Proudofus.uk
@ProudofusUK • 103,219 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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For 3,000 years, only the rich wore colour. Red was a beetle crushed by the thousand. Blue was a plant rotted in urine. Purple was a sea snail, and you needed 12,000 of them for the hem of one robe. Colour was not a taste. It was a rank. Then at Easter 1856, an 18 year old in Shadwell was trying to make malaria medicine out of gasworks sludge. He failed. He went to wash out the flask. And it came out purple. The colour emperors killed for... In a sink in the East End. The reason it worked is the part nobody believes. He was 18. He patented it that August, walked out of college, borrowed his father's money and built a factory. Within 2 years Britain had gone purple, the price collapsed, and a servant could wear a colour an empress had worn. Look at what you are wearing. Nobody dived for it. Nobody counted shells for it. Because a boy in Shadwell got it wrong. And instead of washing his mistake away, he gave the world colour. That spirit was handed down. It is still in you. Help us hand it to the next generation. Everything we make is free. It stays that way because of people like you: 🙏 Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk314,470 просмотров • 5 дней назад
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.uk9,837,728 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
🇬🇧 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.uk1,127,888 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
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.uk1,600,542 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
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.uk1,223,489 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
🇬🇧⚓ She was built to outrun the Royal Navy. She was built to carry people as cargo. The Royal Navy caught her anyway, and sent her back to hunt her own kind. 🏴⛓️⚫️ Her name was Henriquetta, a Brazilian slaving ship, built for speed by a captain who wanted one thing: to deliver enslaved people before any patrol could catch him. In 1827, HMS Sybille ran her down. ⚓ The Royal Navy did not sink her. They bought her, armed her, and gave her a new name: Black Joke. A lieutenant took command, and she sailed back to the African coast, this time hunting the ships she once sailed alongside. Over the next 5 years she became one of the most successful ships of the whole West Africa Squadron. In one year alone she took 11 prizes. Free West African Kroomen served alongside her Royal Navy crew. 🌊 Her most famous chase began in 1829. She ran down the Spanish slaver El Almirante over 31 hours, neither ship able to shake the other, until Black Joke's guns finally found their range. Aboard El Almirante, 466 enslaved people, waiting in the hold. Every single one was freed. Career totals for people freed across her whole career are less certain, sources vary, and we won't pretend otherwise. What is certain: she was one of the most effective ships the Squadron ever had. By 1832, 5 hard years had worn her out. Her timbers were too rotten to sail home. She was broken up on the African coast that had made her famous. A ship built for one purpose became the opposite of it. Britain inherited a fast ship, and a choice about which side it would serve. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 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.uk124,455 просмотров • 22 дней назад
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.uk1,016,887 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
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.uk860,267 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
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. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk645,551 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
🇬🇧 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.uk359,725 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
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. 🙏🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk377,785 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
"No woman or maiden shall be forced to marry a man whom she dislikes." That's not a modern law. That was written in England 🏴 over a thousand years ago. Anglo-Saxon women had more legal rights than your great-grandmother. On the same island. A thousand years earlier. 🔑 She could own land. In her own name. Buy it. Sell it. Leave it to whoever she chose. No permission needed. Not from her husband. Not from her father. Not from anyone. She could run a business. She could stand in an open-air court, raise her hand in oath, and the law would hear her the same as any man. ⚖️ On the morning after her wedding, her husband owed her a gift. Land. Money. Property. It was called the Morgengifu, the morning gift. It wasn't symbolic. It was legally binding. And it was hers. Not jointly owned. Not held in trust. Hers. Through everything. 💍 A woman called Wynflaed owned seven estates across four counties, her will still survives. Cynethryth, wife of King Offa, struck coins bearing her own name and face. The only Anglo-Saxon queen known to have done it. The coins are still in museum collections. 🪙 Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, built ten fortified towns and led armies in battle. In the tenth century. ⚔️ While most of Europe treated women as property, this island wrote their rights into law. 🇬🇧 Then the Normans came. 1066. And they took all of it away. Every. Single. Right. 🚫 A married woman's property became her husband's. She couldn't own land. Couldn't sign a contract. Couldn't keep her own wages. Under the doctrine of coverture, her legal identity was absorbed into his. Bracton wrote it plainly: "husband and wife are one person, being one flesh and one blood." In the eyes of the law, she didn't exist. For over eight hundred years. Let that satisfy. Eight. Hundred. Years. In 1882, the Married Women's Property Act gave a married woman the right to own property, keep her earnings, and exist as a separate legal person. 📜 But Britain didn't invent those rights in 1882. It restored them. Rights that Anglo-Saxon women had exercised a thousand years before. On the same island, under the same sky, in a language that became the one you're reading now. 🏴 This island forgot once. We won't let it forget again. Happy Mother's Day ❤️ Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk424,496 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
🦴 A skeleton in a cave. Nine thousand years old. They tested his DNA. 🧬 And matched it to a man living half a mile away. 🇬🇧 In 1903, workers were digging a drainage channel inside a gorge in Somerset. They hit bone. A body. Curled up. Deep inside the rock. He'd been there since before Stonehenge. Before the pyramids. They called him Cheddar Man. 🧀 He hunted deer through forests that covered this island. He fished rivers that still run through the same valley today. And then he died. Alone. In a cave. For a century, he sat behind glass. A museum piece. A curiosity. A name on a plaque. Then in 1997, a scientist from Oxford had an idea. He took DNA from one of Cheddar Man's teeth. Then he went into the village. Walked into the local school. Swabbed the cheeks of twenty residents. And ran the tests. 🧬 One matched. Adrian Targett. History teacher. Living half a mile from the cave. Three hundred generations. Same family. Same valley. Nine thousand years. And the line never left. He didn't know. The longest unbroken connection between a living person and an ancient ancestor. Anywhere in the world. Same hills. Same river. Same village. Half a mile from the cave. You are the reason we can tell these stories. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk440,980 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
"When men burn women alive, we hang them." 🇬🇧🔥 That was Britain's answer. Here's why they said it. In India, when a husband died, his widow was expected to climb onto the funeral pyre. Into the flames. While her family watched. One man watched them drag his sister-in-law onto the fire. She was seventeen. She screamed. They chanted louder. They held him back. His name was Ram Mohan Roy. He spent years researching the ancient Hindu scriptures. He proved the practice had no basis in the holy texts. Then he went to the British and said: help me end this. The army said don't. Too dangerous. Could cause a rebellion. Eight thousand women had burned alive in thirteen years. Just in Bengal. In 1828, Lord Bentinck became Governor-General. He called the practice "revolting to the feelings of human nature." December 4th, 1829. He signed the ban. The law was sent to translator William Carey. It arrived on a Sunday morning. He threw off his coat and said: "No church for me today. If I delay an hour, many a widow's life may be sacrificed." He worked through the day. By evening it was done. But it wasn't over. 800 orthodox priests signed a petition to overturn the ban. They sent it to London. Roy sailed to England to make sure the law survived. The Privy Council upheld the ban. Years later, priests marched to General Charles Napier and demanded he respect their traditions. He listened. Then he replied: "Very well. This burning of widows is your custom. Prepare the funeral pyre. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive, we hang them. And confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall build a gallows beside your pyre. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours." No widow burned that day. An Indian reformer asked Britain for help. Britain said yes. Together they saved thousands. There are thousands of stories like this. Stories they never taught you. Help us find them: No sponsors. No ads. Just us. Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk478,718 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
⚓🇬🇧🇳🇱 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.uk139,706 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
People were eating full meals and still dying. In 1912 🇬🇧, it couldn't be explained. You could sit in front of bread, meat, potatoes, butter. A whole table full of food. Your body could waste away. Nobody knew why. Until a man from Eastbourne fed milk to rats. He fed young rats every nutrient science said they needed. Pure protein. Pure fat. Pure carbohydrate. Minerals. Water. Everything. They stopped growing. Then he added a tiny amount of ordinary milk. They grew. Something invisible. Something no scientist had ever identified Was hiding in everyday food. Without it, nothing else mattered. You could eat until you were full and still starve. Frederick Hopkins called them "accessory food factors." The world would call them vitamins. In 1929, he won the Nobel Prize. He became the first Professor of Biochemistry at Cambridge. Four of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes of their own. Today every fortified cereal, every enriched loaf of bread, every vitamin pill in every pharmacy in every country on earth traces back to one man, one experiment, and a tiny amount of milk. He was from Eastbourne. They never taught you his name. We will. Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk451,651 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
Every football club on earth exists because of this island. 🇬🇧 Kings banned it. The richest schools in England claimed it. They wrote the rules and locked the gates. Then the working class stole it back. In 1850, Parliament passed the Factory Act. Work stopped at two on a Saturday. Working men had free time. And they chose football. Churches formed clubs to keep men out of pubs: Aston Villa, Bolton, Everton. Factories formed teams from their own workers: West Ham from the Thames Ironworks, Arsenal from a munitions factory. The FA Cup Final. Blackburn Olympic: weavers, spinners, a plumber. They beat the Old Etonians 2-1. No private school team ever reached the final again. Then British workers carried it everywhere they went ⚽🌍 Scottish miners in Spain founded its oldest club. A Nottingham lace trader gave Juventus their black and white stripes. A butcher's son from the same city founded AC Milan. British railway workers in Uruguay named their team after Stephenson's Rocket. Cornish miners founded Mexico's first football club. A schoolteacher from Kent taught the game to his students in Argentina. His school produced Lionel Messi. A boy from Southampton brought two footballs to Brazil. They call him the father of Brazilian football. Real Madrid are said to wear white because of an English amateur team. From Lancashire cotton mills to every continent on earth. Three and a half billion people watch football. The most popular sport ever created. And it was created here. By the British people. Every Saturday, three o'clock. That kickoff time exists because of the Factory Act of 1850. The moment working men were given an afternoon off. They chose football. And the world followed. No owners. No sponsors. Just supporters. Be part of us. 👉 🙏 Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk434,674 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
🇬🇧 For 300 years, North African pirates enslaved over a million Europeans. 🇬🇧 Spain. Italy. France. Ireland. Even Iceland. Entire villages taken. Europe paid ransoms. Begged. No one could stop it. Then Britain sailed into Algiers harbour. 50,000 cannonballs. 9 hours. Every slave walked free. Not just British. All of them. 300 years of terror. Ended in a single day. Be proud of us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk469,515 просмотров • 6 месяцев назад
Slavery existed for over 5,000 years. Every major civilisation accepted it. For most of history, nobody seriously tried to stop it at scale. Then Britain did something different. It didn’t just pass a law. 👇 In 1807, Britain abolished the slave trade. Then it enforced it. For 60 years, the Royal Navy hunted slave ships. 1,600 ships captured. Around 150,000 people freed. And it cost lives. Around 2,000 British sailors died doing it. Then in 1833: Britain abolished slavery across its empire. 800,000 people set free. It paid £20 million to do it. Around 40 percent of government spending. This wasn’t quick. This wasn’t easy. And it didn’t start with politicians. It started with ordinary people. Women boycotted sugar. Hundreds of thousands of them. Thomas Clarkson rode 35,000 miles to gather evidence. A movement that took decades. This is part of British history. Not perfect. But not what most people are told either. Almost no one explains it like this. Proud Of Us is funded entirely by our community. No sponsors. No advertisers. If you believe this history deserves to be told properly:👇 Be part of us. 👉 🙏 Be proud of us 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk355,392 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
They were outnumbered six to one. 🏴🇫🇷 Starving. Sick. Exhausted. The French looked across the field and laughed. They weren't even soldiers. They were farmers. But those farmers had something nobody else in the world had. The Welsh longbow. A weapon so powerful nobody else knew how to make it. So demanding it took a lifetime to learn. So devastating that what happened next changed Europe forever. The French had the greatest army on the continent. The finest nobility in France. They were so confident they argued over who would capture the English king. Then the arrows fell. Twelve per minute. Per archer. Thousands of arrows. The sky went dark. The French charged. Into mud. Arrows punched through plate armour. Horses screamed. Knights fell face-down in the mire and couldn't stand up. The archers dropped their bows. Drew swords and mallets. And went to work. Three dukes. Dead. Ninety counts. Dead. Over 1,500 knights. Dead. English dead? A few hundred. The greatest army in Europe. Destroyed by farmers with bows. 25th October 1415. That's not just a battle. Our history. Plenty more available at Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
Proudofus.uk359,067 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад