Amazing & Extraordinary Facts About Great Britain Read Online Free PDF Page A

to the sun.’

    HI-DE-HI!
, SPARTAN SOCIALIST STYLE
    The first English holiday camp predates Butlin’s by 30 years. It was established in Caister, near Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, by John Fletcher Dodd, a grocer and founder member of the Independent Labour Party. In 1906 he bought a house near the seafront and invited some fellow socialists from the East End of London to occupy some tents in his garden. The enterprise expanded, with wooden chalets and a dining hall which could accommodate 500 people. It was run on strict lines with bans on alcohol, smoking, gambling, improper language and noise after 11 pm. Anyone infringing the rules was asked to leave. Visitors included leading socialists like Herbert Morrison, George Bernard Shaw and Keir Hardie. In 1924 the cost of staying at Caister was a guinea (21 shillings, or £1.05 in modern decimalized sterling) for a week. The camp expanded during the 1930s though the atmosphere must have been very different from that at Butlin’s up the coast! By the 1950s the camp was attracting a thousand visitors a week. The Dodd family eventually sold it to Haven holidays and it continues to thrive, though with a less severe regime than that of its founder .
Cambria Ne’er Can Yield!
Sieges of Harlech
    H arlech in Wales’s Cardigan Bay is home to one of the fourteen castles built by King Edward I in his conquest of Wales. Its design, consisting of two rings of concentric walls, makes it almost impregnable and it was situated so that it could be supplied from the sea and thereby withstand sieges. Nevertheless in 1404 Owain Glyndwr managed to take the castle after a long siege and for the following four years it was his headquarters and the de facto capital of Wales. From 1461–1468 it held out against the longest known siege in British history, remaining the last Lancastrian stronghold in Wales during the Wars of the Roses, a feat which inspired the song
Men of Harlech
. Nearby are the Roman Steps, a staircase cut into the mountain. Traditionally associated with the Romans, who quarried slate in the area, their precise origin is a mystery.
One-Way Ticket to the Eternal Underground
Woking: gateway to the Gods
    I n 1850, alarmed by the overflowing burial grounds of London churches, Parliament purchased 2,000 acres of land at Brookwood, near Woking in Surrey. The London and South-Western Railway constructed adjacent to Waterloo a special station for mourners and two stations at Woking Necropolis station (now called Brookwood), one for use by Anglicans and one for Nonconformists. The new cemetery was consecrated by the Bishop of Winchester in 1854 and since that time almost a quarter of a million people have been buried there. It is the largest cemetery in Europe and contains separate sections for groups including Latvians, Chelsea Pensioners and Muslims. Dodi Fayed was initially buried there but was later moved to a grave in the grounds of the Fayed family home at Oxted in Surrey. Woking is also the home of the first purpose-built mosque ever built in Britain, the Shah Jahan Mosque, which opened in 1889.

Oldest and Oldest
Berrow’s Worcester Journal
    W orcester is noted for its beautiful cathedral, its porcelain and its association with Edward Elgar. However it is also the home of the world’s oldest daily newspaper. Founded in 1690 as the
Worcester Postman
it became
Berrow’s Worcester Journal
when the new proprietor, Harvey Berrow, changed the name in 1753. The cathedral also contains the oldest effigy of an English monarch, that of King John, who was buried there in 1216.

The Venice of the West (Midlands)
The birthplace of British industry
    B irmingham – England’s second-largest city – has a greater mileage of canals than any other European city, since it is the hub of the British canal system. It was also the home of the first large-scale manufacturing establishment in the world: the Soho works of Matthew Boulton and James Watt whose mechanized plant was a blueprint for similar