Quotulatiousness

November 13, 2024

Ah, the lovely Welsh countryside, where everything is … racist?

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Doyle digs into the claim that the Welsh government recently made that “racism relating to climate change, environment, and rural affairs” is oppressing visible minorities in the principality and preventing them from accessing the countryside:

The Welsh government believes that the countryside presents a problem for ethnic minorities. Its latest report on “racism relating to climate change, environment, and rural affairs” concludes that certain racial groups “face barriers created by exclusions and racism preventing them from fully participating in ‘environmental’ activities”. In response, the Welsh Conservative leader Andrew R. T. Davies has told a reporter from Guido Fawkes: “This kind of outdated virtue signalling nonsense is completely out of touch with the needs of the people of Wales. Labour is stuck on yesterday’s thinking, the kind that is being roundly rejected globally. Time to turf them out.”

The horticultural pun is forgivable given the sheer magnitude of the absurdity. While we might dismiss this as the usual brain-addled antics of the Welsh government, it’s just the latest example of a trend that has been ongoing for years. In September 2020, an article appeared in the Metro claiming that the countryside was “shaped by colonialism” and therefore is “unwelcoming to people of colour”.

Apparently, the illustration of three white people scowling at a black woman while standing in a meadow is proof of the article’s central thesis. I may as well sketch a shiny goblet and claim it as evidence that I’ve found the Holy Grail.

[…]

All of these examples are ostensibly frivolous and easy to dismiss as yet more “woke gone mad” news items, but there are other sinister aspects to consider. For instance, I was able to discover the reason why Kew Gardens went along with this ideological bilge by reading its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Delivery Plan. One of Kew’s EDI “strategy pillars” includes the seeking of accreditation by outside activist groups including Stonewall. Like many public bodies, ideas are implements in the workplace in return for points on schemes like Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index.

And this has serious ramifications. You might remember when the Times uncovered documents revealing that Stonewall has attempted to control what NHS trusts, government departments and local councils say on their social media accounts, demanding public support for its views on gender identity ideology, and then rewarding them with points towards its Top 100 Employers index. This means that if a government department uses the term “birthing parent” instead of “mother” they are able to advance in the scheme. It’s quite the racket.

Worse still, 10% of the Scottish government’s score on the index was relating to consultation with Stonewall on revising legislation. In other words, for a while there it was looking very much as though the SNP were using taxpayers’ money to fund a lobbying group that would in turn reward the government for changing the law according to their ideology.

The Welsh government is one of the worst offenders when it comes to pushing gender identity ideology onto children and working at the behest of identitarian activists. A Freedom of Information request in 2023 revealed that “Stonewall Cymru was directly funded by Welsh Government in the sum of £100,000 for the financial year requested”. (The full details can be accessed here.) I am not alleging that the latest drive to “problematise” the countryside is being directed by activist groups for financial gain, but it does suggest a certain susceptibility when it comes to this kind of ideological mania.

So when the Welsh government and other institutions insist that the countryside is racist, or that chrysanthemums are homophobic, or that badgers hate Sikhs, or whatever the current delusion might be, we shouldn’t just laugh it off. These are just the latest and silliest symptoms of a much deeper cultural malaise. This is an illiberal and regressive ideological movement masquerading as liberal and progressive, and it has ways of asserting its power.

Let’s face it, if they can convince you that the countryside is a domain of heteronormative white supremacy, they can convince you of anything.

November 8, 2024

QotD: David Lloyd George and the British Liberal Party

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Lloyd George is one of the most obviously fascinating figures in modern British political history, for three reasons. The first is his background. The Liberal Party, since its formal inception in 1859, had always responded to a touch of the purple. Lord Palmerston was a viscount; Lord John Russell was the son of a duke; William Gladstone was Eton and Christ Church; Lord Rosebery was Lord Rosebery; Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H.H. Asquith at least went to Trinity, Cambridge and Balliol, Oxford respectively.

Lloyd George was from nowhere. He grew up in Llanystumdwy, Caernarfonshire, where he lived in a compact cottage with his mother, uncle, and siblings, and was trained as a solicitor in Porthmadog. He rose to dominate British politics, and to direct the affairs of the most expansive empire the world had known, seeing off thousands of more privileged rivals, on the basis of truly exceptional native gifts, and without even speaking English as his first language.

How he got into the position to direct World War I is one of the most remarkable personal trajectories in British history. Contemporaries everywhere saw it as an astonishing story, even in the most advanced democracies. As the New York Times asked when Lloyd George visited America in 1923, “Was there ever a more romantic rise from the humblest beginning than this?”

The second reason why Lloyd George is fascinating is his extraordinary command of words. Collins is good on this. The book is full of speeches that turn tides and smash competitors. Lloyd George could exercise an equally mesmeric command over both the Commons and mass audiences, typically rather different skills. Harold Macmillan called him “the best parliamentary debater of his, or perhaps any, day”.

Biblical references and Welsh valleys suffused his speeches. As another American journalist put it, when Lloyd George was speaking, “none approaches him in witchery of word or wealth of imagery”, with his “almost flawless phraseology” communicated through a voice “like a silver bell that vibrates with emotion”. Leading an imperial democracy through a global war demanded rhetorical powers of the rarest kind. Asquith lacked them. That, amongst other reasons, is why Lloyd George was able to shunt him aside.

The last reason we should all be interested in Lloyd George — as readers will have anticipated — is that he was the last British politician to inter a governing party. His actions during the war split the Liberals into Pro-Asquith and pro-Lloyd George factions, and the government he led from 1916 until 1922 was propped up by the Conservatives. Though the Liberal split was partly healed in 1923, it was all over for the party as a governing force. By the time Lloyd George at last became leader of the Liberal Party (in the Commons) in 1924, he had only a rump of 40 MPs left to command.

By the 1920s, Lloyd George’s shifting ideologies could not easily accommodate the old party traditions or the new forces reshaping allegiances and identities in the aftermath of the war. In 1918 he described his political creed to George Riddell, the press magnate, as “Nationalist-Socialist”. The consequence was an unprecedented redrawing of the map of British party politics, producing the Labour/Conservative hegemony we have lived with ever since.

The rot had arguably begun to set in for the Liberals in the elections of 1910, when they lost their majority. Fourteen years later, in 1924, Lloyd George stepped up to the Commons leadership of an exhausted, defeated party, and neither he nor his successors could arrest the slide into irrelevance. […] The Liberals could not come back because they were left with no clothes of their own. What had once been distinctive lines on economics, religion, welfare, the constitution, foreign policy and even “progress” were either appropriated by their competitors or ceased to be politically relevant. The party’s history as the dominant political force of the last near-century was no proof against radical structural change.

Alex Middleton, “Snapshot of the PM who killed his party”, The Critic, 2024-08-01.

August 25, 2024

Woke libraries

Filed under: Australia, Books, Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Frank Furedi on the already well-advanced plan to turn public libraries into safe spaces for progressive indoctrination:

“Robarts Library” by mattclare is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

In recent times, the Library has become the target of what I characterise in my new book, as The War Against The Past. The current project of dispossessing Western society of its historical legacy has gained a powerful influence over the institutions of culture. That is why the Library – a repository of the knowledge and wisdom gained through the past – has become the target of cultural vandalism.

The promoters of the culture war in the Library often justify their action on the ground that their target is not so much the past – but the “racist past”. This is the argument used by the Government backed supporters of a campaign in Wales who wish to reorganise libraries along the lines of anti-racist principles. These racially obsessed cultural warriors insist that Libraries throughout Wales must embrace the goal of becoming anti-racists if the devolved Labour government’s pledge to “eradicate” systemic racism by 2030 would be realised. To ensure that libraries and the “racist” buildings holding their collection are cleansed of the sin of “whiteness”, a £130,000 project designed to indoctrinate local librarians in “critical whiteness studies” has been devised.

The project of racial indoctrination pursued in Wales warns that staff training sessions will be necessary to ensure that libraries align with anti-racist principles. However, it insists that such training sessions should not take place in buildings with a “racist past”. From the standpoint of the authors of the document proposing “critical whiteness studies”, many buildings housing libraries must be avoided because they serve as symbols of racism. Do they presume that the buildings in question can contaminate members of the public with the racist plague? Or are they merely interested in tearing down the walls of racist buildings in order to rebuild them as temples to the doctrine of decolonization?

In a world, where the racialisation of every dimension of life has acquired its own imperative, it was only a matter of time before buildings became demonised as racist. There is now a veritable literature authored by academic racial entrepreneurs who insist that buildings can be racist. One enthusiastic social scientist supporting this thesis offers numerous “examples of buildings being racist”. The racialisation of building and the material properties used in their construction has acquired the character of a veritable fetish. “Concrete, steel and glass buildings are ‘racist'” is the title of one contribution on this subject.

The Welsh Government appears to be consumed by the quest of ridding its nations of racist buildings. As far back as 2021 it published an audit of all such buildings as well as, schools, streets, statues and pubs that it regarded as the product of Wales’ racist past. In effect almost any building, street name or pub whose name was linked with a historical figure was by definition racist. Gone are the days when a pub is allowed to call itself Admiral Nelson or the Duke of Wellington.

The policy of renaming a building, street or a statue is bad enough. What is far worse is when a library is forced to subordinate its book collection to the imperative of racialization. In the name of ridding the book shelves of their “whiteness” and “racist past”, a library becomes a target of officially sanctioned cultural vandalism.

Throughout the Anglosphere. Cultural vandalism is justified on the ground of settling scores with colonialism, racism or white supremacy. For example, school libraries in Australia have removed “outdated and offensive books on colonialism” from their collection[v]. The purge of a school library in Melbourne was guided by Dr Al Fricker, a Dja Dja Wurrung man and expert in Indigenous education with Deakin University. In the course of auditing all 7000 titles on its library shelves. Fricker showed little nostalgia towards the collection. He stated that some of the books removed were almost 50-year-old and were “simply gathering dust anyway”. He stated that “we wouldn’t accept science books being that old in the library, so why do we accept other non-fiction books to be that old, because nothing is static”.

There is something truly disturbing about the idea that a library ought to rid itself of old non-fiction books. In my discipline of sociology that would mean ridding libraries of the 19th century pioneers of the field. In effect the call to reject old non-fiction books constitutes the annihilation of the intellectual legacy of the social sciences and the humanities.

July 25, 2024

QotD: Why devolution has not worked in the United Kingdom

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Reading this Samizdata quote of the day got me thinking about why devolution in the UK has been a general disappointment and source of endless annoyance.

I remember when arguments were originally made for devolution, commentators would claim that devolution would work in the same way that the federal structure of the US works, or, for that matter, how the cantonal system works in Switzerland. By which they meant that if a state such as Zug in Switzerland or Wisconsin in the US tried a specific policy (encouraging cryptos, or enacting Workfare, to take two actual examples), that the perceived success or failure of these policies would be studied by other cantons and states. Hence the idea that devolution allows a sort of “laboratory experiment” of policy to take place. It creates a virtuous kind of competition. That’s the theory.

What seems to have happened is that since devolution in the UK, Scotland, Wales and to some extent, Northern Ireland, have competed with England in who can be the most statist, authoritarian and in general, be the biggest set of fools. Whether it is 20 mph speed limits spreading to many places and harsh lockdowns (Wales) or minimum pricing on booze and “snitching” on your own family for views about gender (Scotland), the Celtic fringe appears to be more interested in being more oppressive, rather than less. I cannot think of a single issue in which the devolved governments of the UK have been more liberal, and more respectful, of liberty under the rule of law. (Feel free to suggest where I am mistaken.)

One possible problem is that because the UK’s overall government holds considerable budgetary power, the devolved bits of the UK don’t face the consequences of feckless policy to the extent necessary to improve behaviour.

Even so, I don’t entirely know why the Scots and Welsh have taken this turn and I resist the temptation to engage in armchair culture guessing about why they tend to be more collectivist at present. It was not always thus. Wales has been a bastion of a kind of liberalism, fused to a certain degree with non-conformity in religion, and Scotland had both the non-conformist thing, and the whole “enlightment” (Smith, Hume, Ferguson, etc) element. At some point, however, that appears to have stopped. Wales became a hotbed of socialism in the 20th century, in part due to the rise of organised labour in heavy industry, and then the whole folklore – much of it sentimental bullshit – about the great achievements in healthcare of Nye Bevan. Scotland had its version of this, plus the resentments about Mrs Thatcher and the decline of Scotland as a manufacturing power.

[…]

Maybe the “test lab” force of devolution will play a part in demonstrating that, as and when we get a Labour government for the whole of the UK, it will be a shitshow on a scale to put what has happened in the Celtic parts of the UK in the shade.

Johnathan Pearce, “Why has devolution not worked in a liberal direction?”, Samizdata, 2024-04-23.

October 15, 2023

History Summarized: The Castles of Wales

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 23 Jun 2023

Every castle tells a story, but when one small country has over 600 castles, the collective story they tell is something like “holy heck ouch, ow, oh god, why are there so many arrows, ouch, good lord ow” – And that’s Wales for you.
(more…)

July 29, 2023

The brief – but vastly profitable – heyday of Parys Mountain

Filed under: Britain, Business, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes discusses the engine behind the meteoric rise of Britain’s “Copper King”, Thomas Williams:

Parys Mine Shaft. View down a shaft at Parys Mine.
Photo by Stephen Elwyn Roddick – CC BY-SA 2.0

At the time More visited, Thomas Williams had only just begun his rapid rise to power. He was already a major industrialist and grown stupendously wealthy. When More asked about his stables, Williams apparently could not even estimate how many he possessed to the nearest ten. But Williams not yet even master of the mountain.

Nonetheless, the mining was well underway. The closest port, Amlwch, was already connected to the mountain by a new road that had been built for the Parys Mine Company’s sole use. Having not long ago been a village of just six houses, Amlwch had turned into a bustling port.

The mine itself was a source of fascination. “This differs from any mine I had ever seen or perhaps is anywhere else to be found, for the ore here instead of being met with in veins is collected into one great mass, so that it is dug in quarries and brought out in carts without any shafts being sunk”. Instead, the miners hollowed out the mountain itself, forming vast caverns that they supported by simply leaving vast columns of the ore untouched. He noted at least four or five of these caverns with ceilings forty feet high, with columns of yellow ore: “the whole seemed like the ruins of some magnificent building whose pillars had been of massy brass.”

It’s a fascinating insight into what Parys would have very briefly looked like, because today there is so little of the mountain left. Indeed, some of the caverns More got to see were already collapsing, with the rubble then needing to be sorted. He describes how one such piece of rubble — a two-ton chunk of ore — had to be bored, the cavity rammed with gunpowder and sealed with stones, and then exploded. “They are continually blowing up parts of the mine”, he noted, and was informed that the part of the mine he was visiting alone got through 10-12 tons of gunpowder per year. The mountain was disintegrating, punctuated by the occasional boom.

And as though that were not dramatic enough, the whole place smelled like hell. When More visited there were some seventy vast kilns upon the mountain for calcining the ore, burning off its sulphur. Each kiln held some 2,000 tons of ore, and when ignited with a little dried vegetation or coal it was so sulphurous that it took four months of furious burning for the ore to be sufficiently calcined. He noted that one had to keep to the windward side of the kilns, as “the fumes arising from them are very disagreeable and destroy all vegetables for a considerable distance around them.”

April 22, 2023

The Big Four

Filed under: Britain, Business, Government, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jago Hazzard
Published 1 Jan 2023

It’s 100 years since the Grouping – what happened, why and how?
(more…)

October 26, 2022

Sin Eaters & Funeral Biscuits

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 25 Oct 2022
(more…)

July 22, 2022

Inventing historical connections with slavery where they don’t exist

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, David Foster recounts the story from the National Museum of Wales which effectively fabricated a connection to the slave trade as part of their politically correct performative “decolonization” efforts:

A replica of Richard Trevithick’s 1802 steam locomotive at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea.
Photo by Chris55 via Wikimedia Commons.

In March, Britain’s Daily Telegraph and GB News channel both reported that the National Museum of Wales would be relabelling a replica of the first steam-powered locomotive, unveiled by its Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick in 1804. Trevithick had no links to slavery, but the amendment has apparently been included anyway as part of the museum’s commitment to “decolonizing” its collection. In a statement defending what it described as the addition of “historical context”, the museum said: “Although there might not be direct links between the Trevithick locomotive and the slave trade, we acknowledge the reality that links to slavery are woven into the warp and weft of Welsh society.” The statement continued:

    Trade and colonial exploitation were embedded in Wales’ economy and society and were fundamental to Wales’ development as an industrialised nation. As we continue to audit the collection, we will explore how the slave trade linked and fed into the development of the steam and railway infrastructure in Wales.

[…]

When a society compulsively disrespects its historical accomplishments — when it obsessively seeks to turn every good thing into a bad thing — the outlook for that society is bleak. It destroys social cohesion, and sends the wrong kind of message to actual and potential opponents. The matter of the steam locomotive display in Wales may seem minor, and certainly trivial when compared with the appalling events in Ukraine or the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. But it is not.

The behavior of the museum administrators in Wales is of a piece with other contemporary symptoms, such as the eagerness within influential circles in the US to embrace the conclusions of the New York Times‘s revisionist 1619 project. It is part of the politicization of everything. Science, technology, and art cannot — indeed, must not — be appreciated simply on the grounds of beauty, utility, or truth; everything must be reduced to race, gender, and other academically and media-approved categories of analysis.

Trends such as these have real-world implications, including the growth and decline of nations and their relative power. Writing in 1940, C.S. Lewis, warned about the dangers of what he called the National Repentance Movement, which focused on the need to apologize for Britain’s sins (thought to include the Treaty of Versailles) and to forgive Britain’s enemies.

Certainly, the British State had done many bad things during its long and eventful history — as well as many good things. But the excessive focus on its sins was part of a phenomenon manifested in a 1933 motion debated at the Oxford Union: “This House will under no circumstances fight for King and country”. To the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, attitudes like these indicated that aggression would not meet much resistance. They also informed a policy of appeasement.

Liberals and progressives (as they call themselves) claim to be greatly concerned with physical sustainability of resources and ecosystems. But they are too eager to undercut the social sustainability of their own societies and the physical infrastructures on which those societies depend, however fond they may be of repeating the word “infrastructure”.

October 31, 2021

Soul Cakes & Trick-or-Treating

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 30 Oct 2020

Help Support the Channel with Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tastinghistory
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LINKS TO INGREDIENTS & EQUIPMENT**
Canon EOS M50 Camera: https://amzn.to/3amjvwu
Canon EF 50mm Lens: https://amzn.to/3iCrkB8
Currants: https://amzn.to/2T3qItA
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Clove: https://amzn.to/3dyNWRP
Mace: https://amzn.to/31j625h
Saffron: https://amzn.to/3560pbP
KitchenAid Stand Mixer: https://amzn.to/37hsboA

LINKS TO SOURCES**
The Customs and Traditions of Wales by Trefor Owen: https://amzn.to/37gi6bt
The Book of Hallowe’en by Ruth Eda Kelley: https://amzn.to/3dDb41i
Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween by Lisa Morton: https://amzn.to/348t0xQ

**Amazon offers a small commission on products sold through their affiliate links, so each purchase made from this link, whether this product or another, will help to support this channel with no additional cost to you.

Editor: WarwicSN – https://www.youtube.com/WarwicSN

SOUL CAKES
ORIGINAL 16TH CENTURY RECIPE (From Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book)
To make Cakes
Take flower & sugar & nutmeg & cloves & mace & sweet butter & sack & a little ale barm, beat your spice & put in your butter & your sack, cold, then work it well all together & make it in little cakes & so bake them, if you will you may put in some saffron into them or fruit.

MODERN RECIPE
INGREDIENTS
– ½ Cup Lukewarm Ale (Below 100°F/38°C)
– 1 Teaspoon Yeast
– 3 Cups (360g) Flour
– ½ Cup (100g) Sugar
– 4 Tablespoons Butter Softened
– ½ Teaspoon Salt (if you’re using unsalted butter)
– ¼ Teaspoon Nutmeg
– ¼ Teaspoon Clove
– ¼ Teaspoon Mace
– ⅓ Cup Sack or Sherry
– 1/4 Teaspoon Saffron Threads (optional)
– 3/4 Cup Dried Fruit, plus more for decoration. (Optional)
– 1 Egg for Egg Wash (Optional)

METHOD
1. Create an “ale barm” by mixing the yeast with the lukewarm ale and letting sit for 10 minutes. If you are using saffron, mix that into the sherry and let steep.
2. In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, salt, nutmeg, clove, and mace together. Add the yeasted ale and work it in. Then work in the softened butter and the sack with saffron along with any fruit you are using. Mix until everything the dough comes together, then knead for 5 – 12 minutes. The longer you knead, the more bread-like the cakes will be, but the more they will rise.
3. Allow dough to rise for 1 hour (it will likely not double in size), then punch the dough down and form into small cakes. Cover and allow the cakes to rise for another 20 minutes while you preheat the oven to 400°F/200°C.
4. When the cakes have puffed up, add the optional egg wash and/or additional fruit, or form a cross on the top of each cake using the back of a knife (do not cut the cross in). Then back fro 20 minutes. When baked, allow to cool before serving.

#tastinghistory #halloween #soulcakes

June 14, 2021

The Welsh Flag: History and Meaning of The Red Dragon Flag

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History With Hilbert
Published 16 May 2018

You may think it’s a bit odd that I’m making a video in the Union Flag Series about the Welsh flag, given that it’s the only part of the United Kingdom not represented on the country’s flag. However Wales is great, and its flag has some interesting history and symbolism so you’re just going to have to deal with it. In this one I’ll be look at the Welsh Dragon Flag, at the figures of Cadwalladr ap Cadwallon (and his dad), Owain Glyndŵr, Henry VII and many more.

Music Used:
“Sneaky Snitch” – Kevin MacLeod
“Teller of the Tales” – Kevin MacLeod
“Up and Away” – Holfix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YmM_…​
“Celtic Impulse” – Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

All images are from the Public Domain of Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay with the following exception:

Owain Glyndŵr’s Flag – Hogyncymru:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…

May 31, 2021

The History of HSTs in the West

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 29 May 2021

Hello again! 😀

With the recent withdrawal of the last HST operations into London, I wanted to make a series of videos chronicling the history of these mighty trains in terms of their years of each region they were assigned to, the Great Western, East Coast, Midland, West Coast and Cross Country Routes.

With that in mind, we start with the first of the BR Regions to employ the venerable HST, but also the first to withdraw them from long distance services, the Great Western, a line that, since its inception under the auspices of Brunel, has played host to many different types of trains, but none have had greater impact that the superb HSTs.

All video content and images in this production have been provided with permission wherever possible. While I endeavour to ensure that all accreditations properly name the original creator, some of my sources do not list them as they are usually provided by other, unrelated YouTubers. Therefore, if I have mistakenly put the accreditation of “Unknown”, and you are aware of the original creator, please send me a personal message at my Gmail (this is more effective than comments as I am often unable to read all of them): rorymacveigh@gmail.com

The views and opinions expressed in this video are my personal appraisal and are not the views and opinions of any of these individuals or bodies who have kindly supplied me with footage and images.

If you enjoyed this video, why not leave a like, and consider subscribing for more great content coming soon.

Thanks again, everyone, and enjoy! 😀

References:
– 125Group (and their respective sources)
– Wikipedia (and its respective references)

February 23, 2021

The Corgi Toys Story

Filed under: Britain, Business, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Little Car
Published 4 Feb 2020

Corgi Toys is the name of a range of die-cast toy vehicles produced by Mettoy Playcraft Ltd. in the United Kingdom.

The script for this video comes from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corgi_Toys

If you find issues with the content, I encourage you to update the Wikipedia article, so everyone can benefit from your knowledge.

To get early ad-free access to new videos, or your name at the end of my videos, please consider supporting me from just $1 or 80p a month at https://www.patreon.com/bigcar

Link to my other channel – Big Car: https://www.youtube.com/bigcar2

February 8, 2021

Why Everybody Disagrees on the Efficacy of the English Longbow – A Video Essay

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

SandRhoman History
Published 7 Feb 2021

Everybody quarrels over the efficacy of the English longbow. Many historians, reenactors and history enthusiasts alike hold the view that arrows piercing armor is a myth. Some base this view on testing as was done for example by Tod from Tod’s workshop. Together with his team, he provided an invaluable data point for this debate. Others, such as traditionalist historians are often open to the possibility of arrows piercing armor, even though they are aware of actual testing of the longbow. In general, the efficacy of a weapon is much more complicated than its mere armor penetration value. So, in this video we’d like to shed light on the whole debate and explain why it is so hard to find common ground on this issue. This is why everybody disagrees on the efficacy of the English longbow.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sandrhomanhis…​

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sandrhoman​

Tod’s Video: ARROWS vs ARMOUR – Medieval Myth Busting https://youtu.be/DBxdTkddHaE​

Tod’s playlist: MEDIEVAL MYTH BUSTING https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI…​

Bibliography:
Rogers, C.J., The Efficacy of the English Longbow, 1998.
Devries, K., Medieval Military Technology, 1994.
Bane, M., “English Longbow Testing against various armor circa 1400”, 2006.
Soar, H., Gibbs, J., Jury, C., Stretton, M., Secrets of the English War Bow. Westholme, 2010, pp. 127–151.
Magier, Mariusz; Nowak, Adrian; et al., “Numerical Analysis of English Bows used in Battle of Crécy”. Problemy Techniki Uzbrojenia. 142 (2), 2017, 69–85.

November 7, 2020

History Summarized: Wales

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 6 Nove 2020

Wale, Wale, Wale(s), what have we here? I’ll tell you! A look at the oft-forgotten history of Britain’s secret third country Wales, where the population is about 50% bards just by sheer cultural osmosis.

SOURCES & Further Reading: A Concise History of Wales by Jenkins, A History of Wales by Davies

This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

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