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

A sailing barge

As his tall-masted sailing barge, the Phoenician, skimmed over the water of the Thames, Captain Alfred Horlock knew that he had another winner. He saw the wind billowing the russet sails of his vessel, smelt the salt in the breeze from the estuary, and felt the waves beneath his feet as the ship rode them like a dream.

Behind him were the other competitors in this race, their blunt bows cleaving through the river.

Captain Horlock felt triumphant. He was a skipper who knew how to use the wind and the tide to beat all his rivals in the most graceful races of all time – the sailing barge races on the Thames and Medway, first held in 1863.

Captain Horlock was one of the most successful skippers to compete in these. He won his first race in 1905, and in the years that followed built up a tally of 19 wins out of the 21 races he entered.

He was one of the four generations of Horlocks who had won the barge races, beginning with his grandfather in 1868. The vessels they used were known as spritsail barges, which are among the most remarkable sailing vessels in the world. At one time they were a familiar sight in the Thames estuary and along the east coast of England, carrying their cargoes from one coastal port to another, or up the Thames to London docks.

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This edited article about frogs originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 696 published on 17 May 1975.

Frog on a lily pad by Nadir Quinto

As winter slowly draws to an end and the first signs of spring appear, many members of the animal world begin to wake from their hibernation. Among these is the frog which emerges from its six-month sleep in its dark, muddy home at the bottom of a pond or of a ditch, to prepare itself for the busiest time of the year.

This begins in the middle of March which is the frogs’ pairing season. All over Britain, these remarkable-looking creatures, with their smooth, moist skin, and bulging eyes perched on top of the head, start to congregate in ponds to select their mates.

They return to the same ponds, and to the same part of the pond, year after year. The males arrive first and wait for the females to follow. The female lays her eggs a few weeks later and it is at this time that the males find their voices. They swell their throats and croak loudly, while the females chirp and grunt in reply.

While the male lies on her back, the female sheds her eggs, often totalling many thousands, and the male fertilises them as soon as they are laid. At first, the eggs sink to the bottom of the pond and are only about three millimetres in diameter. But their gelatinous covering soon absorbs the water, swells up to about seven millimetres, rises to the surface of the water, and there floats in a giant mass of spawn. Each of the jelly spheres has a black centre, which is the egg-proper.

It takes four weeks for these to develop into brown larvae or tadpoles. The head, body and tail, like those of a fish, merge one into another and bear no resemblance to the adults.

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This edited article about glaciers originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 694 published on 3 May 1975.

Prehistoric landscape with glaciers

For thousands of years the river of solid ice has been creeping down the mountainside, slowly and relentlessly grinding and cutting a valley between the mountain peaks capped with their eternal snow.

This moving river of ice is called a glacier, from the Latin-French word glacis meaning ice.

How are frozen rivers such as this one formed? When snow falls on high mountains, one of two things can happen.

The sun may melt the snow so that it flows down the mountain as a river of water.

But if the mountain top is very cold the snow hardens and slides down into a valley. If the valley is also very cold the snow collects there and is squeezed and frozen into the river of ice we call a glacier.

Pushed forward by the ice forming behind it, the glacier moves slowly down the valley, scratching and grinding the rocks over which it passes and in time digging out for itself a deep channel.

During its formation and while it is travelling down the mountain, a glacier collects large pieces of rock which become frozen into it and stick out like teeth from the bottom of the ice. While the immense weight of ice is moving, these teeth cut great grooves in the ground over which the ice is passing.

A lot of glaciers end their lives in warmer valleys where their ice melts and becomes a stream or small river.

You will find them where there are high mountains and a cold climate. Antarctica, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, the Himalayas and Switzerland are the great breeding grounds of glaciers.

In Switzerland, where there are over two thousand of them, glaciers are quite short, seldom more than four miles long. But in Antarctica they are hundreds of miles long and sixty miles wide.

In very cold parts of the world, particularly in Antarctica and the far north of the American continent, glaciers move down to the sea. There huge pieces of the frozen rivers break off and float away as icebergs.

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 the sea originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 689 published on 29 March 1975.

Waves crashing on the seafront by Clive Uptton

Most of us think that the sea consists entirely of water. But in every hundred pounds weight of sea water there are about three and a half pounds of solid materials. Most of them are salts of one kind or another.

If all the salts could be taken out of all the world’s oceans and spread over the continents, they would form a crust several feet thick.

Another surprising thing is that sodium chloride, which is the chemists’ name for the salt we sprinkle on our food, makes up only three-quarters of the salts dissolved in sea water.

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This edited article about Zaire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 673 published on 7 December 1974.

Henry Morton Stanley explored the Congo and with King Leopold II of the Belgians  he largely invented the country known as the Belgian Congo. Picture by C L Doughty

During the last two decades, many regions of Africa have gained their independence, and Britain, who had a large part of her empire in this continent, gave back the power of self-government peacefully to many states.

The Congo, now called The Republic of Zaire, has had a turbulent and violent history. Henry Morton Stanley was the first man to explore the main Congo River, and after his great journey, the Congo Free State was founded in 1879 by King Leopold II of Belgium. King Leopold II and Stanley literally created the Belgian Congo. These two men were both similar in character, ambitious, with great tenacity and boundless energy.

Leopold became one of the richest men in the world through the exploitation of the country’s wealth, particularly its vast resources of rubber and ivory which were then the main exports. He ruled with a rod of iron and during his reign, it has been estimated that between five and eight million Congolese lost their lives or were killed, either in the plantations or hunting elephant. If an African did not satisfy his boss, often his foot or arm sometimes both, were cut off.

The Congo was plunged into anarchy when the army mutinied just after receiving its independence from Belgium in 1960. Before the mutiny, the then Belgian Congo was turned into a blood bath when the Congolese butchered many of their Belgian ‘white masters’. For several years the native population had been plotting and planning to overthrow the foreign domination of their country. Right through this mainly dense forest area of Africa, which covers 905,000 square miles, the various tribes sent messages to each other by their bush telegraph, (the talking drum). Each village had their tribesmen signallers who passed information backwards and forwards through this hostile land.

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This edited article about Egypt originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 671 published on 23 November 1974.

Building the Pyramids by Neville Dear

Armies have fought across its deserts – men in tanks and bomb-laden aeroplanes in recent years, and the conquerors on camels in its distant past. And yet this land in the desert beside the Nile is a place with a strange tranquility, which the hot haze rising in the streets of its sun-bleached towns cannot dispel. It seems strange and yet Egypt, (for this is the country otherwise known as the United Arab Republic) will always remain an enigma from its inscrutable Sphinx staring across the desert to its political disturbances of modern time.

Egypt is a leading nation in the Arab world, and the Egyptians are descended from one of the oldest civilisations known. Their written records go back over 6,000 years. But for century after century, this nation has been dominated by its various conquerors. Ethiopians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and others have all left their footprints in the sands of Egypt. From 525 BC, the date of the Persian invasion, until 1922, when a British protectorate ended, it has been virtually ruled by foreigners. Although a king was proclaimed in 1922, the military occupation by British troops did not end until 1936.

Later, it saw the rise to power of Colonel Gamal Nasser, first president of the Egyptian republic, who nationalised the Suez canal, and sparked off retaliatory action by British and French armies. He also built the enormous Aswan High Dam to irrigate vast areas of desert and turn it into fertile land. Nasser carried out many reforms to bring his people out of their feudal backwardness and, since his death in 1970, his work has been continued by his successors.

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This edited article about paddle steamers  originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 664 published on 5 October 1974.

A paddle steamer on the Missouri River by Ron Embleton

Among the most beautiful and elegant of all the ships ever built, are the paddle steamers. When we see pictures of this type of vessel, we usually think of the mighty Mississippi in the United States; of Mark Twain and his delightful books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. As a young boy this famous American writer would sit on the banks of the river in his hometown of Hannibal and dream of the day when he could become captain of a Mississippi steamer. It was an ambition cherished by many young boys who lived in Missouri in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Paddle steamers were designed to operate in shallow waters and although they are old fashioned and belong to a bygone age, they are still used today in many parts of the world in shallow waterways.

They were long and low with as many as four decks, often with carved rails, pillars and balustrades. The wheel house, right at the top of the boat, was often made in the oriental style, like little temples, and surmounted by the whistle, the steam horn which had such a distinct note. Another feature of the paddle steamer was the two funnels splayed out at the top just like those on steam trains of the same period.

The first steamer to operate on the Mississippi was the “New Orleans.” This was in 1811, but her power was not sufficient to get the boat back upstream so she was discontinued.

The next and most important steamer was the “George Washington” which was to become the blueprint for more than five thousand steamers which were to chug up and down the Mississippi.

But for a long time the stern wheelers were the ugly ducklings of the river; the beautiful swans being the side-wheelers; steamers with big paddle wheels at each side of the boat.

But in the mid-1800s another steam giant was to take over the transportation business in the United States. Much quicker, and cheaper, the “Iron Horse” as people called the railroad, was to mark the end of the golden age of the paddle steamer.

This edited article about steam power originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 649 published on 22 June 1974.

The Great Western was one of the first two steam-powered ships to cross the Atlantic and arrived in New York on April 23rd 1838, by H Gribben

The boatmen looked at each other in disbelief. “He must be mad to take a boat out in this wind,” they said. But William Symington took no notice of sceptics; he was determined to show them what his new steam-powered vessel could do. And so, in March 1802, he took the “Charlotte Dundas” on to the Forth and Clyde Canal on a day so blustery that no other vessels dared to venture forth.

Lord Dundas, who had commissioned the building of the boat named after his daughter, was extremely pleased with its performance. In six hours, the boat towed two 70-ton barges a distance of 19 and a half miles.

But the canal owners were not so pleased for they immediately banned the use of steamboats on British canals because it was feared that their wash would cause too much damage to the banks. William Symington became so downhearted at this news that he lost all interest in the project, eventually dying, penniless, in London in 1831. The “Charlotte Dundas” was laid up in a creek of the canal and was finally broken up in 1861 – a sad ending for the world’s first practical steamboat.

Before William Symington’s efforts, there had been many attempts to utilise steam power for boats. The earliest was in 1543 when, on June 17, in the harbour of Barcelona, Spain, Blasco de Garay fitted paddle wheels to the ship “Trinidad” and achieved a speed of 3 and a half mph. Later reports stated, however, that each paddle-wheel had in fact been powered by 25 men. The clouds of steam that eyewitnesses had reported as coming from the vessel had emanated from a cauldron of hot water kept on deck for defensive purposes!

It is believed that in 1707, Denis Papin, the French steam pioneer, fitted a boat with steam-powered paddles intending to sail it from Marburg to London. He did not get very far as the watermen of the River Fulda became suspicious of the strange vessel and smashed it to pieces. A year later, Papin submitted plans to the Royal Society in London for the building of a steamboat, but nothing appears to have materialised from this suggestion.

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This edited article about Gloucester originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 641 published on 27 April 1974.

The Severn Bore attracts many spectators, by Angus McBride

You would hardly expect to go visiting a city just to watch an outsize bore. Yet that’s why hundreds of people pass through the city of Gloucester every month. They are en route to watch the biggest bore in Britain.

The bore, however, isn’t someone who talks too much. It’s in the River Severn, a few miles to the west of the city, and it’s a giant wave.

Bores, like the ones people go to see on the Severn, are created whenever the sea, flowing into an estuary with the rising tide, is compressed by narrowing banks and a shallower channel into an advancing wave and pressed forward by the weight of the tide behind it.

They occur in several parts of the world wherever the range of tides and the shape of the river estuaries is right. The biggest is reputed to occur on a river in China. In Europe the Seine, Gironde and Trent all have bores, but by far the largest and most spectacular are those on the River Severn.

You may see the Severn bore twice a day – at both tides – on about 130 days a year, but bores of any real size only occur on about 25 days. The size can be affected by wind and by the amount of fresh water flowing down the river, but a stiff south-west wind in the Bristol Channel, a low barometer and about two feet more water than normal in the river, combined with a big tide, should give a really spectacular wave.

The Severn bore is one of the sights of Gloucestershire, and it can be watched going round a horseshoe bend in the river for three or four miles. But a word of warning if ever you go to see it. Never, under any circumstances, leave the top of the river bank when a bore is due, because you could be suddenly and swiftly drowned.

The Severn made Gloucester, for the city centre is a low, sandy hill in a well drained area by the river, where men have lived together for probably thousands of years. The first such peoples we know something about in Gloucester are the Romans.

When their army arrived here in the first century A.D. they recognised the advantages of the hilly site. They wanted a frontier on the Severn and easy communication with their theatre of war in South Wales. The place was ideal, and they called it Glevum.

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