This edited article about spa towns originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 256 published on 10 December 1966.

General view of Spa by W S Bagdatopulos

“One [o'clock] in the afternoon. Called for my flowered handkerchief. Worked half a violet in it. Eyes ached and head out of order. Threw by my work . . .” (Mr. Addison – The Spectator no. 323.)

Many such as these would come to ‘drink the waters’ at a spa in order to while away part of the year in a congenial social atmosphere under the pretext of the pursuit of health.

Spas like Bath were so popular at this time that the merits of their medicinal waters were remembered in the summer months when the rigours of London society began to pall. “The city of Bath” remarked Oliver Goldsmith, “by such assiduity, soon became the theatre of summer amusements for all people of fashion . . . Upon a stranger’s arrival at Bath, he is welcomed by a peal of the Abbey bells, and in the next place, by the voice and music of the city waits. For these civilities, the ringers have generally a present made to them of half-a-guinea, and the waits of half-a-crown, or more, in proportion to the person’s fortune, generosity, or ostentation.”

Society in Bath was organised by Beau Nash – “a man,” said Oliver Goldsmith, “who for 50 years presided over the pleasures of a polite kingdom” – and Bath was organised for Society. Its brilliance and gaiety revolved around the healthful springs.

Few of the wilting social ‘flowers’ who fortified themselves for the giddy round of frivolity with mineral water, can have known to whom they owed the fortunate and fashionable practice.

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This edited article about the Crystal Palace originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 255 published on 3 December 1966.

Crystal Palace; the Great Exhibition of 1851; Transept (external views) of the Industrial Palace, from Prince of Wales's Gate by Charles Burton

The Great Exhibition, opened by Queen Victoria in 1851 – an Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations – was an enormous success; and when it was over, many people found that they had grown attached to the giant glasshouse, the Crystal Palace, which had been built specially for the exhibition. Clearly, it had to be removed from Hyde Park, but where could it be taken?

The beautiful estate of Penge Park, at Sydenham, in South London, was offered as a new home for the ‘crystal elephant’. It was taken down piece by piece and re-erected. Queen Victoria opened it for the second time in 1854. Thousands of people passed through the massive glasshouse, visiting the art collections, hearing music and delighting in the glorious gardens surrounding the glittering, airy palace.

Entertainments were arranged on a magnificent scale: particularly famous were the firework displays held regularly in the summer. Such monster explosions as the ‘Niagara of Fire’ used nearly a ton of iron filings in its short, spectacular life.

Meals were served in the many restaurants at prices to suit every pocket. Oysters or chicken patty were priced at sixpence, roast lamb and mint sauce cost one shilling, a chop or steak with vegetables, bread, butter, cheese and attendance cost one shilling and ninepence.

Before the First World War (1914-18) the Final of the Football Association Cup was played in the grounds of Crystal Palace, but on the outbreak of war it was taken over by the Admiralty as a base for recruiting and training naval volunteers. When the war was over, the Palace opened again as a centre of entertainment, but its days were numbered.

On the cold night of 30th November, 1936, it was destroyed by a fire which gutted it from end to end, sending up into the sky firework-like cascades of sparks which were seen for miles around. For three days the building simmered. It was completely wrecked, except for one high tower, later to be pulled down.

Of the old Palace, nothing had remained but the name, for today on the site of the Crystal Palace there stands an enormous modern sports arena.

This edited article about the Great Exhibition of 1851 originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 207 published on 1 January 1966.

The Palace of Glass for the Great Industrial Exhibition, 1851

A New Britain appeared before the world at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London, in 1851. The idea of the exhibition seems to have originated with the Prince Consort, and in July, 1849, he invited some members of the Society of Arts to Buckingham Palace to hear their views. What he had in mind was to show the world what Britain was doing in the way of manufactures. His enthusiasm proved catching, and he easily converted the others to his views.

But the Prince had also to win the manufacturers round to his way of thinking. They were frightened that trade secrets would be given away, but he made an appeal to them on the ground that the profit of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the world, and to their credit many of them agreed to support him. The Prince was careful to keep his own name out of the project as much as possible, and he was annoyed when, as he said, it looked as if he were “to be advertised, and used as a means of drawing a full house.”

At first the public did not take the Exhibition very seriously, but the Prince was persistent, and in the winter of 1849-50 after five thousand guarantors had been somewhat reluctantly enlisted, a Royal Commission was set up. Sixteen acres of land on the southern side of Hyde Park were secured, and a design for a monster palace of glass was accepted from Joseph Paxton, who had built the conservatories at Chatsworth for the Duke of Devonshire. It was this glass palace which excited the most ridicule, and it was freely prophesied that it would prove impossible to erect.

Other criticisms were made, too. It was feared that the Exhibition would attract enormous crowds of very undesirable people, who would trample all over the flower-beds in Hyde Park, and as likely as not finish up by pillaging the houses in Belgravia and Kensington. This would be bad enough, but there would be sure to be hordes of very dubious foreigners, and at that time foreigners were regarded with grave suspicion. Colonel Sibthorpe, M.P., whom we have already seen, was a violent opponent of the railways, even went so far as to get up in the House of Commons and pray that “hail or lightning might descend from Heaven” to defeat Prince Albert’s plans. The American press foretold general massacre and insurrection.

One critic wrote to The Times to point out that when the guns in Hyde Park fired a Royal Salute the glass of the building would crash to the ground.

In spite of all opposition and sneers the glittering Palace steadily rose above the green spaces of Hyde Park, and Thackeray in his May Day Ode wrote:

A blazing arch of lucid glass
Leaps like a fountain from the grass
To meet the sun.

Two thousand workmen were employed on the building which was over six hundred yards long, containing nearly a million square feet of glass and providing over eight miles of table space for the exhibits.

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This edited article about the Normans originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 107 published on 1 February 1964.

Bartholomew Fair in Norman times by Ron Embleton

Robert is a Norman name, unknown among the English before the Norman Conquest. But young Robert, son of Wulf, whom we will watch growing up in England in the reign of King Henry I, is of purely native stock. When he was born, in 1115, Londoners were already giving their children names of Saxon, Danish and Norman origin indiscriminately; for they are Londoners first.

Young Robert is now fifteen. Last year he finished his education and began to help in his father’s workshop as an apprentice; for Wulf is a tailor.

By the time he is twenty-one Robert must be a good tailor also, capable of running a business of his own. He is Wulf’s eldest son, with several younger brothers and sisters; and when his father dies the youngest son will inherit. That was a custom peculiar to English towns, so peculiar that Norman lawyers have named it Borough-English.

Of course, no one supposes that a young child can manage a tailor’s shop. The idea is that Wulf’s elder children ought to be able to earn their own living, and that the business can be sold to support the baby until he is old enough to support himself.

That is a freedom unknown in the country. A townsman may sell his house without seeking permission from any lord. No countryman, from a simple labourer to a great baron, may sell his land; it must descend automatically to his heir. But London is a very free, favoured and powerful town, and Londoners enjoy many liberties.

It is St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1130, and Robert is setting off with his father to visit the great annual fair. Or rather, the opening day of the fair, for Bartholomew Fair lasts until the travelling merchants have sold all their wares.

First of course they hear Mass, as always before any special undertaking, and on many other holy days as well as Sundays during the year. But they do not have to walk far to church; there are 136 parish churches within the square mile of London.

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This edited article about Shakespeare originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 105 published on 18 January 1964.

Shakespeare acting at the The Globe Theatre by Peter Jackson

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you – trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. . . .

“Be not too tame, neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor; suit the action to the word, the word to the action. . . .”

Hamlet is advising the actors who will perform the play he has written, the very action of which will unnerve the murderer of his father, sitting in the audience.

Shakespeare knew the power of words spoken on a stage – the power to enthral, to arouse the emotions, to stir the conscience, or in lighter moments, to amuse.

But two thousand years before him the Greeks knew it, too. They built a place with vast circles of seats rising up from an open stage and there, as the actors performed, the audience looked on.

The Greek for looking on was theasthai; the place itself was called a theatron, and thus we get the word which across the centuries has carried its promise of enchantment to millions. The word is, of course, theatre.

In Greece today you can still sit where those audiences sat, five hundred years before the birth of Christ. You can read the plays which were performed, by such great playwrights as Aristophanes. But knowing of these great beginnings of so many years ago, would you imagine that the theatre story could plunge back into darkness and oppression; that in spite of the culture which spread across Europe, it would be two thousand years before Britain’s capital city would have a permanent public theatre, in 1576?

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This edited article about Sir Henry Wood originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 802 published on 28th May 1977.

Sir Henry Wood

In London, in the summer of 1895, the call went out for a very special kind of conductor. He had to be young, good-looking, and have plenty of personality. An expert knowledge of music was, of course, essential. But the most important quality of all was a love of young people, and the desire to bring all the great symphonies, concertos, and oratorios to them.

The opportunity to hear such music had been denied the capital’s youngsters throughout the 1890s, when only the middle-aged and well-to-do could afford to visit the various concert halls. The manager of one such place, Robert Newman of the Queen’s Hall, near Oxford Circus, was determined to provide what he called “music for everyone”, and so he re-introduced the idea of Promenade Concerts, or “Proms”.

Tickets for such “standing-room only” events would be cheap and plentiful. Their sale would be restricted to boys and girls under the age of, say twenty-five, and the music would be specially chosen to suit and to educate young tastes. The Proms were due to start that August and all that was needed was the right person to wield the baton.

Then, after a long and careful search, Mr Newman settled on a black-bearded and swarthy maestro, 26-year-old Henry Wood, who had been born of musical parents above a pub just a short distance from the Queen’s Hall.

Although he rightly claimed to be as “English as Big Ben”, Wood looked much more like the typically Bohemian type of foreign conductor. And when he was introduced to Queen Victoria three years later she asked imperiously: “Are you quite English. Mr Wood? Your appearance is rather un-English!”

However, despite his “unpatriotic” appearance, Wood recruited a full-scale symphony orchestra, and at 8 p.m. on August 10, 1895, he raised his baton in the crowded Queen’s Hall. A few seconds later the opening bars of Wagner’s Rienzi overture crashed out, and the Proms, which were to become the world’s biggest annual music festival, were under way.

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This edited article about Grock originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 783 published on 15th January 1976.

Grock, the musical clown

On to the stage came a clown with a big, bald head covered by a hat. He wore baggy trousers and enormously long shoes. He decided to start his act by playing the concertina, but his chair collapsed. He opened an enormous trunk and pulled out a tiny violin. After playing a few notes, he headed for a grand piano and sat down on the stool.

The stool was too far away from the piano. Not for one moment did it occur to him to move the stool to the piano. Instead, he nearly fainted with exhaustion pushing the piano to the stool. Then the keyboard lid started attacking him. Every time he opened it it crashed down on his fingers.

At last, things seemed to be going better, but, suddenly, his hat started to fall off. In despair lest the audience should see he was bald, he slid over the piano trying to keep it on. The moment it finally fell off his misery was complete. It was a moment of tragedy and comedy rolled into one. The audience cheered – Grock had truimphed again! His act was wordless except for groans, plaintive protests and gurgles!

Needless to say, Grock was actually a fine musician, a master of eight instruments.

Grock, the greatest clown of the 20th century, was born in Switzerland on 10th January, 1880. His father was a watch-maker who loved the circus, and it was as a circus performer that the young Grock was trained.

From his youth he had the clown’s gift of looking at an object as if it was alive. He once wrote that everything seemed to be looking at him and saying: “We’ve been waiting for you . . . at last you’ve come . . . take us now and turn us into something different . . . we’ve been so bored waiting.” So Grock turned piano lids and violin bows into living things. Grock summed it all up, when he once said to his father: “I want people to laugh . . . to simply split their sides whenever they catch a sight of me.”

Grock switched from the circus to the theatre in Berlin in 1911. It took him some time to adjust to playing less “broadly” than in the circus ring, but he triumphed, especially in London, where Grock appeared year after year with a series of partners and on his own. His reputation was world-wide and colossal – so were his fees!

It cannot be proved how funny, entertaining and moving his performances were by mere words. Grock had tremendous personality, incomparable timing, real pathos and looked, and was, very funny. He spellbound his audiences. In 1959 he died, after a long retirement.

This edited article about the Pont Neuf originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 778 published on 11th December 1975.

A view of the Pont Neuf in Paris with the equestrian statue of Henri IV in the foreground

Paris was in turmoil. Angry crowds of people marched through the streets shouting and fighting, overturning carts and hurling bricks at the windows of buildings.

It was 14th July, 1789 and the crowds were on their way to the Bastille prison, the symbol of tyranny and oppression. Before the day was over, they had destroyed the prison and killed the governor. The French Revolution had begun.

On their way, the furious mobs had to surge across the Pont-Neuf, which stretches across the Seine.

Its origin goes back to the 16th century when Paris was bursting its medieval limits and spreading over both banks of the Seine, especially the right. It was growing into a city, the capital of a flourishing kingdom, and developing severe traffic problems.

The Ile de la Cite was its centre with the cathedral of Notre Dame towering over the low-roofed buildings.

A petition to connect the almost isolated isle to both banks was drawn up and presented to Henri II, who died from tournament wounds before he could do anything about it. His successor, Francois II also reigned briefly and did nothing about building a bridge, and his successor, Charles IX, was just as inactive in this respect.

For a generation nothing was achieved and the problem became intense, for the only links between the island and the mainland were two ageing bridges which were nearing the end of their days.

At last, under Henri III, the last Valois, the new bridge was ordered through the auspices of the National Treasury, and a commission of prominent men, assisted by a technical board of master masons, carpenters and builders was set up.

The design was drawn up by two men, Baptiste Decerceau, the royal architect, and Pierre des Illes. On 31st May, 1578, the first stone was placed by the king in the presence of the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici.

All the piers to the left bank Рthe shorter distance Рwere completed by he end of the year. The design called for a bridge resting on the Pointe de la Cité, the western end of the isle, with a long arm connecting the right bank and a shorter one the left.

Provision was made for houses and shops, but the prospective tenants had to be patient, for the bridge was not completed for 28 years.

First the construction was halted by the religious wars of 1588. By the time peace returned, the piers of the long arm of the new bridge were suffering from the scourge of all medieval bridges – scour, the abrasive action of moving sand.

In 1602, Henri IV, then on the throne, carried out repairs and completed the short arm to the left bank. A year later, he rode his white horse over the still dangerously incomplete bridge. The roadway was finished in 1607 and the bridge opened.

In the mid-17th century, the bridge became the social centre of Paris, as well as the strategic focal point. By now it was not merely an essential passageway but the busiest, liveliest street in town. Idlers, rich or poor, strolled across it and the wealthy rode upon it in their carriages or sedan chairs.

In the 18th century there came the upheaval of the Revolution followed, in 1792, by the setting up on the bridge of a recruiting station to enlist men to fight for the Republic.

The battles of the Revolution passed to and fro across the bridge and then, in 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte accepted the leadership of France when he was appointed First Consul at a ceremony on Pont-Neuf.

Firework displays on the bridge celebrated successive victories, revealing that the Pont-Neuf was as much at the heart of Paris then as it is in these modern times.

This edited article about the Great Exhibition originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 777 published on 4th December 1975.

Victoria and Albert arrive at Paxton’s Crystal Palace by John Keay

The Great Exhibition, opened by Queen Victoria in 1851, was an enormous success; and when it was over, many people found that they had grown attached to the giant glasshouse, the Crystal Palace, which had been built specially for the exhibition. Clearly, it had to be removed from Hyde Park, but where could it be taken?

The beautiful estate of Penge Park, at Sydenham in South London, was offered as a new home for the “crystal elephant”. It was taken down piece by piece and re-erected. Queen Victoria opened it for the second time in 1854. Thousands of people passed through the massive structure, visiting the art collections, hearing music and delighting in the glorious gardens surrounding the glittering, airy palace.

Entertainments were arranged on a magnificent scale: particularly famous were the firework displays held regularly in the summer. One monster explosion, the “Niagara of Fire”, used nearly a ton of iron filings in its short, spectacular life.

Meals were served in the many restaurants at prices to suit every pocket. Oysters or chicken patty were priced at sixpence, roast lamb and mint sauce cost one shilling, a chop or steak with vegetables, bread, butter, cheese and attendance cost one shilling and ninepence.

Before the First World War, the Final of the Football Association Cup was played in the grounds of Crystal Palace, but on the outbreak of war, in 1914, it was taken over by the Admiralty as a base for recruiting and training naval volunteers. When the war was over, the Palace opened again as a centre of entertainment, but its days were numbered.

On the cold night of 30th November 1936, it was destroyed by a fire which gutted it from end to end, sending up into the sky firework-like cascades of sparks which were seen for miles around.

The building was completely wrecked, except for one high tower, later to be pulled down. Of the old Palace, nothing remained but the name.

Today on the site of the Crystal Palace there stands a modern sports centre. And in the grounds of the park, concerts are held on summer evenings which usually finish with fireworks, keeping up the traditions of former times.

This edited article about the London originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 769 published on 9th October 1975.

The first Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race on the River Thames by John Keay

The Boat Race of 1882 was rather special. Fluttering above the umpire’s puffing paddle-steamer was an unmistakable flag of blue, red and gold – the Royal Standard. No less a person than the Prince of Wales himself had arrived.

Boat Race day on the Thames between Putney and Mortlake was always a great day for Londoners, and the annual battle between Oxford and Cambridge generated far more excitement then than it does now. Everybody, from old rowing “blues” presiding over city banks to the lowliest barrow-boys who had never set foot outside London, was a fervent supporter of one or other of England’s ancient universities.

The presence of the prince in 1882 merely made the usual crush and excitement worse. So many Londoners turned up to watch the Boat Race that the South-Western Railway simply doubled their fares – to cut down the number of passengers, they said!

The Thames had always been a focus of London life, both for pleasure and for work. It was already becoming polluted with sewage and other waste, but one heroic swimmer volunteered to give Londoners a different sort of river race in 1880 – by racing a dog down the Thames from London Bridge to Woolwich. The dog, named Now Then, won, being a full half-mile ahead when the intrepid swimmer gave up exhausted at Limehouse.

The biggest event on the river was, however, some 30 miles up-river from London. This was the Henley Regatta, to which citizens of Victorian or Edwardian London habitually flocked in their thousands. They were supposed to be off to see the races, though for many, Henley was simply a grand excuse for a party.

As a rhyme in the magazine Punch put it: – “If athletes must pant, And I don’t say they shan’t, Give them some decent employment; And let it be clear, They don’t interfere With other folk’s quiet enjoyment!”

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