On This Day:
In 1772, English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devon. He wrote many poems including ‘Rime Of The Ancient Mariner’ He suffered from anxiety all his life & it’s been suggested he had bipolar. He was treated with laudanum, causing a lifelong addiction.
In 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson gave his famous signal ‘England expects every man to do his duty’ from HMS ‘Victory’ just before battle commenced. This naval engagement gave the U.K. control of the seas, removing the possibility of a French invasion.
In 1854, Florence Nightingale & 38 nurses she’d trained, went to the Crimea, where the British camp was based. Her 1st winter at Scutari saw 10x more soldiers die of typhus, cholera & dysentery than battle wounds, but 6 months after her arrival, deaths fell sharply.
In 1868, Sir Ernest Dunlop Swindon, inventor of the military tank, was born. He was made war correspondent on the Western Front by Lord Kitchener, & had the idea to build a tank in October 1914. Swindon married Grace Clayton (1897) His daughter died in a road accident during WW2
In 1958, the first women peers were admitted to the House of Lords, forty years after women were granted the right to stand as MPs in the House of Commons. The first woman to address the HOLs was Elizabeth Robinson, when she gave evidence about slave trafficking
HOL in 1870:
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