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Although it’s commonly believed that the guillotine was a French invention, in reality a similar device – the Halifax Gibbet – had been in use in Yorkshire, England 200 years earlier.
The Manchester Mark 1, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester in 1948–1949, was the prototype for the world’s first commercially available modern computer, the Ferranti Mark 1.
Pierrre Adolphe Valette (1876–1942), was a French impressionist painter and teacher who taught at the Manchester School of Art from 1906 until 1920. L. S. Lowry was one of his most famous students.
Adele Meyer was an amalgam of wealthy socialite, suffragist, and social reformer, who did much for the poor working-class women of London. Her efforts even led to a change in the law concerning sweat shops, and the establishment of a minimum wage in 1909.
The topic of biological weapons is by no means new. In 1894 H. G. Wells wrote of an anarchist plot to poison London’s water supply with cholera bacteria in his short story “The Stolen Bacillus”.
William Blake’s The Ghost of a Flea is one of his more “bizarre” paintings, as well as one of his smallest, at just 21.4 cm by 16.2 cm. Painted in about 1819–1820, it has been described by the art critic Alan Riding as “quite his strangest and certainly most Gothic work”.
Herring girls or herring lassies were the women, some as young as 14, who travelled to work on the quaysides of the fishing ports on the east coast of the United Kingdom from Aberdeen to Great Yarmouth, following the herring fleet as it travelled south during the herring season.
Euphame MacCalzean was a wealthy Scottish heiress and member of the gentry convicted of witchcraft. A key figure in the North Berwick witchcraft trials of 1590–1591, she was burned alive on 25 June 1591.
The Crystal Ball is an oil painting in the Pre-Raphaelite style by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917). The iconography of the skull in the background so disturbed one owner that he had the skull on the table painted over.
Humpty Dumpty is one of the best-known English nursery rhymes. Almost certainly intended as a riddle – and one to which everyone today knows the answer is “egg” – it first appeared in print in Samuel Arnold’s Juvenile Amusements (1797).
John William Waterhouse painted three different versions of Ophelia, a character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, of which this is the final one, produced in 1910. The previous two versions show Ophelia in her adolescence, but here she is depicted as a mature woman.
“The Man Who Could Work Miracles” is a short story by H. G. Wells, first published in 1898, in which George McWhirter Fotheringay discovers that he has been granted the power to perform miracles. With the best of intentions, he inadvertently causes the annihilation of everything on the surface of the Earth by stopping the planet’s rotation.
There seems to have been rather few subjects the Belgian artist Antoine Wiertz was afraid to tackle. Here in Faim, Folie et Crime (1853) he deals with infanticide and canibalism as well as the famine and madness of the title.
This photograph of the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall is probably the most famous of a ghost ever taken. It was first published in the Boxing Day edition of Country Life magazine in 1936.
Salamanca, designed and built by Matthew Murray in 1812, was the world’s first commercially successful steam locomotive.
The Cambro is a three-wheeled, single-seat cyclecar produced by the Central Aircraft Company of Northolt, Middlesex from 1920 until 1921. It was one of the cheapest cars on the market, but it is unknown how many were made.
The Lady Lovibond is perhaps the best-known of the many ghost ships that reportedly haunt British waters. The common version of the legend tells that on 13 February 1748 the ship was deliberately run aground on the Goodwin Sands by its first mate, in a fit of “insane Jealousy”, drowning everyone on board.
Witches are widely believed to have flown through the air on broomsticks, although very few admitted to having done so. But the evident eroticism of the charge has resulted in some striking works of art.
The Nightmare is an oil painting by Henry Fuseli, depicting an ape-like incubus crouching on a sleeping woman. It was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782.
Janet Boyman was a Scottish woman executed for witchcraft and associating with fairies. Her court records may indicate a cult-like group of nature spirits, the seely wights, being active in Scotland at that time.
The Angels of Mons were reported to be the saviours of the British Expeditionary Force at the Battle Of Mons in 1914, perhaps a host of ghostly archers led by St George, who unleashed a deadly salvo of arrows at the opposing Germans. Or, perhaps more likely, the first urban myth.
The Sunbeam Tiger is a high-performance V8-engined version of the British Rootes Group’s Sunbeam Alpine roadster, designed in part by the American car designer and racing driver Carroll Shelby, and produced from 1964 until 1967.
Pit brow women, pit brow lasses, pit head women or tip girls were female surface labourers at British collieries. They worked at the coal screens on the pit brow at the shaft top until the 1960s, picking out stones and sorting the coal after it had been hauled to the surface.
John William Waterhouse’s painting The Danaides shows seven of the fifty daughters of King Danaus in Hades, punished for murdering their husbands by being condemned to fill a leaky pot with water. The shape of the jugs mirrors the severed heads of the men they have killed.
O ur view of witches tends to be somewhat ambivalent, as many were consulted to cure the sick, long before the Church decided that they must all be in league with the Devil. But is the classical sorceress in this 1886 painting by John William Waterhouse caught in the act of performing good magic or bad?