This edited article about County Durham originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 705 published on 19 July 1975.

At Jarrow Bede taught children the message of the Gospel, by Peter Jackson

On September 27, 1825, a steam engine was standing on a newly-built railway line near the little Durham village of Shildon. It would have looked ridiculous to us today, for it was very small, and had a tall funnel that was quite out of proportion to the rest of its size. It looked rather like a present-day tar-boiler, and was coupled up to a string of trucks and improvised carriages.

“This is a fine engine,” said a man with a tall, shiny stovepipe hat and a green brocade waistcoat.

“Aye,” replied the friend who stood beside him. “Our Mr. Stephenson’s done a right good job!”

Suddenly a man appeared, struggling through the crowd towards the engine.

“There he is!” called the man in the stovepipe hat. “Mr. Stephenson!”

George Stephenson smiled at the excited crowd, then climbed on to the engine tender. The man in the stovepipe hat, his friend, and the rest of the assembled crowd, climbed aboard. Although tickets had only been issued to 300 people, nearly 200 more scrambled on to the train!

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This edited article about Fife originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 703 published on 5 July 1975.

A picture history of Malcom’s reign showing Margaret’s escape by boat; their marriage in Dunfermline Abbey; Malcom’s refusal to do hommage to William Rufus and the endless carnage and bloodshed in Northumberland. Pictures by Dan Escott

The people of Fife do not live in a county. They live in a kingdom. Their land of heather-hills, cornfields, and coal mines stretching far into the North Sea has always been called the Kingdom of Fife.

Why does this eastern area of Scotland claim this proud title? The coalminers, fishermen and weavers of Fife will tell you it dates back to the days when Fife was a feudal kingdom ruled by its own Pictish king.

Fife lost its king before the Conqueror came to Britain. There was much confusion over the rules of succession, which ended with a Scottish chief named Kenneth MacAlpin becoming ruler of the Scots and the Picts.

Centuries later, of course, the kingdoms of England and Scotland were united under one monarch.

Dunfermline, the chief city of Fife, was the seat of medieval kings in Scotland. The palace there was a royal residence from the time of Queen Margaret in the eleventh century until the sixteenth century.

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This edited article about King Faisal of Saudi Arabia originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 703 published on 5 July 1975.

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia

Dressed in a long white gown that effectively concealed the pistol he was holding. Prince Faisal bin Museid Ibn Abdel Aziz of Saudi Arabia began slowly to walk the length of a hall in the royal palace in Riyadh, the capital. At the far end of the hall sat his uncle, King Faisal, who was receiving the members of his family and court. It was March 25th, this year, the birthday of the prophet Mohammed, a holy day.

The courtiers had given the king the customary kiss on each cheek, and they drew to one side to allow the prince to do the same.

When he was only a few yards from the king, the prince stopped. While the attendants waited politely for him to advance, he drew his pistol. They saw the glint of metal, heard the sound of three shots fired at point blank range and saw the king collapse with blood staining his royal attire. The attendants rushed the king to hospital, but they were too late. Thirty minutes after the shots had been fired, he was dead.

The killer’s motives were not clear. Some said that his mind was deranged. Others declared that he had murdered out of revenge for his brother, who was killed at a political demonstration by Faisal’s security forces.

But whatever the motive was, the fact remains that with Faisal’s death there passed from the Middle Eastern scene a man with the power to control the flow of one of the world’s most vital commodities – oil!

King Faisal, a man of austere habits and untold wealth, was becoming the most important chieftain of all Arabia. This was because a measure of unity had been reached among the desert lands after the 1973 war with Israel. The fuel crisis in the West stemmed directly from his decision to stop exports of oil to countries which supported Israel. Even those like Britain, which tried to remain neutral, suffered from the oil restrictions.

The soaring price of oil brought vast riches to the already wealthy land of Saudi Arabia, where the king counted his fortune in millions of pounds. As the country with the largest oil fields in the world, Saudi Arabia earned £10,000 million last year – or roughly £300 a second. Her financial reserves grew almost too fast for accurate assessment.

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This edited article about Nottinghamshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 699 published on 7 June 1975.

Robin Hood by James E McConnell

From Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire has come one of the most stirring and romantic legends in English history – the tale of bold Robin Hood who, with his band of Merry Men, roamed the greenwood in the Middle Ages.

But did Robin ever exist? The answer, unhappily, is probably not. The jolly outlaw who made the county, its castle and vast forests famous, may be just a legend.

Ballads and poems have celebrated his daring exploits down the ages. But there are no historical records to prove he lived.

He may have been the Earl of Huntingdon, unjustly banished by bad King John, and Maid Marian may have been Count Fitzwalter’s daughter who followed him to the greenwood.

He could have been another form of the superstition of Robin Goodfellow, a kindly, woodland spirit who was supposed to haunt the forests of England.

Or he may have been just a common outlaw. There were plenty of yeomen in forests like Sherwood, forced to live as robbers after banishment. Heavy punishments were often imposed upon ordinary men for very petty crimes.

Fact or legend, Robin has always represented the yeoman’s love of freedom and hatred of tyranny. And he has made Sherwood Forest immortal.

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This edited article about Alfried Krupp originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 699 published on 7 June 1975.

To British Tommies in the Great War the very name Krupp sounded like a shrapnel burst. Picture by Frank Bellamy

The flares from the RAF Mosquito pathfinders lit up the chimneys above the huddled factory roofs. German anti-aircraft shells flashed in a dark sky criss-crossed by the white, weaving ribbons of searchlights. The roar of the approaching Lancaster bombers grew louder. Then the ground trembled as bombs blasted the huge arms plant.

In the garden of his 300-roomed mansion, Villa Hugel, on the outskirts of Essen, Alfried Krupp and his guests watched the raid. At its height, amid the roar of high explosive, he led them through a maze of corridors to his underground bunker.

In the morning, the dead and wounded in the shattered Krupps complex were counted. Most of them were inmates from concentration camps and prisoners of war forced to work for the Nazi arms machine. Krupp had no difficulty in obtaining labour: he replaced the casualties many times to maintain record weapons production despite the British night raids over the Ruhr. For Krupp dispersed his plants throughout Germany and so avoided crippling damage.

Retribution for Alfried Krupp, as for many Nazi leaders, came in 1945. On April 10, Alfried sat down to a game of skat, a German form of bridge, in which one player pits his skill against two others. Allied artillery barked around Villa Hugel yet Krupp ignored the noise and won a small fortune from his guests. The next morning, he was arrested by American troops, but not before he had kept them waiting. He refused to appear until he was impeccably dressed as befitted a Krupps senior executive.

It was two years before he and other directors were brought to trial before a United States military tribunal in Nuremberg, charged with plundering Nazi occupied lands and using 100,000 prisoners as slave labour.

On July 28, 1948, Alfried Krupp was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment and forfeiture of his entire property. But he spent only three years in jail and even there, with his imprisoned directors, he held weekly board meetings to study reports on world trade and, in particular, steel production.

The US High Commissioner in Germany, John McCloy, announced on July 31, 1951, that Alfried Krupp’s sentence had been revised, following a review of the evidence and a reappraisal of personal guilt. He was freed and the confiscation order revoked, signalling once again the rise of the Krupps empire.

The British had always thought of the Krupps family as the sinister armourers of the Kaiser in the First World War and Hitler’s merchants of death in the second one. On the other hand, the Germans had always regarded them with respect and esteem as the founders of social security in the early 1800s, when they created a comprehensive welfare scheme with pensions for the factory workers. It was a family with a proud history dating back to the 16th century, the mainspring of German industrial and social development, creating armaments down the centuries along with other heavy industrial goods that gave them untold millions.

But it was not until the 1800s, that Krupps began to dominate the German industrial and political stage.

When Friedrich Krupp died on October 8, 1826, he left his 14-year-old son, Alfred, the secret of making high quality cast steel with a small workshop in which production was almost at a standstill.

Despite his youth, Alfred accepted the challenge. He took complete charge of the firm. It prospered under his guidance with production expanding after four years to include the manufacture of steel rolls.

Alfred designed and developed new machines, invented a system for making spoons and forks and devised plant for turning out currency. At the first world exhibition in London in 1851, he put on show the largest steel ingot ever cast, weighing 4,300 lb.

With the appearance of railways, Krupp really expanded, turning out rolling stock, establishing collieries, ore mines, blast furnaces and even setting up a laboratory for testing steel. In fact, just to prove how good it was, he decided, like his relatives before him, to turn to making guns.

At first, no one in Europe was interested in his weapons. It was not until 1856 that the first orders came from Egypt. Belgium bought Krupp cannon in 1861 and Russian orders arrived two years later.

When Krupp guns thundered in the Franco-German war of 1870-71, the firm was nicknamed: “The Arsenal of the Reich.” Yet the output of peaceful goods always outpaced the production of armaments in those early days. And all the time, Alfred Krupp kept a benevolent eye on his workers, building houses, hospitals, schools and churches for them. When his father died, there were a mere seven workers in the small Krupp workshop. When Alfred died in Essen on July 14, 1887 he had 21,000 employees.

Under the direction of his son, Friedrich, the firm continued to expand. By the time he died in November, 1902, the staff had doubled. Then the pattern of control began to change. For Friedrich left two daughters, the eldest of whom, Bertha, became the sole heiress.

In 1906, she married Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, a diplomat, who was subsequently authorised by Kaiser William II to change his name to Krupp, the right to be carried on by his heirs.

To British Tommies in the World War One trenches, the very name of Krupp sounded like a shrapnel burst. By then, Krupp had 151,000 workers turning out fantastic amounts of arms, including the huge guns that bombarded Paris from 75 miles away in 1918. They were named “Big Bertha” after Gustav’s wife.

In the aftermath of war, Krupp manufactured more rolling stock, locomotives, lorries and, of course, weapons. In politics, Gustav was always wily and ready to support the ruling power. He backed Hindenburg against Hitler and changed promptly to throw his weight behind the Nazi leader when he took control. Gustav was believed to have served on various Nazi organisations; he certainly received titles and awards, including the gold party badge.

But as the last war wore on, the tall aristocratic figure with the spade beard and moustache ailed and his son, Alfried, assumed increasing control of the firm.

Gustav was, in fact too senile to be prosecuted with war crimes after the Allied victory, although charges were considered. He died while his son was in prison.

When the Krupp factories were ultimately returned to Alfried, he was ordered by the Allies to sell off his iron and steel properties. But the order was never carried out. Alfried Krupp always pleaded failure to find a buyer and after the order had been extended repeatedly, it was finally lifted altogether.

Alfried Krupp, who died in 1967 when the firm had a turnover of £475 million, created from the ashes of war a new future for the Krupp empire. In 1973, it made a net profit of £16 million, boasted a total sales bill of £1,612 million and a work force of 70,000.

There are more than 150 factories and mines producing 12 per cent of the Ruhr steel and making every kind of machine from ships to diesel engines. And there are the weapons and the roses and orchids, too.

The weapons are made for NATO. And the flowers? The roses and orchids come from the lush grounds of Villa Hugel in their hundreds of thousands. Even the most beautiful and delicate of blooms make money for the Krupps.

This edited article about chocolate originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 697 published on 24 May 1975.

Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, liked drinking cocoa

The Aztecs liked drinking cocoa almost as much as they enjoyed a good fight. Their last emperor, Montezuma, used to get through fifty golden cups every day, as Hernando Cortez and his band of Spanish adventurers noted, after they had invaded Mexico in 1519 and conquered the remarkable Aztecs.

It was certainly a better habit than tearing out human hearts as a sacrifice to the gods to ensure that the sun came up each day, another local custom.

Not that Cortez and his men discovered the humble cocoa bean, for, a quarter of a century earlier, Christopher Columbus had shipped a number of beans back to Europe. But the story of chocolate really begins with Cortez and his daring band of adventurers.

The Aztecs believed that their gods had provided them with cocoa trees, and they made chocolate from crushed cocoa beans, corn and water, and proceeded to spice it with pepper. This was too much for the Spaniards. But one of them had the bright idea of putting sugar into the brew, and it rapidly became so popular that women had steaming cups of it brought into church to sustain them during the sermon.

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This edited article about Humberside originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 693 published on 26 April 1975.

Wilberforce watching a slave-master mistreating his slaves on the dockside in Liverpool

by C L Doughty

Turmoil filled the mind of the boy who, in the sequestered calm of his study in an ancient public school, sat at his desk writing a letter.

In his mind’s eye, the writer envisaged negroes, their bodies gleaming with sweat, packed into the filthy holds of ships sailing from Africa to America.

He saw among them the sick and the dying, and he shuddered when he thought of the bodies of the dead being tossed mercilessly to the waves by the hard-faced crew. And he knew that those that survived the journey would be set to work on the plantations of the American south.

For these were slaves being shipped to the New World by ruthless traders. And the boy who had read about them, and was writing a plaintive plea to a newspaper for their release, was William Wilberforce. Writing from his school at Pocklington, Humberside, he ended his letter with, “Will no one do anything to stop this odious traffic in human flesh?”

No one, it seemed, was willing to do very much until the boy himself grew up to become an ardent campaigner for the abolition of slavery, a campaign which continued until his death. For three days before he died, Wilberforce had the satisfaction of knowing that a Parliamentary bill, which had resulted from his political efforts, was given a second reading in the House of Commons. And in due course, it became law.

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This edited article about Yorkshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 692 published on 19 April 1975.

A typical townscape in the industrial heartland of Yorkshire by Andrew Howat

Yorkshire . . . biggest group of counties in Britain, heart of our great woollen trade . . . cornerstone of all things British . . . wild country, rolling seas, heavy industry – and cricket.

No area languishing in the past is this. For high over the bleak moors towers the missile warning station of Fylingdales, built above rocky coast and sea. In the event of a nuclear attack on Britain, this up-to-the-minute radar station would flash an early warning of the nation’s peril to all our defence bases.

In no other area could you find a remote enough spot for Britain’s closely-guarded warning station. Yet, by contrast, Yorkshire is chiefly known as the throbbing, humming hive of British industry, where for centuries thousands of Yorkshiremen have woven wool and hewn coal to keep us warm.

Most of the industry is crowded into hilly West Yorkshire, formerly called the West Riding, where chains of industrial towns scar the countryside. The original county was so big – more than three million acres – that it was divided into three Ridings – from the old English ryding, meaning a clearing. Since April, last year, it has become the separate counties of North, West and South Yorkshire. Other parts are Humberside and Cleveland, which includes a portion of what was formerly Northumberland.

In the days when the Romans ruled Britain, the wool trade of the world was centred on Yorkshire’s lonely West Riding. Celtic tribes pastured their herds of short-haired sheep on the green slopes of the Pennine hills and wove cloth from the wool on rough handlooms in their huts.

The many streams of soft water flowing down the hillsides helped in the process of cleaning and softening the wool for spinning and weaving.

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This edited article about Julius Wernher originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 690 published on 5 April 1975.

De Beers diamond merchants found their precious gemstones in the diamond mines of Kimberley, by John Henry Frederick Bacon

Sir Julius Wernher, head of De Beers great South African diamond combine, was a very worried man. One day in 1906, a report reached him that a Frenchman named M. Lemoine had discovered a way of making first-class diamonds at a cost of less than a penny apiece.

Diamonds are costly because of their scarcity. To flood the market with mass-produced man-made diamonds would ruin De Beers and the world’s diamond industry almost overnight.

Sir Julius acted promptly. He arranged a meeting at which Lemoine was to demonstrate his process to Sir Julius and a number of his friends, all leading figures in the diamond industry. Their idea was that if Lemoine could convince them of the truth of his claim, it would be well worth trying to buy him out at his own price.

On an appointed day, the party assembled in Lemoine’s laboratory. As a precaution against trickery, Sir Julius insisted that Mr. Jackson, an expert employed by De Beers, should mix the chemicals. This was agreed to, and under Lemoine’s instruction Jackson mixed the ingredients in a crucible and placed the crucible in an electric furnace.

At the end of half-an-hour, the crucible was withdrawn and allowed to cool. The solidified mass was then broken up by Mr. Jackson and, to the onlookers’ amazement, a number of fine, uncut diamonds were revealed. The smiling M. Lemoine then invited Sir Julius himself to do the mixing for a second trial. The result was even more successful for, this time, more than twenty fine diamonds were produced.

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This edited article about early passenger flight originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 685 published on 1 March 1975.

A montage of historic and contemporary passenger planes by Wilf Hardy

The guns had fallen silent all along the Western Front at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, and humanity ceased to dream about peace and began to live it. The terrible First World War was over.

Peace included the chance to use to the full the newest miracle of science, aviation. It was a mere fifteen years since the first manned, powered flight, by the American Wright Brothers in 1903, and now, thanks to the demands of war, tremendous advances in aviation had taken place. 1919 was to see the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic by Alcock and Brown in a converted Vickers Vimy bomber and many other exciting feats. It also saw the birth of international scheduled and regular air transport.

True, before the war Zeppelin airships had been the first to carry passengers, making 881 flights between 1912 and 1913, and the next year a flying boat in Florida, U.S.A. carried a passenger at a time across Tampa Bay. Then, early in 1919, various European companies began carrying some passengers and mail internally. But it was the British company of Aircraft Transport & Travel Ltd which made the historic international and highly organised breakthrough on August 25, 1919.

Its plane was a converted D.H.4A day bomber, which could carry two passengers in cramped conditions in a cabin that had originally housed the observer/gunner in his cockpit. The time was 9.10 am, the plane was marked G-EAJC and was piloted by Lieutenant E. H. (Bill) Lawford, who took off from Hounslow Heath Aerodrome on what was a “positioning” flight – a dummy run – for the first official services later that day. Only one passenger was carried, a Mr. G. M. Stevenson-Reece of the Evening Standard, but there was a full load aboard, including newspapers and leather from a London firm for a Paris firm.

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