Search Results for 'illustrated london news'

There was a time when you would not have to remind people who GK Chesterton was. The chief proponent of beer and beefsteak Catholicism, he was the greatest polemical writer of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Blunt was an aristocratic English writer, a person of remarkable ability who, as “the best looking man in England was credited with having refreshed the blood of several ancient families”. He was always against colonialism and sympathetic to small nations, so it was no surprise that he became an ardent supporter of Home Rule for Ireland. In 1887, he was in Ireland to study the grievances of the people when he heard that evictions had recommenced on the 56,000-acre estate of Lord Clanricarde in Woodford.

Christmas Trees as they came to be now started around the late 1400s into the 1500s. In what’s now Germany (was the Holy Roman Empire then), the Paradise Tree had more decorations on it (sometimes communion wafers, cherries and later pastry decorations of stars, bells, angels, etc. were added) and it even got a new nickname the ‘Christbaum’ or ‘Christ Tree’.

Our illustration today was published in the Illustrated London News on June 25, 1842, and was intended to “Convey an idea of the desperation to which the poor people of Galway have been reduced by the present calamitous season of starvation. The scene represented above is an attack upon a potato store in the town of Galway, on the 13th of the present month, when the distress had become too great for the poor squalid and unpitied inhabitants to endure their misery any longer, without some more substantial alleviation than prospects of coming harvest; and their resource in this case was to break open the potato stores and distribute their contents, without much discrimination, among the plunderers, and to attack the mills where oatmeal was known to be stored.

That was the answer the journalist PD Mehigan got when he asked a breeder to explain the magic of the Galway Plate some 80 years ago. An examination of the records bore out that theory for him - no bad horse, or middling horse, has ever won the Galway Plate.