Sophie Blanchard, Ballooning Pioneer

I went to see the film The Aeronauts last night, in which scientist James Glaisher is taken up in a balloon by Amelia Wren, the widow of a professional balloonist, in 1862. It's based on true incidents - though the ascent in the film was actually made with a male colleague - they broke the record for height, at around 35,000 feet (about 37,000 in the film) and made scientific observations that contributed to the study of meteorology and weather forecasting.
I really enjoyed the film, and did a bit of research when I came home to find that the fictional Amelia Wren was based on some real life women balloonists.

One of the most important of these was the French woman Sophie Blanchard, the first professional woman balloonist. She was married to a balloonist, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, and after he died she continued to make ascents. She also, like Amelia in the film, had a parachuting dog!
She became a favourite of Napoleon, who made her Aeronaut of the Official Festivals, in which role she made ascents to celebrate the birth and baptism of Napoleon's son, as well as at other official occasions. She also crossed the Alps by balloon.
Sadly, her career ended in tragedy, in 1819. She was making a night time ascent from the Tivoli Gardens in Paris, and setting off fireworks, something she had done before. This time, though, one of the fireworks set the hydrogen in her balloon alight and the balloon crashed onto the roof of a nearby house. Sophie was tangled in the netting, and fell from the roof to the street below. She was the first woman to be killed in an aviation accident. Money collected at the time of her death was used to construct a memorial above her grave at Pere Lachaise cemetery, depicting a balloon in flames.

More about Boscastle

I've got to go back - I only saw a fraction of what Boscastle has to offer.
When I got back to work, I found a guidebook to the area. It's by Jim Castling, and it's very comprehensive.
The map at the beginning of the book shows me that the pretty little river that flows through the village (the one that occasionally floods catastrophically) is the River Valency, and it's joined around the Wellington Hotel by the River Jordan.

The Wellington Hotel ran a daily coach and four service to Camelford Station until the beginning of the First World War, and famous visitors include Edward VII, Sir Henry Irving the actor, and Guy Gibson of the Dambusters.
Thomas Hardy stayed there when he was working as an architect (before he became a famous novelist) when he was working on refurbishing nearby St Juliot's church. and beside it was the Old Mill, which still has a (now only decorative) mill wheel.

I'd been looking around to see where the castle that gives its name to Boscastle was - and it's actually further up the Jordan valley, with a whole other part of the village that we never saw.
Even further up, on Forrabury Common, you can still see the medieval field system with the strips that were shared among the community. Each strip is about an acre in size, and the area covers 80 acres.
Forrabury Church is dedicated to the wonderfully named St Symphorian. Originally Norman, it was rebuilt in 1867, so there probably isn't much left to interest church-crawlers like myself.
There's also the Minster Church nearby, once the site of a medieval monastery.

The Cobweb pub, where we had lunch, was a warehouse up until 1947, for corn, coal, building materials and household items. The building itself dates back to the 17th century.
Boscastle Pottery, next door, used to be a bakery.
The Old Manor House pub we passed on the way to the Witchcraft Museum really was the old manor house, and amazingly there were once 18 pubs in the village!
The little National Trust bookshop, which we didn't have time to go in, further along, used to be a blacksmith's forge. The National Trust bought the entire harbour, right up to Forrabury Common, in 1955.

There's an old lime kiln by the Harbour restaurant. This was once the village hall, and the local cinema. The lime kiln wasn't the only industry in the village - another building, now called Seagulls, was a manganese mill, and then there were the "fish palaces" where fish were processed. There was even ship building along that stretch of river, and a service that carried passengers from Boscastle to Quebec and New York up until the 1850s!
In its heyday as a port, Boscastle handled up to 300 ships in a year, carrying anything from coal to wines and spirits into the port, and taking out cargos of slate and limestone from nearby quarries. This went on until the railway reached Camelford in 1893. The last cargo ship to come to Boscastle was the Francis Beddoe in 1916.

Some More Sights of London

We passed a few interesting things while on the way to other places over the week. One of them was this church spire:

It's St George's in Bloomsbury, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the sixth and last church that he designed and built in London. The spire appears in the background of Hogarth's famous picture Gin Lane. The lion and the unicorn were added in 2006, as the originals had been lost.
Looking at their website, I see that the memorial service for Emily Davison was held here in 1913. She was the suffragette who threw herself under the King's horse during the Derby. The horse, Anmer, completed the race without his jockey, who was also injured in the fall. Emily Davison died in hospital two days later without regaining consciousness.
The basement of the church houses the Museum of Comedy, and the church itself holds services in Korean.

And then there was this mews, down the hill from the Horniman Museum:

It's called Havelock Walk. The houses were decorated like this all the way along the row, and there's also an artist's studio.

Remember, Remember....

The real meaning of Guy Fawkes Night - when a group of conspirators tried to blow up Parliament with everybody inside it.
Okay, they did not have a credible plan - they wanted to restore a Catholic monarchy, with very little political support, by kidnapping King James' nine-year old daughter Princess Elizabeth and bringing her up as a Catholic.
However, it's still important that we should remember it, and not let it get completely swamped by Hallowe'en. Maybe the new TV series with Kit Harington will help. It seems that he's a direct descendent of Robert Catesby, the leader of the conspirators.

Remember, remember....

Here's the gatehouse of Ashby St Ledgers manor house, near Rugby, where the Gunpowder Plot was planned. In fact, that's probably the very room where the plotters gathered. Guido Fawkes came from the Rugby area, too, and it was a convenient location to get to the young princess Elizabeth, nine-year-old daughter of James I and VI, who the plotters intended to make Queen - with themselves as her advisors, of course, and after they had converted her to Catholicism. She was being brought up as a Protestant, and had no idea what was planned for her.
I used to visit Ashby quite often. It's a beautiful village, with estate cottages designed by Lutyens, and at the time the local pub, the Olde Coach House, was well known for real ales. The church, with the unusual dedication of St Leodegarius, is also interesting, with several medieval wall paintings.
It is also possible to trace the route that the plotters intended to use to get to Princess Elizabeth, who was staying at Coombe Abbey. I've walked out about a mile or so from Ashby, and the landscape is reasonably unchanged, though a railway line now cuts across the original path that the plotters would have taken. Some of the plotters were at nearby Dunchurch, pretending to be a hunting party.

Of course, it all went horribly wrong....

History Books which have shaped me

One of my favourite discussion forums, Ship of Fools, has been discussing which history books shaped our view of the past. Here are some of mine:

I can't remember a time when I didn't read history, either fiction or non-fiction. Even one of my earliest school readers described making rush lights, and (weirdly) the window tax! I think it may have been the history of a house....
I moved on to the usual suspects - Rosemary Sutcliff, Geoffrey Trease, Henry Treece, Mary Renault, so that covered Romans, Ancient Greeks, Vikings, and odd bits of later stuff. (The nearer to the present day I come, the less interested I seem to get).
I had a brief flirtation with Georgette Heyer when I was a teenager - not the Regency novels so much as the eighteenth century stories. Of course, this was about the same time as Poldark was on TV, and I fancied Robin Ellis like mad (but TV is a subject for another post!).
At university, I studied archaeology and medieval history, so that's my comfort zone, and since I moved to Wales I've got fascinated by Welsh history. The best fiction about medieval Wales is by Sharon Penman (the Here Be Dragons trilogy) and Edith Pargeter's Brothers of Gwynnedd series, along with The Heaven Tree trilogy. And Brother Cadfael.
Another special interest is women in history, and the book that set me off on that track is the marvellous Women in Anglo-Saxon England by Christine Fell.
So here are a few books from my shelves that I turn to again and again:
The Visual Culture of Wales: Medieval Vision by Peter Lord
The Norman Achievement by Richard F Cassady (Normans in Sicily as well as England and France)
The Medieval Machine - The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages by Jean Gimpel, which shows how the middle ages wasn't all primitive and covered in mud
and The Making of the English Landscape by WG Hoskins. I've got the original at the moment, but I used to have an annotated version where another writer re-visited all the places Hoskins mentioned and described what they looked like now.

Oh, and I'll listen to Michael Wood talking about anything - even periods and places that I had no previous interest in, because he makes it so fascinating!