Proudofus.uk
@ProudofusUK • 101,659 subscribers
The history they left out. Ordinary people who changed the world. Sources & support 👉 https://t.co/wN9S2gRmFj 👈 Be part of us. Be proud of us. 🇬🇧
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🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧 Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed. Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧 So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖 Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17. They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too. Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing. In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave. In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables. In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves. In 1807, Britain banned the trade. Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time. The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom. From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓ In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans. In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿 Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today. That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧 So why haven't you heard any of this? Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure. The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account. We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away. This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it. If you can afford to support what we do: Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk1,082,207 Aufrufe • vor 9 Tagen
His lighthouse stood for 123 years. And in the end it was not the tower that failed. It was the rock underneath it. 🇬🇧 Two lighthouses stood on the Eddystone Rocks before him, 14 miles south of Plymouth, and the sea destroyed them both. The first, built of wood, vanished without trace in the Great Storm of 1703, taking its builder and 5 other men with it. The second stood for 47 years, then burned one December night in 1755, down to the rock it stood on. 🔥 So Britain faced a question: how do you build on a rock the sea owns? The Royal Society's answer was not a lighthouse man. It was John Smeaton, an Englishman from Austhorpe near Leeds, a maker of scientific instruments who had turned his mind to engineering. He started with a question nobody had thought to ask. Why does an oak tree survive a storm? Wide at the root, narrow at the top. So he shaped his tower like the trunk of an oak. Wood had washed away and wood had burned, so he built in granite, every block dovetailed into its neighbours like a carpenter's joint in stone, pinned with dowels of marble. For the mortar he ran experiment after experiment until he proved which limestone sets hard even underwater, a lime the Romans had used whose science had been lost. He worked out why and brought it back. 3 years, 1756 to 1759, 14 miles out in the open sea. Then the lamp was lit, and the sea came to test it, winter after winter. It did not move. He went on to build bridges, harbours, canals and mills across Britain, and because the only engineers Britain named were soldiers, he called himself a civil engineer, the first man in Britain to do it. In 1771 he and 6 others met in a London tavern and founded the first engineering society anywhere in the world. It still exists. 🏛️ His light burned for 123 years. When engineers finally found a fault in 1877, it was in the reef, not the tower. The sea was wearing away the rock beneath it. His tower had outlasted the rock it stood on. In 1882 the lamp went out for the last time. But nobody scrapped his tower. The top came down stone by stone and went back up on Plymouth Hoe, where it stands today in its red and white bands. You can climb it. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Look at any lighthouse standing on a British rock. That curve is his oak, still holding. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it. 👉 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk27,491 Aufrufe • vor 14 Stunden
You have a birthday. So does England. 🏴 And it’s today. The 12th of July. Almost 1,100 years ago, on this exact day, England became a country. Almost no one knows it. The island was old long before it had a name. Farmers. Romans. Saxons. Then out of the sea came the Danes. ⚔️ They came to raid. They stayed to farm. And one hard question hung over the whole land. Two peoples, Saxon and Dane, one small island. Whose country was it now? Alfred of Wessex held the last corner and turned the tide. But he wanted more than a truce. One country. For both peoples. One England. He died before he could build it. 🔥 So his family finished it. His son took back town after town. His daughter Æthelflæd led the armies herself. A woman commanding armies more than 1,000 years ago. But it was Alfred’s grandson who ended the work. Æthelstan. In 927 he rode north and took York, the last Viking crown in England. One man now held every English kingdom. Then he did something stranger. He called the other kings of Britain to a bridge in the north. A quiet place called Eamont. 📜 Scots. Welsh. The kings of the north. There, by the river, they bent the knee. And that morning he took a new title. Not king of Wessex. Not king of the Saxons. King of the English. All of them. That bridge, on this day in 927, is the closest thing we have to the morning a country began. ⚖️ He made it real. One law, coast to coast. One coin, struck the same everywhere. On it he wears a crown, not a war helmet. Then in 937 they came to destroy it. Vikings, Scots, the men of the north. The largest army the island had ever seen. They met him at Brunanburh. Dawn to dark. Five kings fell. And when the sun went down, Æthelstan was still standing. 🏛️ England had been tested. And England had held. He left no son. He died in 939 and chose a quiet abbey at Malmesbury. Alone, in the country he had made. But it never came apart. Every king and queen of England since has sat on the throne he built. More than 1,000 years. Unbroken. You were taught 1066. The Tudors. The wars. But not this. Not the king who made the country. Not the bridge. Not the 12th of July. Æthelstan. The first king of England. And the one we forgot. Next year it turns 1,100. England has a birthday. And now you know when it is. 🇬🇧 You did not choose to be born here. But you inherited a country with a beginning. A name won on a bridge, 1,100 years ago. That is yours. No one can take it from you. Help us remember the king who made us. Help us remember who we are. 👇🙏 👉 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk96,622 Aufrufe • vor 2 Tagen
🏴🇬🇧On a winter night in 1844, the whole street laughed at a shop with 5 things for sale. Today 1 in 8 people on Earth belongs to what it started. Rochdale, Lancashire, deep in the Hungry Forties. The cotton mills ran day and night and the weavers still went hungry. That year they had struck for better pay and lost. Most of them had no vote. Even the food they could afford cheated them. Chalk in the flour. Sand in the sugar. A thumb on the scales. 🔥 They could not raise their pay. They could not cast a ballot. But no law stopped them keeping a shop. So 28 of them, weavers and tradesmen, put their names to a list and called themselves the Equitable Pioneers. The stake was £1 a member, weeks of wages, saved in pennies through the hungry months until they had about £28 between them. Enough for the ground floor of a worn old warehouse. 31 Toad Lane. Before they opened, a warper named Charles Howarth wrote them rules. ✍️ One member, one vote. A woman's membership equal to a man's. Full weight and honest measure. Only the purest food they could buy. And the one rule nobody had made work before: the dividend. Profits back to the shoppers, in proportion to what they spent. The customer became the owner. They opened at 8pm on 21 December 1844, 4 days before Christmas, lit by their own candles because the gas company had refused them. The lads jeered through the window. The Pioneers weighed out their butter anyway. Full weight. It held. A year on: 74 members, £710 through the till. In 1846 a weaver named Eliza Brierley paid in her own £1, and her vote counted the same as any man's. Parliament took another 82 years to match it. Town after town copied the rulebook, then country after country. Today around 3 million co-operatives run on rules that began in that shop. Around 1 billion members. 1 person in every 8 alive. 🏛️ And the little shop still stands. 31 Toad Lane is a museum now. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 1 billion members, and hardly a soul who can name 1 of the 28. They asked for honest weight. We owe them honest memory. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it. 👉 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk93,714 Aufrufe • vor 2 Tagen
He was DEFEATED ELEVEN TIMES. Attacked. Threatened with DEATH. Nearly blind. Addicted to opium just to function. They told him to stop. He spent forty-six years refusing. His name was William Wilberforce. Born in Hull, 1759. He could have lived a comfortable life. Wealthy family. Safe seat in Parliament. Instead he chose to destroy the most powerful economic system in the British Empire. The slave trade. He didn't fight alone. Thomas Clarkson rode 35,000 miles gathering evidence. Olaudah Equiano, man who had been enslaved himself, gave testimony that no politician could ignore. Wilberforce took their evidence to Parliament. They voted no. He came back. They voted no. He came back. Lost by eight votes. MPs deliberately stayed away so they wouldn't have to choose a side. He came back. Again. And again. And again. By now his eyesight was nearly gone. His body was breaking. He'd been on opium since he was 29. Twenty years after he started, they voted again. 283 to 16. The slave trade was abolished. But he wasn't finished. Slavery itself was still legal. He fought for another twenty-six years. In July 1833, lying in bed, barely able to move, he received word. Parliament had voted. Slavery was abolished across the entire British Empire. Three days later, William Wilberforce died. He held on just long enough. They buried him in Westminster Abbey. Help keep our stories alive. Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk9,835,062 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
⚓🇬🇧🇳🇱 For 300 years, corsairs came to enslave Europeans. Not from a colony. From Europe's own coasts.🏴☠️ Spain, Italy, France, even Ireland and Iceland felt their reach. One historian's estimate puts the number enslaved above a million across the centuries. That figure is disputed. In both directions. What is not disputed: every government paid ransom, and paid again, and the raids never stopped. 🕊️ In 1816 Britain tried one more time, through words alone. The Dey of Algiers agreed to stop. For a while, it held. ⚡ Then in May 1816, around 200 fishermen under British protection were massacred at Bona. Britain had run out of patience. Admiral Lord Exmouth was given a fleet. And Britain did not sail alone: a Dutch squadron joined him, under Vice-Admiral van Capellen. British and Dutch, sailing as one force. 💥 August 1816. The combined fleet stood off the walls of Algiers. Exmouth sent his terms in. The Dey refused. At half past two, the guns opened fire. For nine hours, British and Dutch guns hammered the harbour defences. The corsair fleet in harbour was destroyed at anchor. Allied casualties, British and Dutch together, passed 900 killed and wounded. It was a hard fight, not an easy one. By morning the defences lay silent. Exmouth demanded surrender. The Dey accepted. 🔓 1,083 slaves were freed at Algiers itself. Men and women of many nations and many faiths. The Dey repaid around 80,000 pounds sterling in ransom money. Counting earlier releases that year, around 3,000 people walked free across all of 1816. Not walking free in a single day. Freed across the whole of that year. The treaty broke the back of a 300-year system. It did not end the raids overnight. Raiding returned in the years after, on a smaller scale. It was the French conquest of Algiers, from 1830, that finally ended it for good. Britain and the Netherlands had broken a system three centuries old. Not for empire. For people who had no one else to answer for them. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ British and Dutch sailors stood against a system nobody else had stopped. Knowing their story, you stand a little taller. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you with us. 👇🙏 👉 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk129,895 Aufrufe • vor 5 Tagen
🏴🇬🇧 Lancashire was starving. The cotton was an ocean away, in the hands of enslaved people. They still said no. The mill has gone quiet. No cotton is coming. An ocean away, it is still growing. Lancashire is starving for it. They could have ended it tomorrow. They said no. Britain's cotton mills ran on American cotton, the great majority of it grown by enslaved hands. In 1861, America went to war with itself, and the Union navy blockaded the southern ports. The cotton stopped crossing the ocean. ⚙️ In Lancashire, the mills began to close. By November 1862, three-fifths of the workforce stood idle. Hundreds of thousands went onto relief. The mill owners wanted the cotton flowing again. Break the blockade, they urged Westminster. Get the cotton moving. That would have meant Britain siding with the slave states. The workers were the ones being asked to pay for it. They said no. 📜 Manchester, the final days of December 1862. Cotton workers filled the Free Trade Hall. They voted, overwhelmingly, to stand with the Union. To endure the famine rather than profit from slave-picked cotton. Then they did something else. They wrote to the President of the United States. Despite everything they were losing. The letter went to Abraham Lincoln. It crossed the same ocean the cotton no longer could. ✍️ Washington, January 1863. Abraham Lincoln read what Lancashire had written. Hungry people, choosing his side over their own bread. He wrote back: "An instance of sublime Christian heroism, not surpassed, in any age, in any country." His reply crossed back over the same ocean. Lancashire read it, and kept going. The hardship lasted years. Many left Lancashire for good. But they did not break. Lincoln's words still stand in Manchester today, cut into the stone he stands on. Ordinary people chose a stranger's freedom over their own comfort. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ They had nothing to gain, and everything to lose. They stood with strangers across an ocean, and history remembers it. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it. 👇🙏 When we stood together, we achieved more. 👉 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk43,351 Aufrufe • vor 3 Tagen
🏴🇬🇧 The man who first lit a house died 7 years before Edison was even born. One house in Cornwall glowed after dark in 1792. No candles. No oil. Light, burning out of pipes. The first house on Earth lit this way. The man inside was a Scot. William Murdoch, a millwright's son from Ayrshire, walked more than 300 miles to Birmingham in 1777 to ask the great firm of Boulton and Watt for work. ⚙️ Matthew Boulton noticed his hat. It was wood, turned on a lathe the young Scot designed himself. The hat got him the job. The firm sent him to Cornwall to keep its mine engines running. But the nights were his own. In 1784 a model steam carriage ran across his living room floor, under its own power. The first machine in Britain recorded doing it. Then he sealed coal in iron, heated it, caught the gas that came off and piped it through his own house. He put a flame to the end of the pipe. 🔥 And the dark went out of his parlour. By 1805 he had lit a Salford cotton mill end to end: over 900 steady flames where candles had guttered and smoked. In 1807 the first gas lamps rose in Pall Mall. Murdoch did not put them there. A promoter called Frederick Winsor had run ahead with the idea. Companies were chartered and fortunes made, in pounds sterling. Murdoch had never patented gas light, and the fortune was never his. What he got instead was the Royal Society's Rumford Gold Medal in 1808, stamped in Latin: out of smoke, light. 🏛️ You were taught the man who beat the darkness was Edison. Murdoch was 7 years dead before Edison was even born. By 1839, gaslight stood over London, Manchester and Glasgow. Britain lit the night first, and the world followed. 🇬🇧 Today he stands in gold in Birmingham beside Boulton and Watt, and every June the town of Redruth holds a festival in his name. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ His real monument comes on at dusk, in every British street. A gift from a millwright's son. Never signed. Still burning. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it. If you can afford to support our mission: Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk95,283 Aufrufe • vor 10 Tagen
In 1707, two thousand sailors DROWNED. Not because of a storm. Because nobody could tell where they were at sea 🇬🇧 This was the longitude problem. The deadliest puzzle in science. Parliament offered £20,000 to anyone who could solve it. Nearly four million today. Every great scientist in Europe tried. Newton. Halley. The finest minds alive. All of them failed. The man who solved it was a carpenter from Yorkshire. His name was John Harrison. No formal education. No university. No wealthy patron. He taught himself clockmaking. Built timepieces out of wood. His idea was “simple”. If you know the exact time at home and the exact time at sea, you can calculate exactly where you are. The problem? No clock could keep accurate time on a moving ship. Heat warps metal. Cold contracts it. The ocean never stops moving. Harrison spent DECADES on it. H1. Twenty years of work. Not good enough. H2. Better. Still not enough. H3. Seventeen years. Over 700 parts. Still not enough. Then he did something nobody expected. He stopped building clocks. He built a watch. H4. Thirteen centimetres across. The most important watch ever made. They sent it across the Atlantic. Eighty-one days at sea. When they arrived, it had lost five seconds. Five seconds. In eighty-one days. The problem was solved. But here's the uncomfortable part. They didn't give him the prize. The Board of Longitude was run by astronomers. The very men who'd been trying to solve it their own way. The Astronomer Royal was both judge and competitor. They changed the rules. Demanded his designs. Refused to pay. A working-class carpenter had beaten every astronomer in Europe. And the establishment couldn't accept it. Harrison was nearly EIGHTY before he got justice. He went directly to King George III. The king tested the watch himself and told Harrison to petition Parliament with the king's full backing. Parliament paid. Harrison died three years later. After his death, every ship on earth carried a chronometer based on his design. Every GPS satellite. Every ship's navigation. Every flight path. All of it traces back to a carpenter from Yorkshire who taught himself to build a watch. His watches are still at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Still ticking. Still perfect. The establishment tried to bury him once. We're not letting it happen again 👇 Be part of us. Be proud of us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk1,599,741 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
The first statue ever raised in St Paul's Cathedral is not a king, a general or a saint.👑🚫⛪️ It is a quiet Bedfordshire squire who asked one question nobody wanted asked. 🇬🇧 In Georgian England you could be found not guilty and stay in gaol. 🏴 The gaoler drew no wage, he lived on fees from his prisoners, and if you could not pay, the door stayed shut. Innocent or not. In 1773 John Howard was made High Sheriff of Bedfordshire. Most sheriffs sent a deputy to the county gaol. Howard walked in himself. ⚖️ He asked the magistrates to pay the gaoler a wage instead. They asked him to name one county in England that did. So he rode out to find one. Gaol after gaol, county after county, there was none. Just the same fee at every door, cells cut below ground and a fever in the straw that killed more prisoners than the gallows. In 1774 Parliament called him to the bar of the Commons, thanked him for his humanity and zeal and changed the law of England. Fees struck down. Cleared men freed in open court. Howard printed the new law himself and sent it to every gaol in England. 📜 Then he kept going. Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Russia. 🏴🇮🇪🇫🇷🇩🇪🇷🇺 He weighed the prison bread and measured the cells in hundreds of prisons, over 42,000 miles by his own count, and set it all down in The State of the Prisons in 1777. In 1779 Parliament passed the Penitentiary Act with his evidence before it. At 63, at Kherson on the Black Sea, he sat at a fever patient's bedside, and the gaol fever he had followed through the prisons of Europe took him too. He asked for a quiet grave, a sundial and to be forgotten. 🔥 Britain refused. St Paul's had never once held a statue. The first ever raised was his. The reformers who came after him took his name and carry it still. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ One quiet Englishman kept opening doors nobody wanted opened. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you with us. 👉 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk52,103 Aufrufe • vor 7 Tagen
Britain took on fifty nations. African kings. Arab sultans. Bombarded ports. Deposed rulers who refused. Lost 1,600 men. Spent 40% of the entire Treasury. A debt so big it wasn't paid off until 2015. You or your parents were still paying for it. Not for land. Not for gold. To end the slave trade. They captured 1,600 ships. Freed 150,000 people. Patrolled 3,000 miles of coastline for sixty years. And none of it was the government's idea. It was 400,000 ordinary people who signed petitions and 300,000 families who refused to buy sugar. They forced Parliament's hand. Your ancestors changed the world and nobody told you. If you think this should be taught in schools, help us reach more people: Be part of us Be Proud Of Us 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk1,222,620 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
A 65 year old Welshwoman lied about her age to get INTO a war. 👵🏴⚔️ She told the enrolment office she was 55. The truth meant instant rejection, and she was going to that war. 🇬🇧 Her name was Betsi Cadwaladr, a farmer preacher's daughter from Bala, 1 of 16 children. At 14 she ran away. By 31 she was a maid aboard a merchant ship, nursing the sick and delivering babies at sea, from the West Indies to Australia. In her 60s, nursing at Guy's Hospital, she read the reports from the Alma. Wounded men, and no one to nurse them. So she wrote 55 in the register and sailed. Britain had already sent its most famous nurse. Florence Nightingale. Betsi had never met her and already did not like the name. Kept waiting at Scutari with nothing to do, she stood before the most famous woman in Britain and asked for Balaclava, the rough harbour hospital at the edge of the war. Nightingale warned her that beyond Scutari she could not protect her. She went. She dressed wounds that had waited days for a hand, then ran the kitchen for men too weak to stomach army rations. Almost alone. 5 in the morning to midnight. 7 days a week. For more than 7 months. The men were fed. She was spent. Dysentery broke her, and Britain shipped her home. The 2 women never warmed to each other, but Nightingale acknowledged what she had done. She died in 1860 in a shared pauper's grave. No stone. No name. Then in 2009 Wales formed its largest health organisation and gave it her name. Betsi Cadwaladr. It stands over the care of the whole north of Wales. In 2012 her grave finally got its stone: the faithfullest of Her Majesty's Nurses. She never asked to be remembered. She only asked for the front. That is a Welshwoman worth being proud of, and putting names like hers back is the work we do. Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk41,159 Aufrufe • vor 6 Tagen
In 1943, Black American soldiers arrived in Lancashire.🇬🇧🇺🇸 Back home, they couldn't eat in the same restaurants as white people. Couldn't drink in the same bars. The locals didn't care about any of that. They said come in. Same pubs. Same pints. Same welcome as everyone else. They danced together. Drank together. Walked through the village together. One soldier said he didn't know he was coloured until he looked in the mirror. Then the US commanders tried to stop it. They demanded the village separate them. Every pub refused. A barmaid called Gillian Vesey served whoever was next. No exceptions. Military police walked into a pub and tried to arrest a soldier for wearing the wrong uniform. A British soldier stood up. "Why do you want to arrest them? They're not doing anything wrong." That night, things turned violent. A soldier was killed. The commanding general blamed the white officers. Racist officers were removed. The soldiers went home. But they carried something with them. The memory of a place that treated them like people. One veteran said: "These soldiers were never going back to accept being treated as less." "None of us were." A small Lancashire village showed them what was possible. Not by marching. Not by protesting. Just by being decent. They didn't think they were being brave. They were just being British.🇬🇧 This is who we are. Help us show the world. Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk1,015,584 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
They were starving. The cotton was right there. They refused to touch it. Lancashire, 1862.🇬🇧 The cotton mills that clothed the world. The cotton came from American slave plantations. Then the Civil War began. Lincoln blockaded the Southern ports. The cotton stopped coming. 331,000 people lost their jobs. The most prosperous workers in Britain were queuing for charity soup. Children went hungry. Everyone expected them to break. Demand the government side with the slaveholders. Get the cotton flowing again. They didn't. New Year's Eve, 1862. Manchester Free Trade Hall. Workers packed the hall. Hungry. Unemployed. Freezing. The Manchester Guardian told them not to come. They came anyway. They voted to support Lincoln. To keep the blockade. To keep starving. They refused to buy their survival with someone else's chains. Lincoln wrote back. He called it "sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country." Then he sent ships full of food to Lancashire. There's still a statue of Lincoln in Manchester. His words are still on it. But here's what most people don't know. That hall, the Free Trade Hall, was built on the exact site of the Peterloo Massacre. In 1819, cavalry charged into working people on that same ground. Demanding the right to vote. At least fifteen killed. Same ground. Same working people. Two generations apart. In 1819 they were cut down for asking to be heard. In 1862 their children chose to starve for someone else's freedom. Lancashire. Every time. Help us get the stories of our ancestors out of the archives and into the people. 👉 No sponsors. No ads. Just us. Be part of us. Be proud of us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk859,097 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
🇬🇧 Most British schoolchildren are taught about Magna Carta. They are taught it was sealed in twelve fifteen at Runnymede. They are taught it is the foundation of English liberty. They are taught it is one of the most important documents in human history. They are not taught what came next. They are not taught about the eighty years between twelve fifteen and twelve ninety-five when ordinary Englishmen forced three successive kings to write down, for the first time in any kingdom in medieval Europe, what English law was, what English liberty was, and how an English king must govern. They are not taught about the Charter of the Forest, which restored the right to graze, gather firewood, and live on common land, and which remained in force for seven hundred and fifty-four years. They are not taught about the Provisions of Oxford in twelve fifty-eight, often called England's first written constitution, which placed the king under a council of fifteen and required Parliament to meet three times a year. They are not taught about the Provisions of Westminster in twelve fifty-nine, which subjected the barons themselves to the same law they had forced upon the king. They are not taught about Simon de Montfort, an earl born in France who died for England, who summoned the first Parliament in English history to include ordinary commoners alongside the great lords. They are not taught about the Statute of Marlborough in twelve sixty-seven, which is the oldest piece of statute law in the United Kingdom still in force today. ⚖️ Seven hundred and fifty-nine years old. If you've ever taken a debt to court in England, you've used it. 🏠 If you've ever rented a home, you've been protected by it. 👑 If a creditor can't lawfully drag your possessions into the street to settle what you owe, that's because of a law signed seven hundred and fifty-nine years ago. They are not taught about the Model Parliament of twelve ninety-five, summoned by Edward the First, which became the shape of every English Parliament since. Eighty years. Three successive kings. The first written constitution in any kingdom in medieval Europe. It was not given to them. It was not handed down from God or king or Pope. ✍️ It was written. By Englishmen. For England. 🇬🇧 The British write their own history. They always have. This one needed more than a thread. The full story is in our video, watch it below 👇 Help us remember who we are. Help us remember every British achievement. 👇🙏 👉 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk358,560 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
In 1840 an American slave ship ran aground in the Bahamas. On British ground, the 38 people below deck could not be owned. 🇬🇧 Free Black boatmen rowed out, magistrates came aboard, and all 38 walked ashore free. 19 October 1840. The Hermosa, a schooner out of Richmond, Virginia, bound for the slave markets of New Orleans. Below deck, 38 enslaved people. Her papers listed them as cargo. She struck a reef off Abaco, in the Bahamas. British ground. Bahamian boatmen rowed out through the surf, free Black men who worked these reefs for a living, and carried all 38 safe to Nassau. Britain had abolished slavery 6 years before. The captain refused to let them ashore. He called for another ship to carry them back to bondage. Then British magistrates came aboard, armed men at their backs. No fleet. No proclamation. A local court doing its ordinary work. In Virginia, paper made those 38 people property. On British ground, no paper on Earth could. One by one, 38 people stepped ashore at Nassau. Free. The owners demanded them back for years. They never got them. Nobody famous freed those 38. Boatmen rowed out. Magistrates climbed aboard. Ordinary hands, keeping Britain's word. In Virginia, paper made them property. On British ground, thanks to the British citizens, it could not. 🇬🇧 This is the revival of British culture. Be part of it. 👉 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
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There's a door in England.🚪🏴 It's been there for nine hundred years. And on that door is a knocker. If you grabbed it, the law couldn't touch you.⚖️ Durham Cathedral. Built in 1093. From the moment it was finished, a rule was carved into its stone. Anyone who reached that knocker was protected. Thirty-seven days. No one could arrest you. No one could harm you. Two monks sat in a room above the door. Day and night. Every hour. Listening for a knock. Because when it came, they had to open the door. They gave you a black gown. A yellow cross on the chest. A bed. Food. And for thirty-seven days, safety. After that, you had a choice. Face trial. Or leave England forever. They called it abjuring the realm. Walk to the coast carrying a cross. Never leave the road. Board a ship. Never come back. Over three hundred people claimed sanctuary. Murderers. Thieves. Debtors. All given the same protection. The right of sanctuary ended in 1623. But the knocker never came down. It's still on the door at Durham Cathedral. Nine hundred years old. Still holding the ring that saved three hundred lives. England built mercy into its architecture. Into the stone. Into the door. Into a ring that anyone could grab. Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
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Scurvy killed more British sailors than France and Spain ever did. 🇬🇧 The Royal Navy's greatest enemy wasn't cannon fire. It was a disease. In 1747 a Scottish naval surgeon named James Lind had a theory. He took twelve sailors suffering from scurvy aboard HMS Salisbury. Divided them into six pairs. Gave each pair a different remedy the navy believed in... Cider, vinegar, seawater. And gave one pair two oranges and one lemon a day. After six days, five pairs were unchanged. The sixth pair were almost recovered. 🍊 Lind had just conducted the first clinical trial in recorded history. Every medicine you have ever taken was tested using his method. He published his results in 1753. The Admiralty ignored him for forty years. Meanwhile Captain James Cook used citrus on his second voyage. He lost only one sailor to scurvy in three years at sea. The Admiralty noted it. Did nothing. Tens of thousands of sailors died of a disease that had already been cured. In 1794 one admiral finally acted. He ordered lemon juice issued to every sailor aboard HMS Suffolk for a twenty three week voyage to India. Not one case of scurvy. The following year the Royal Navy made it standard issue. Every sailor. Every ship. Scurvy vanished from the fleet almost overnight. ⚓ Then the Navy switched from lemons to West Indian limes... Cheaper and easier to source from British colonies. Limes carry a fraction of the vitamin C that lemons do. American sailors watching British sailors drink their lime rations had a name for it. They called us limeys. And it stuck. Ten years later, at Trafalgar, Britain's navy was at full strength. The French and Spanish fleets were not. One Scottish surgeon. Twelve sailors. Two oranges and a lemon. James Lind died in 1794. One year before the navy he served finally adopted his cure. He invented the clinical trial. He saved more British sailors than any admiral in history. Your ancestors proved the truth. Did they teach you that? It's time to prove the truth again. Your support pays for the research, production and hours it takes to get it right. Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
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🇬🇧 Every British river. 🌊🇬🇧 Has a name older than English. Older than Rome. You still say it. The Thames. The Romans wrote it as Tamesis. But the name they wrote was already old when they arrived. A pre-Celtic name passed to the Celts, passed to Rome, passed to us. The name has changed only in the shape of the sound. The Severn. The Welsh called her Sabrina. A river goddess in the Brittonic tongue. And the Severn still carries her name today. 🏞️ The Trent. The Celts called it Trisanton. A name meaning the trespasser. The river that bursts its banks. And it still bursts its banks. The Avon. The word means river. The Britons called every river the Avon. The English kept the name. The Tyne. A Brittonic name meaning the flowing one. The Dee. A name meaning the goddess, the holy one. The Britons named her sacred and the English left her sacred. The Anglo-Saxons came. They renamed villages. They renamed hills. They renamed almost everything they could. But they did not rename the rivers. The rivers were too holy. The names were too rooted. And so the Brittonic words stayed in English mouths. The Britons did not vanish. Their words did not vanish. Their descendants became the British. And the British still name the river the same way. Every time. 🇬🇧 British people speak a language older than English. Every day. Without noticing. The Britons named the water. The British still call it the same. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The river names are not relics. The villages changed names. The rivers kept theirs. Help us pass our history downstream. 👇🙏 👉 👈 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
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A woman sat a medical exam and beat every man in the room.🏴🇬🇧 So the men who ran it changed the rules. That same year, to make sure no woman could ever do it again. But she'd already won. Her name was Elizabeth Garrett. 🏴 It was 1865, and every medical school in Britain was shut to women. Oxford refused her. Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews, the Royal College of Surgeons. Refused, all of them. At one London hospital she got in as a nurse and sat in on the lectures, and did so well the male students signed a petition to throw her out. So she read the rules until she found the one crack. The Apothecaries had to license any apprentice who passed their exam, and the charter never said the apprentice had to be a man. She studied in private, sat it, and passed with the highest marks in the room. They had to license her. Then they slammed the door, rewriting the rules so no woman could ever do it again. But she was already through. She took a degree in Paris because Britain still would not grant her one, built a hospital staffed entirely by women and a school to train the ones behind her, and ended her life as the first woman ever to be mayor of an English town. We are the home of British heroes. Not built by ads, not by the government, built by us. Will you help Britain regain its Pride? Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧
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