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 Charles Dickens originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 705 published on 19 July 1975.

The charismatic novelist, Charles Dickens, gave dramatic readings which captivated his spellbound audiences. Picture by Neville Dear

The fashionably dressed audience applauded enthusiastically as the curtain went up. Most had paid heavily for their seats, some as much as £5, which was a lot of money in 1870. But none regretted it. It was money well spent to hear the great Charles Dickens reading from his own works.

Dickens stood there in the glare of the gas lights, a grey-haired, bearded man in a perfectly tailored evening suit with diamonds gleaming in his shirt front, but looking a good deal older than his 58 years. Then, as the house lights went down, Britain’s greatest living author began to speak. Within a few minutes, no fewer than thirty members of the audience had fainted.

It was not unusual. The medical attendants who set about rendering first aid had known what to expect as soon as they had read the programme. Even veterans of the Crimea were likely to feel distinctly queer when Charles Dickens read one of his bloodthirsty episodes, because he always made it sound even worse than the real thing.

Reading in public from his own work was something that Dickens started quite late in life.

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This edited article about Robert Burns originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 704 published on 12 July 1975.

Robert Burns from the painting by Alexander Naismith

The most famous and best loved of Scotland’s poets was born on January 25th 1759, inside the cottage at Alloway in Ayrshire which his father had built with his own hands.

It was here that Robert Burns spent the first seven years of his life as the son of a farmer. At the age of 15 young Burns had learnt enough about farming to enable him to become a skilled ploughman, but though he once wrote of himself: “I have not the most distant pretensions to being . . . a Gentleman. I am simply Robert Burns, at your service. I was born at the Plough”, it is not true to say, as many have claimed in the past, that he was an uneducated illiterate who suddenly began to write poems without any knowledge of literature. Burns received careful instruction from his father and from his schoolmaster and, as a child, would take poetry books with him into the fields to read. From his mother he gained a wealth of traditional ballads and folk tales which was to help inspire some of his best poetry and at 16 young Burns wrote his first song, ‘Handsome Nell’.

His early love poems and country verses were published in 1786, making him the toast of Edinburgh at 28.

In 1791 he decided to become an exciseman at Dumfries and in his spare time carried out a most important literary task which many believe to be his finest achievement. This was the provision of songs for the Scots Musical Museum and Select Collection of Original Scottish airs. At this time also, he wrote in one day what is considered to be the greatest of his longer poems, ‘Tam O’Shanter’.

Then, in 1796, Burns found that he had to pay the final penalty for his intemperate drinking habits. On July 21st, 1796, Scotland’s finest poet died, at the tragically early age of 37.

This edited article about the man in the iron mask originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 701 published on 21 June 1975.

An English rebel, a French royal prince or a minor Italian nobleman – who was the man in the iron mask? Picture by Neville Dear

One bleak November evening in 1703 a prisoner lay dying in the famous Bastille fortress in Paris. Breathing erratically, he struggled with the responses to the prayers of the chaplain, kneeling with the prison major and the doctor at his bedside. Suddenly he stopped breathing altogether.

The doctor rose quietly and folded the man’s arms across his breast. Then all three left the room. They had just witnessed the death of the most famous prisoner of all time, the Man in the Iron Mask.

The identity of the Man in the Iron Mask is one of the best kept secrets of history. His story has been the subject of books, plays and films, but this glamorizing of his curious life has served only to plunge his real identity deeper into obscurity.

Who was this man? Why did he spend most of his adult life in prison, and why did he wear an iron mask?

To begin with, the mask was not made of iron, but consisted of a whalebone cage covered with tough black velvet. This much we know from a diary kept by one of the lieutenants of the Bastille during the prisoner’s confinement, a soldier called De Jonca. This diary is an important source of evidence for dispelling some of the more fantastic suggestions as to who the prisoner was.

The best known but least credible theory is the one dramatized by Alexandre Dumas in his famous novel, The Man In The Iron Mask.

Louis the Thirteenth, King of France, having despaired of ever being presented with an heir to the throne by his queen, Anne, was discussing the succession problem with his ministers when a messenger hurried into the room and whispered a few words into his ear. The king set off at once to an adjoining room, and returned a little while later with a newly-born boy wrapped in a shawl. His queen had at last provided him with a son, and the Council rejoiced heartily.

A few hours later the king was again asked to come to the queen’s bedroom where, to his dismay, he found that she had just given birth to the second of twin children – another boy.

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This edited article about Alfred Nobel originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 701 published on 21 June 1975.

Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921

The uneasy conscience of a Swedish scientist, who slowly realised that his life’s work would create destruction and misery, led to the foundation of awards dedicated to the search for peace and the happiness of mankind.

All his life, Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, had investigated the chemical properties that released enormous waves of energy when detonated. His ambition was to make them safe to handle and he visualised his discoveries being used in peaceful pursuits such as blasting out harbours, clearing mines and demolition work of all kinds.

Maybe he was naive or perhaps he never found the time to contemplate the awfulness that his work might one day produce. And it seemed he never realised how much money he was making. His work encompassed his horizons completely.

Alfred Nobel, who was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833, was brought up in his father’s inventive aura. Emmanuel Nobel was a manufacturer of nitroglycerin and he had a genius for invention but it was not reinforced by training or education. The creative instinct was not restrained by the caution that comes from learning, with the result that many accidents occurred with his experiments with explosives.

Emmanuel went to Russia where he made steamships and underwater explosives for the government. The rest of the Nobel family joined him in St. Petersburg – now Leningrad – in 1842.

Alfred Nobel spent only two terms in school and then tutors were brought in to help him study to become an engineer. He never went to university. But by his 16th birthday, he was a competent chemist and fluent in French, German and Russian with enough knowledge of English to write poetry in the language.

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This edited article about Rudyard Kipling originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 700 published on 14 June 1975.

Kipling’s Mowgli and his faithful animal friends

A Great man once said that the most exciting years of our lives are those of our earliest childhood. Then, everything is new and strange; each day brings a fresh adventure. Because we live, at that age, so near to the ground, we see and hear things close to the earth. The memory of these things stays with us all our lives, often coming back very powerfully when we are old.

All this was undoubtedly true in the life of Rudyard Kipling. He spent his earliest years soaking up a childhood’s impressions of India, where he was born in 1865. For his first three years, he crawled or pottered about under its hot sun and tropical rain. He gazed at the waving palm trees and tall grasses, the riot of flowers, savouring the fragrance of lilies, orchids, dunghills and charcoal fires; he watched the darting lizards, the circling vultures and an occasional snake or mongoose. From the Indian servants of his home, he learned to prattle away in Hindustani, the common language of the markets and kitchens. From them also, he heard strange Indian folk-tales so different to the stories which the average English child first hears.

His curious name, ‘Rudyard’ was chosen by his godmother, because his parents had first met at a place called Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, where his father was a designer of pottery. His gifts as an artist and sculptor, together with a taste for adventure which his son certainly inherited, gained Rudyard’s father a job under the Government of India. He was sent to Bombay in the summer of 1865, with his wife Alice, whom he had married in the previous March. His task there was to revive the dying art of India’s artists and craftsmen, at the newly opened Bombay School of Art.

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

William Brodie, the real-life Jekyll and Hyde

The young ladies in the drawing-room could not stop talking about the handsome and prosperous bachelor who was coming to tea.

“What a wonderful husband he would make,” they said to each other. “He’s bound to marry soon. I wonder which one of us it will be?”

“Quiet!” said the girl keeping lookout at the window. “He’s knocking at the front door now. He’s dressed all in white – just like a saint.”

And saintly was just how William Brodie appeared to the wealthy merchants he mixed with in Edinburgh society. A bachelor of temperate habits, a city councillor, a skilful cabinet-maker and carpenter, he seemed faultless. The only thing held against him was his shyness and modesty that made him a difficult person to really know.

“He’s certainly polite and charming,” the girls of Edinburgh would say to their mothers. “But he seems a little too perfect. It is as if he is trying to hide something from us.”

They little guessed then that William Brodie was hiding plenty from them. Just what it was emerged in 1788 when Brodie – then forty-eight and still unmarried – was tried and executed at Tolbooth Prison as the leader of a gang of vicious underworld burglars who had long terrorized the city.

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

The Nazis arrested P G Wodehouse and, after releasing him from a prison camp, they effectively interned him in Germany for the duration of the war, by Roger Payne

His first comic creation was a character called Psmith, with the P silent, as in psalm, and one of his masterpieces of invention was the monumental Empress of Blandings. No, she was not a mighty ruler, but a prize pig, the pride and joy of that potty peer, the Earl of Emsworth.

For P. G. Wodehouse, who died in February of this year at the grand old age of 93, the clock stopped around 1900, even though some of his more recent characters travelled by jet. He created a timeless fairyland set somewhere in Shropshire, where he placed that noble pile of funny happenings, Blandings Castle.

Also in the fairyland was London, and especially, the Drones Club, inhabited by Eggs, Beans and Crumpets. (Young readers please note that it was quite common to address someone as “Old Bean” or “Old Egg” in not-so-distant days.)

The weather tended to be rather good in this fairyland, except for flashes of Summer Lightning, the title of one of his funniest books, and the loudest noise seemed to be “the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows”. Aunt Agatha was rather noisy, of course, but not the greatest of them all, Jeeves, butler extraordinary to Bertie Wooster.

What a pair! Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. Yes, Wodehouse was in the big league, the lowbrow whom the highbrows, along with millions of others, adored. This most English of writers was even translated into Chinese and Japanese, and his early admirers included Kipling, H. G. Wells, and Hilaire Belloc, who called him the best living writer of English. Ordinary folk just laughed out loud.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

Born in Paris on January 25th, 1874, William Somerset Maugham was to become one of the most famous English writers of the twentieth century.

His father was solicitor at the British Embassy in Paris and young William learned to speak French before he spoke English.

An orphan before he was ten years old, he was brought up by a clergyman-uncle in Whitstable, Kent, and went to school at King’s School, Canterbury.

Maugham then went to continue his education at Heidelberg University in Germany, and returned to England to study medicine in St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, for six years.

Although he spent a long time training to become a doctor, Maugham never practised his profession except as a student in the London slums, and it was from these experiences that he drew material for his novel, Liza of Lambeth, and for Of Human Bondage, which is considered his finest novel.

At first, Maugham was better known as a playwright than a novelist, though it was only after years of effort that he won success with his play Lady Frederick in 1907.

During the First World War, Maugham served with the Intelligence Department which gave him material for his famous spy story, Ashenden.

In 1915, he married a daughter of Dr. Thomas Barnardo, the man who devoted his life to the rescue of orphans and waifs.

Maugham’s fame as a short-story writer, at which he was an acknowledged master, began with The Trembling of a Leaf in 1921. Ten more collections of short stories followed.

His best known novels are The Moon and Sixpence, The Painted Veil, Cakes and Ale, The Razor’s Edge and Catalina.

Maugham was made a Companion of Honour in 1954, and died in 1965.

This edited article about Perthshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 688 published on 22 March 1975.

Rob Roy and his cattle-raiding exploits against Montrose

Often in the quiet nights the cottagers of Perthshire would hear strange sounds on the road outside – the sound of cattle being herded along, the soft murmur of men’s voices, the clink of a bridle as a mysterious midnight procession moved on its way.

It was wiser not to interfere. The cottagers put their heads under the blankets, and left well alone, for Rob Roy MacGregor was stealing cattle again.

On the face of it, Rob Roy was a farmer. He lived in Perthshire, at the turn of the seventeenth century. His interest in cattle, however, was not limited to grazing them. He called on farmers and offered to protect their herds against thieves for a sum of money.

“Aye, that’s well enough,” said the farmers, after Rob Roy had departed, “but who’s the biggest cattle thief in Perthshire? Rob Roy!”

When too many Perthshire cattle farmers had got to know his game, Rob Roy became a cattle-dealer. Men gave him money to buy cattle at market for them, but Rob Roy soon got tired of working for a small fee.

One day in 1711 he collected the money as usual – and made off with it to the Western Isles.

When Rob returned to Perthshire, he found that his family had been turned out of their home by the Duke of Montrose, because Rob Roy owed the Duke money. Seething with anger, Rob Roy vowed vengeance against Montrose.

“He shall pay dear for this!” he snarled, “his grand estates will provide me with food and my living. Not a single one of his cattle shall be safe from me!”

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