Latest news with #VictorianBritain
The Independent
10-07-2025
- Sport
- The Independent
How strawberries and cream became ‘a true icon' of Wimbledon
Wimbledon is all about strawberries and cream (and of course tennis). The club itself describes strawberries and cream as 'a true icon of The Championships'. While a meal at one of the club's restaurants can set you back £130 or more, a bowl of the iconic dish is a modest £2.70 (up from £2.50 in 2024 – the first price rise in 15 years). In 2024, visitors munched their way through nearly 2 million berries. Strawberries and cream has a long association with Wimbledon. Even before lawn tennis was added to its activities, the All England Croquet Club (now the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club) was serving strawberries and cream to visitors. They would have expected no less. Across Victorian Britain, strawberries and cream were a staple of garden parties of all sorts. Private affairs, political fundraisers and county cricket matches all typically served the dish. Alongside string bands and games of lawn tennis, strawberries and cream were among the pleasures that Victorians expected to encounter at a fête or garden party. As a result, one statistician wrote in the Dundee Evening Telegraph in 1889, Londoners alone consumed 12 million berries a day over the summer. At that rate, he explained, if strawberries were available year-round, Britons would spend 24 times more on strawberries than on missionary work, and twice as much as on education. But of course, strawberries and cream were not available year-round. They were a delightful treat of the summer and the delicate berries did not last. Victorian newspapers, such as the Illustrated London News, complained that even the fruits on sale in London were a sad, squashed travesty of those eaten in the countryside, to say nothing of London's cream, which might have been watered down. Wimbledon's lawn tennis championships were held in late June or early July – in the midst, in other words, of strawberry season. Eating strawberries and cream had long been a distinctly seasonal pleasure. Seventeenth-century menu plans for elegant banquets offered strawberries, either with cream or steeped (rather deliciously, and I recommend you try this) in rose water, white wine, and sugar – as a suitable dish for the month of June. They were, in the view of the 17th-century gardener John Parkinson, 'a cooling and pleasant dish in the hot summer season'. They were, in short, a summer food. That was still the case in the 1870s, when the Wimbledon tennis championship was established. This changed dramatically with the invention of mechanical refrigeration. From the late 19th century, new technologies enabled the global movement of chilled and frozen foods across vast oceans and spaces. Domestic ice-boxes and refrigerators followed. These modern devices were hailed as freeing us from the tyranny of seasons. As the Ladies Home Journal magazine proclaimed triumphantly in 1929: 'Refrigeration wipes out seasons and distances … We grow perishable products in the regions best suited to them instead of being forced to stick close to the large markets.' Eating seasonally, or locally, was a tiresome constraint and it was liberating to be able to enjoy foods at whatever time of year we desired. As a result, points out historian Susan Friedberg, our concept of 'freshness' was transformed. Consumers 'stopped expecting fresh food to be just-picked or just-caught or just-killed. Instead, they expected to find and keep it in the refrigerator.' Today, when we can buy strawberries year-round, we have largely lost the excitement that used to accompany the advent of the strawberry season. Colour supplements and supermarket magazines do their best to drum up some enthusiasm for British strawberries, but we are far from the days when poets could rhapsodise about dairy maids 'dreaming of their strawberries and cream' in the month of May. Strawberries and cream, once a 'rare service' enjoyed in the short months from late April to early July, are now a season-less staple, available virtually year-round from the global networks of commercial growers who supply Britain's food. The special buzz about Wimbledon's iconic dish of strawberries and cream is a glimpse into an earlier time, and reminds us that it was not always so.
Bloomberg
04-07-2025
- General
- Bloomberg
Progressives' Disdain of Genius Is a Problem for the West
In his great book, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), Thomas Carlyle raged against the levelling spirit of Victorian Britain. 'This…is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the desirableness of great men,' he complained. Show the critics a great man, he said, and they will ask you to 'account for him,' 'take the dimensions of him,' and otherwise 'bring him out to be a little kind of man.' The levelling spirit is far more powerful today than it was back then. Any history student who is foolish enough to argue, as Carlyle did, that 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men' would be guaranteed a stern lecture on the importance of 'social forces' and 'economic factors.' This is particularly pronounced when it comes to the notion of geniuses.
BBC News
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Victorian scam artist who tried to dupe the islanders of Skye
Hiding her true identity behind more than 40 aliases, con artist Annie Gordon Baillie made a living swindling shopkeepers across Victorian in the 1880s, the Scottish fraudster took her criminal activities to a new arrived on Skye during the Crofters' War, a violent clash between tenant farmers and landowners over land as an aristocratic novelist, she saw an opportunity to make a fortune - by convincing 1,000 islanders to relocate to a patch of Australian swamp. Annie's story is told in a new series of BBC Radio 4's Lady Swindlers with Lucy episode draws on newspaper articles, court reports and a book called The Adventures of a Victorian Con Woman: The Life and Crimes of Mrs Gordon Baillie by Mick Davis and David was born into poverty in Peterhead, a fishing port in Aberdeenshire, in February her 20s, she was defrauding shopkeepers and running up credit for goods she had no intention of paying the 1870s, Annie became more ambitious and set up a fake charity to establish a Protestant school for girls in Rome - a heartland of the Catholic poured in but the school was never built."The law catches up with her briefly in 1872 and she spends nine months in prison for fraud," said historian Worsley. Following her release from prison, Annie had a whirlwind few married an opera singer and the couple had three children. The family spent some time in New in November 1884, she turned up on the Isle of Skye "wearing fancy clothes and jewels," according to Worsley. "She passes herself off as a wealthy literary lady, who is writing a novel about the plight of the crofters of Skye," she added. Skye, along with other west coast island communities, was in the grip of the Crofters' throughout much of the 1800s, it was a dispute between landowners and communities of tenant farmers distressed by high rents, their lack of rights to land, and eviction threats to make way for large-scale farming process of moving families out of inland areas where they had raised cattle for generations to coastal fringes of large estates, or abroad to territories in Canada, had started with the Highland Clearances in the 18th and early 19th the clearances and the Crofters' War were marked by violent clashes between people facing eviction and landowners and the authorities. One of the bloodiest incidents was the Battle of the Braes on Skye in being attacked with stones by a crowd of men and women, about 50 police officers from Glasgow baton-charged the unrest spread to Glendale in Skye and in 1883 the frustrated authorities called for military intervention to help round up the early 1883, the iron-hulled Royal Navy gunboat Jackal appeared in Loch Pooltiel, off disembarked from the Jackal and landed at Glendale's Meanish Pier to help police in making sent reporters to cover the dispute's twists and turns, so Annie was well versed on the "war", and any opportunity to benefit for was all the rage among wealthy Victorians, and Annie tapped into as a "lady novelist", she told Skye's crofters she would fundraise for their cause. Annie did an interview on her "charity work" with the Aberdeen Evening News, turning up at a hotel in Portree in a striking crimson dressing gown and fingers adorned with jewelled historical and crime writer Denise Mina said the disguise distracted people from what Annie was really up to."She had a great eye for an emotive cause," Mina said."Physically, how would I describe her? She's very pretty, very petite and always well turned out."But Mina added: "She is taking money from crofters who are just about to go to war because they have been run off their land and burned out of their homes."She is going to raise money and leg it with the dosh."It is quite spiteful what she is doing, but it is all wrapped up in this lady façade." Annie's scam took a bizarre turn when she suggested the islanders quit Skye and emigrate to even travelled out to Australia to negotiate a deal for land as a new Melbourne, she was shown an unwanted area of marshy said 1,000 crofters could relocate there, and give up farming and become fishermen Mina said: "The whole point is the crofters don't want to leave - that's the whole dispute."The deal collapsed and Annie returned to London where more trouble awaited her. Publicity around her scheme had caught the attention of a Scotland Yard detective - Det Insp Henry Marshall - who had long been on the trail of Annie and her shopkeeper frauds across was arrested in 1888, leaving crofters on Skye still waiting for their "golden ticket" to a new life in was later jailed for five years for swindling the shopkeepers. The money involved in the frauds was believed to be far less than the true amount of Annie's ill-gotten gains over the years. After her release, she was soon back in jail - this time for stealing released from prison, she emigrated to New York where in 1902 there is a record of her being placed in a workhouse as punishment for vagrancy. And then she vanishes without a Swindlers' in-house historian, Prof Rosalind Crone, said Annie's story exposed the "dark side" of charitable giving in Victorian times."It wasn't always about helping the unfortunate or supporting worthwhile causes," she crofters, the war led to a public inquiry and eventually legislation that protected their land rights - and hopefully any chance of ever being scammed by phoney lady novelists again.
