The Age of Uncertainty: Star Trek - The HR Perspective

The Age of Uncertainty: Star Trek - The HR Perspective: I watched an episode of Star Trek yesterday, for the first time in years. The episode was called 'The Immunity Syndrome'. I have fon...

The King's Arrow

Here's a picture from the prologue of The Minister of Chance, where the King of Tanto is practicing archery at his country retreat, which is actually Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire.
The production team are trying to raise quite a modest sum of money to make a full film of the audio drama that is already available online (which is brilliantly written, and full of great actors) and to do this they are selling some of the props on ebay.
And I got one of the King's arrows!
I think this will make a very fine addition to my re-enactment quiver!

Stephen Bodio's Querencia: Found Object

Stephen Bodio's Querencia: Found Object: From Paul McCormack:

More women warriors, in a most unlikely place! What a pity it seems to be a hoax!

A Free Man on Sunday

Here's another of the byways of history that is easily passed by - the mass trespass of Kinder Scout.
It seems strange now to think of the Ramblers' Association as a radical communist movement! Yet in the late 1920s and 1930s a walk in the countryside could be met by hostile farmers and gamekeepers with shotguns, and there was a militant left wing group of ramblers calling themselves Red Grouse. The working people from the industrial towns of the north wanted to get out on their days off to fresh air and countryside, and the landowners wanted to keep the walkers off their land, even where public footpaths existed.
The differences between the two culminated in the mass trespass on the moorland around Kinder Scout in the Peak District in 1932. Trespass was not a criminal offence (and still isn't), but half a dozen men were sent to prison for between two and six months after violent scuffles with the gamekeepers who were trying to keep the walkers off the mountain. The moors were kept for grouse shooting at the time, and were owned by the Duke of Devonshire. Undeterred by the threat of prison sentences, ten thousand ramblers gathered a few weeks later for a walk up Winnat's Pass, nearby.

The only way most people get to hear about this now is through Ewan McColl's song The Manchester Rambler, which has the refrain: "I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free man on Sunday" and includes a verse where a walker argues with a gamekeeper:
"well, he called me a louse, and said 'Think of the grouse'". Most of the ramblers who went on the mass trespass came from Manchester.
There's also an excellent children's book about the mass trespass by Fay Sampson called A Free Man on Sunday - she also wrote the Pangur Ban series for children, a Celtic fantasy involving a white cat, an Irish monk and an Irish princess - and a magical dolphin. She's also written Arthurian fantasy and (more unusually) Sumerian fantasy based around the goddess Inanna.
The mass trespass was the first event in the struggle to open up the countryside to the public, and paved the way for the first National Parks, which were created after the Second World War. The Right to Roam is now enshrined in law, in the 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act. On the 70th anniversary of the mass trespass, a commemorative walk was held, and the present Duke of Devonshire apologised for the actions of his grandfather in 1932. Benny Rothman, who was one of the leaders of the mass trespass and was sentenced to six months imprisonment for his part in it, lived to see the Right to Roam legislation - he died in 2002 at the age of 90.

All Cannings Long Barrow

Western Daily Press June 2014

I think this is a wonderful idea!  I'm almost tempted to reserve a niche for myself.

The Tolpuddle Martyrs

I first heard about the Tolpuddle Martyrs on Blue Peter. In the days of Valerie Singleton, John Noakes and Peter Purves, Blue Peter was a source of all sorts of interesting information which I still remember today.
It was 1834, just after the Captain Swing riots, and a group of men in Dorset decided to form a trade union to protest about their low wages - they were getting 6/- a week at that time. It was called the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers. Forming a trade union was legal - but they were arrested for swearing an illegal oath when they joined. The law that was used had actually been passed to deal with the naval mutiny of 1797, and had never been repealed. The jury at the trial was packed with landowners and magistrates who opposed the rights of working men to band together to negotiate a fair wage, and the six men were transported to Australia.
And then there was a public backlash against the severity of the sentence. Petitions were signed (with 800,000 signatures), there was a protest march - 30,000 people marching up Whitehall, and most of the men were freed and were able to return home.
There's now a Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum, and there's a festival in the village every year to commemorate the men, usually the third week in July - so just around now. People like Tony Benn and Billy Bragg have attended, because of the importance of the Martyrs to the history of the trades union movement. The website is www.tolpuddlemartyrs.org.uk

Captain Swing

Last night I was over at a local musical evening (it's an 'open mic night' without any microphones) and a local poet performed a poem about the last men to be executed in England at the scene of their crime. The poem started a discussion about the forgotten history of working people in this country, like the Captain Swing riots.
In 1830, three men burned the hay ricks of a farmer, in protest at low agricultural wages (7/6 a week, which was low even by the standards of the time, and caused great hardship among the working poor) and were hanged for it.
This was part of the Captain Swing protests - they were campaigning for higher wages, higher levels of parish relief (the benefit system of the time) and against the new threshing machines which were taking away their jobs. Agricultural wages were so low that families depended on the parish relief to survive. The situation was not dis-similar to today, where the bulk of the benefit bill is paid to people who are in employment but who cannot survive on the low wages they receive.
Captain Swing was probably not a real person, but the name was used by the protesters when they sent threatening letters to farmers who owned threshing machines or paid low wages, usually before the farmer's hay ricks or barns were burned down, or their threshing machine destroyed.
William Cobbett, who wrote about agricultural reform, among other things, observed the change in agricultural practice. Large farms originally employed farm servants, who lived at the farm and got bed and board, on year long contracts. This was changing to the hiring of casual day labourers, who came in to do the work but lived elsewhere, and were only paid for the days they worked rather than for the whole year.
Cobbett said that the farmers preferred this, as it was cheaper for them than having live-in farm servants. It was, of course, worse for the labourers, especially when there was a surplus of people looking for work.
The authorities cracked down on the protests brutally, sentencing 500 people across England to transportation to Van Diemen's Land, as Tasmania was then known. Around 19 people were executed.
However, agricultural wages did rise a little, for a while, to as much as 10/- a week
and threshing machines fell out of general use.

The next stage for the labourers was unionisation....