on January 16, 1906.

McGOVERN, THOMAS

Born 1851 in Massachuests - Died November 19, 1909. Lived on the Yankee Fork thirty years, had claims on Fourth of July Creek named High Tariff, Union, Maggie and Dewey.

McMAHON, WILLIAM

Native of California. Born 1870 - Died in a snowslide at the Montana Mine on Mt. Estes on January 16, 1906.

McNAB, JOHN

Born 1852 in Texas - Died May 20, 1897.

MCNAUGHTON, CHARLES (THOMAS)

Born in Belfast, Ireland in 1867. Died at Custer, Idaho on March 6,1907.

MOORE, JOHN

Born December 16, 1840 - Died July 2, 1883. Mined at Loon Creek in the 1870's, mined at Stanley, sold the Yellow Jacket, Red Jacket, and Blue Jacket mining claims to A.P. Challis and Henry Sturkey.

MONROE TRIPLETS Died at birth in 1896. Their father was Dr. Monroe, second doctor in Custer.

MULLEN, JOHN

Born in Ireland in 1847. Came to the United States with his parents at the age of two years. Grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Died at Custer, Idaho on March 26, 1907.

MURPHY, WILLIAM

Birthdate unknown. Died December 12, 1900 - Suicide by gunshot. He borrowed the weapon from the McGowan's Saloon.

OLLSON, CHARLIE

Died September 5, 1880. He fell from the framework of the Custer Mill last Saturday morning, died at 6:00 p.m. Sunday evening. He was buried the next day, the funeral being well attended. The wounds that caused his death were compound committed fracture of both the right and left tibia fibula, and fracture of the base of the skull. Ollson resided in California a long time.

OLSEN, GEORGE

Birthplace unknown. Born 1877 - Died at Custer, Idaho on November 3, 1900. Has an iron bassinet around his grave.

PIERCE, CLIFFORD C.

Born 1908 in Montana, married Lucille (Shoemaker). Died January 26, 1992 in Andaconda, Montana. Ashes and memorial only.

PIERCE, CLIFFORD L.

Son of Clifford C. and Lucille Pierce. Died July 17, 1936.

PIERCE, JAMES CHESTER

Born November 2, 1873 - Died July 30, 1935 of suicide due to extremely painful cancer of the lower intestines. He had mentioned to his son that if I hadn't been a man in this country, I would have liked to have been a tree. Years later after the old man had died, a tree sprang from the exact spot where his heart was buried. To this day, his family half believe the tree is the fulfillment of the old man's wishes.

PIERCE, LUCILLE Wife of Clifford C. Died March 31, 1991.

PIERCE, SARA J.

Born January 1887 - Died August 22, 1953.

PIERCE, SHIRLEY MAE

Baby daughter of Clifford and Lucille Pierce who died November 29, 1935.

POQUETTE, JERRY

Lived across the river from Jerry's Creek. The creek had been named for him. Died November 29, 1905.

RAPP, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Born in Pennsylvania, 1841, operated a livery stable in Bonanza, had claims in Joe's Gulch near Stanley and was the postmaster in Stanley when he died on October 28, 1901.

REECE YOUNGEST BOY

Birthdate unkown - Died June 8, 1882 of scarlet fever.

RILEY, JAMES

Birthplace and age unknown. Died at Custer, Idaho on February 19, 1897.

ROMER, SILAS

Born in Ohio, July 1852 - Died October 4, 1903. He carried mail from Custer to Sunbeam, and on to Loon Creek area. When a child became sick at Sunbeam and needed medicine from Custer, Silas, against his better judgement, volunteered to make the trip. He made it to Custer but was caught by a snowslide on the return trip, and killed. The child is said to have recovered.

STEEL, JAMES E.J.

Born 1935 - Died March 4, 1880 of cold and fever. From Ohio.

STEEN, JOHN Worked for Morrison at Jordon Creek, owned the Morrison claim by 1895. Born 1862, St. Clair New Brunswick, Canada - Died of diabetes, June 12, 1900.

STRATTON, JACOB H.

Born 1836 - died July 11, 1906.

SULLIVAN CHILD

The two year old child of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Sullivan died at Custer, Idaho on March 15, 1889.

SWENSSON, F.O.

Sacred to the Memory of F.O. Swensson. Died November 1880.

SWENSSON, JOHANNA

Born 1842 in Sweden - Died September 28, 1880. Wife of F.O. Swensson, owner of Franklin Hotel. Service by Reverend J.F. Taylor.

TAYLOR, EDNA

Age 4, eldest child of J.F. Taylor and Rose D. Born 1875 - died 1879.

TAYLOR, JOHN

First natural death, abscess of the throat, (Yankee Fork Herald).

TERRY, MIKE

Born in China, buried in the Chinese section. While the coffin was being transported from Custer, it slipped off the wagon and slid down the hill. There it stayed until spring weather made it possible to retrieve the coffin and proceed with the burial.

TULLY, FRANCIS S.

Died October 1897, at Custer, Idaho.

TURNBULL. ANNA

Born in Ontario, Canada in 1852. Died at Bonanza, Idaho on November 20, 1894. Wife of James Turnbull. Age 42. Died in childbirth.

TURNBULL, THOMAS

Born 1878 - Died in Bonanza as a young man.

VARNEY, DUDLEY B. CAPTAIN

Born in New Hampshire in 1838. Died at Custer, Idaho on May 7, 1906. Was a member of the Jim Bridger expedition through the Big Horn and Yellowstone countries in 1864. Came to Loon Creek in 1869. Became one of the owners of the Montana Mine on Mt. Estes. Elected to Idaho Territorial Legislature from Lemhi County in 1878. Lived in Custer for many years. Received a spinal injury when a horse fell with him, that was ultimately the cause of his death.

WILSON, JACK J.

Born 1881 - died February 10, 1933 of sickness and old age.

WRIGHT, E.J. BUCK

Born in Ireland, 1858 - died in Custer, Idaho of suicide by morphine, on September 27, 1900.