Altan Urag - Davalgaa, Ijii Mongol (Official video)

Altan Urag - Davalgaa, Ijii Mongol (Official video)

Still working on my Mongolian Book Bandit story - this is inspiring!

Women Warriors - Nancy Wake, the White Mouse

Here's Nancy Wake, one of the most decorated service women of the Second World War - and one who had a five million franc price on her head at one point!
She was born in New Zealand, and grew up in Australia, and in 1937 she married a Frenchman, so at the outbreak of war she was living in Marseilles. She became a courier for the Resistance, and it was the Gestapo who nicknamed her White Mouse.
When she reached England in 1943, after escaping France over the Pyrenees, she joined the SOE, who parachuted her back into France in 1944. Once there, she co-ordinated groups of maquis - over 7,000 of them - and led raids herself. Once she killed a German sentry with a judo chop to the throat so that he wouldn't raise the alarm.
I saw a film about her a few years ago, (this would have been the 1987 film called Nancy Wake) in which she rode a bicycle for something like 300 miles, through several German checkpoints, to another group of resistance fighters, to use their radio, and then had to carry the answer back to her own group.
It was only when the war had ended that she learned that her husband had been tortured to death by the Gestapo for refusing to tell them where she was.

After the war, she was awarded the George Cross, the American Medal of Freedom, and the French Medal of Resistance and Croix de Guerre, among other honours.

She returned to Australia, where she married again, and she lived to be 98 years old, dying in 2011.

Maureen O'Hara

I just heard that Maureen O'Hara has died, at the age of 95.
Here she is in one of my favourite pirate films, The Black Swan, with Tyrone Power.

Black Victorians - Arthur Wharton, footballer

What a magnificent moustache! Here's Arthur Wharton, the first black professional footballer in England. He played for Darlington, was spotted by Preston North End, left them to concentrate on running, and returned to football with Rotherham. Then he moved to Sheffield United as a goalkeeper, followed by Ashton North End, Stalybridge Rovers, and Stockport.
He died in poverty in 1930, having become a collier after he retired from football.
He was born in Jamestown, on the Gold Coast, the son of a Grenadian, Henry Wharton, and Annie Florence Egyriba, a member of the Ghanaian royal family. He came to England at the age of nineteen to study to become a Methodist missionary, but turned to athletics instead. A year after he married Emma Lister, in 1890, he was the landlord of the Albert Tavern in Rotherham, but went back into football in 1894.

Women Warriors - Catharina Margaretha Linck

Poor Catharina - remembered more for the manner of her death than her years of military service in various armies.
Her mistake, after years of living as a man, was to marry a young woman, also called Catharina Margaretha, but whose maiden name was Muhlhahn. For this offence, she was sentenced to death by beheading in 1721, by the Prussian King, Frederick William. The court document of the case is the only documentary evidence of her life, but it includes information about her former life. From 1705 to 1708 (when she deserted) she served in the armed forces of Hanover, escaping hanging for desertion by revealing her sex. Later she joined the Prussian army, being dismissed when her superiors got a letter from the doctor who had examined her - and proved her to be female - for the Hanover army. She went on to join a Polish garrison and then the army of Hesse, deserting both times, and with spells of working in the cloth trade in between.
The court involved King Frederick because they were having difficulty in determining a suitable punishment for Linck, partly because there was nothing to cover the situation of two women having sex in the Bible.
Catherina Muhlhahn was sentenced to imprisonment, as she had originally believed that her husband was male.
In Catharina Linck's testimony, while preparing herself for death, she says: "Even were I to be done away with, those like me would remain."

Trowelblazers - Gertrude Caton Thompson and Great Zimbabwe

This is a really cool lady! In 1929, she organised a dig at Great Zimbabwe, with an all woman team, and declared that the site was built by an African civilisation. Which did not go down at all well in South Africa! Her views on the matter are now generally accepted, however. Zimbabwe is thought to mean "great houses of stone" in the Shona language, and the name has been attached to all ruins of this type across the region. There are around 200 of them, though Great Zimbabwe is the biggest and most impressive.
Here's a picture of some of the ruins, which gives an idea of the scale of the place, from the blog Zimtree:

Her work also helped to confirm the medieval dating of the site, which later excavation has shown to have been continuously inhabited from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, with the bulk of the finds coming from the fifteenth century.

Gertrude Caton Thompson got her experience as an archaeologist in Egypt, where she worked with Margaret Murray, Flinders Petrie and Dorothea Bate, and later with the British School of Archaeology, where her digs were characterised by her precision - it's routine now to plot the precise position and depth of artefacts, but it was a new idea in the 1920s.
She was a research fellow at Newnham College Cambridge, and the first female president of the Prehistoric Society as well as a founding member of the British School of History and Archaeology in East Africa.