The British are often said to be sentimental about their pets and this is perhaps especially true of dogs. Trained canine companions have long played an important role in our ancestors’ lives, from hunting and racing hounds, through working farm animals, to show dogs, lucky mascots and ladies’ miniature ‘toys’. Traditionally the wealthy classes kept aggressive dogs to help guard their properties and sometimes adopted small dogs as ornamental pets, leading to the disdainful term ‘lap-dog’. Over time different breeds have become fashionable and useful to people: for example, during the 17th century various types of spaniel evolved into efficient gun dogs on land and in water, as huntsmen took up flintlock pistols for shooting game.
I was fortunate in having a large family archive dating back to the earliest days of Quakerism and when my mother, Joan Barlow, died in 2007 at the age of 93, I became its custodian. Its contents had always intrigued me as a child: our old Bible of 1616, family trees and old letters dating back some hundreds of years, plus first-hand accounts of historical events by my great-grandfather, Frederick Goodall Cash, of Queen Victoria’s coronation and Wellington’s funeral, and my grandmother, Mabel Cash Barlow, describing a visit to the House of Commons in 1889.
Walking around Swindon today, it is extraordinary to think that only a couple of centuries ago this was a small, insignificant market town on the top of a hill, encircled by farms and fields. The arrival of two canals at the beginning of the 19th century brought the first stirrings of change, but it was the railway, and the construction of the famous Swindon Works in 1841, that transformed Swindon from a tiny agricultural town into an industrial centre of international importance.
The first-known European to explore South Africa was Portuguese Bartolomeu Dias towards the end of the 1400s; however, it was the Dutch East India Company that first established a settlement of free burghers – farmers – to provide a port and supplies for ships, at Good Hope. These early migrants were largely Dutch, German and French; their slaves were in the main imported from far-eastern Dutch colonies.
Sue Wilkes reveals the shadowy world of Britain’s spies, rebels and secret societies from the late 1780s until 1820. Drawing on contemporary literature and official records, Wilkes unmasks the real conspirators and tells the tragic stories of the unwitting victims sent to the gallows. In this ‘age of revolutions’, when the French fought for liberty, Britain’s upper classes feared revolution was imminent. Thomas Paine’s incendiary Rights of Man called men to overthrow governments which did not safeguard their rights. Were Jacobins and Radical reformers in England and Scotland secretly plotting rebellion? Ireland, too, was a seething cauldron of unrest, its impoverished people oppressed by their Protestant masters. Britain’s governing elite could not rely on the armed services - even Royal Navy crews mutinied over brutal conditions. To keep the nation safe, a ‘war chest’ of secret service money funded a network of spies to uncover potential rebels amongst the underprivileged masses. It had some famous successes. These and more are explored in this book.
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