Map of the month – Southwick House

Southwick House, Hampshire (County series 1:2,500)

One of the most momentous decisions of the Second World War was taken in the old library at Southwick House in June 1944.

Nestling beneath the northern slopes of Portsdown Hill and just to the north of Portsmouth, Southwick House had become home of the RN School of Navigation, HMS Dryad, a stone frigate (shore establishment), moved from the coast due to the heavy bombing of its original home in Portsmouth dockyard in 1941.

By 1943, with the planning for D-Day already underway, the house was chosen to be the location of the Advance Command Post of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. Because of this, HMS Dryad was moved out of the house onto further land requisitioned from the estate.

In April 1944 Admiral Ramsay, the Allied naval commander-in-chief for Operation NEPTUNE, the naval assault phase of OVERLORD, moved his headquarters to Southwick House. As D-Day approached, the house became the headquarters of the main allied commanders, including Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral Ramsay and the Army Commander-in-Chief General Montgomery.

The invasion of Normandy had been tentatively selected for Monday 5 June, but the weather forecast was bad, so Eisenhower ordered a 24-hour postponement. Then, later in the day, the senior meteorologist, announced to the senior commanders gathered in the old library at Southwick House that there would be a short interval of fine weather on Tuesday, 6 June.

“OK let’s go!……..With these words, the greatest invasion force that the World has ever seen prepared to launch the largest seaborne invasion in history, with nearly 5,000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers participating.  Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on D-Day, with 875,000 men disembarking by the end of June. ‘The Great Crusade’ culminated in May 1945 with the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany.

Southwick House remained part of the naval base, HMS Dryad, until its closure in 2004. Southwick Park is now the home of the Defence College of Policing and Guarding.

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Map of the week – Lord’s Cricket Ground

Map: Stanford’s London Street Map – 1891

The home of cricket.
Lord’s Cricket Ground, is in St John’s Wood, London. Rather than referring to any connection with the peerage, Lord’s is actually named after its founder, Thomas Lord  (1755 – 1832), an English professional cricketer who played first-class cricket from 1787 to 1802. It is owned by Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and is the home of Middlesex County Cricket Club. Lord’s is also widely referred to as the “home of cricket” and is home to the world’s oldest sporting museum.

Lord’s today is not on its original site, being the third of three grounds that Lord established between 1787 and 1814. His first ground, now referred to as Lord’s Old Ground, was where Dorset Square now stands next to Marylebone Station. His second ground, Lord’s Middle Ground, was used from 1811 to 1813 before being abandoned to make way for the construction of the Regent’s Canal. The present Lord’s ground is about 250 yards north-west of the site of the Middle Ground. Next door to the ground can be seen the Nursery still referred to in cricketing circles as the Nursery End of the ground.

Some facts about Lord’s:
The earliest known match played on the current Lord’s Cricket Ground was Marylebone Cricket Club v Hertfordshire on 22 June 1814.
1866-67 Freehold of the Ground purchased for £18,333 6s 8d.
1868 Aboriginal cricketers become the first Australian team to play cricket at Lord’s
The main survivor of the Victorian era is The Pavilion with its famous Long Room.
Lord’s is also the home of the MCC Museum, which is the oldest sports museum in the world, and contains the world’s most celebrated collection of cricket memorabilia, including The Ashes, which again will be the centre of this summers anticipated clash with the current Australian side.

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Mad Jack, a bear and a frozen lake

Map of the week – Mad Jack, a bear and a frozen lake
Map: Ordnance Survey 1:2500 County Series from 1874

John “Mad Jack” Mytton (30 September 1796 – 29 March 1834) was born to a family of squires and  became notorious as a notable British eccentric and Regency rake.

Jack, on entry to Cambridge University, took with him 2,000 bottles of port to sustain himself during his education. After his studies he embarked on The Grand Tour of Europe followed by a spell of Military Service before inheriting the family seat at Halston Hall, Whittington (near Oswestry in Shropshire) along with an annual income of £20,000 (close to £800,000 in today’s money), which he proceeded to spend at an unsustainable rate and with an increasingly eccentric behaviour.

At Halston, on a freezing winters day, he would lead his small army of stable lads on rat hunts, each stable boy equipped with ice skates.

He arrived at one particular dinner party at Halston Hall riding a bear and when he tried to make it go faster the beast bit deep into his calf. Despite being bitten, Mad Jack kept the bear Nell as a pet.

He would reportedly get out of bed in the middle of the night, take off his nightshirt and set off completely naked  carrying his favourite gun across the frozen fields towards his lake. Here he would ambush the ducks, fire a few shots and return to bed apparently none the worse for his ordeal. His most extraordinary day’s shooting came when he got fed up waiting for the birds to come within range, stripped naked, sat on the ice and slowly shuffled forward on the slippery surface until he was within range.

A fan of horse riding and hunting, Mad Jack set out to test if a horse pulling a carriage could jump over a tollgate. As many would have predicted it couldn’t.

In 1831 he fled to France to avoid his creditors, prison and court. After a couple of years he decided to return to England and ended up in the King’s Bench debtor’s prison in Southwark, London, where he died there in 1834 a ’round shouldered, tottering old-young man bloated by drink. Worn out by too much foolishness, too much wretchedness and too much brandy’.

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Map of the week – The Foundling Hospital

Map: Stanford’s Library Atlas published in 1891

The Foundling Hospital
The Foundling Hospital (The word “hospital” was used in a more general sense than it is today) was founded in 1741 by philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coram. It was a children’s home established for the “education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children.”In September 1742, the first stone of the a Hospital was laid in Bloomsbury, lying north of Great Ormond Street and west of Gray’s Inn Lane (the first children were admitted to the Foundling Hospital on 25 March 1741, in a temporary house in Hatton Garden). The western wing was finished in October 1745. An eastern wing was added in 1752 “in order that the girls might be kept separate from the boys”.The Hospital was later to be described as “the most imposing single monument erected by eighteenth century benevolence” and became London’s most popular charity.In 1756, the House of Commons resolved that all children offered should be received, that local receiving places should be appointed all over the country, and that the funds should be publicly guaranteed. A basket was accordingly hung outside the hospital; the maximum age for admission was raised from two months to twelve, and a flood of children poured in from country workhouses. In less than four years 14,934 children were presented at the door..In the 1920s, the Hospital decided to move to a healthier location in the countryside. The buildings were eventually sold to property developer James White in 1926. He had hoped to transfer Covent Garden Market to the site, but the local residents successfully opposed the plan. In the end, the original Hospital building was demolished and the children were moved to Redhill in Surrey.

The Foundling Hospital still has a legacy on the original site. Seven acres of it were purchased, with financial support from the newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere, for use as a playground for children. The area is now called Coram’s Fields.

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Map of the week – “The man who posted himself”

It all began in 1898. Mr. Reginald Bray, a clerk from Forest Hill in South London, bought a copy of the Royal Mail guide that proudly proclaimed they would deliver anything as ‘small as a bumblebee and as large as an elephant’. Bray viewed these rules as a challenge and spent the next 40 years of his life experimenting with the limits of the British postal system.

(map shown: Forest Hill, London – OS County Series 1:2,500 – 1895)

He started with postcards. His first postcard was addressed to ‘any house in London’. He followed this with envelopes knitted from wool. He even tried sending two postcards with two addresses hoping for them to be forever forwarded from one address to the other.Bray then switched to parcels. He mailed, amongst other objects, a bowler hat, a turnip with the address carved on it, a rabbit’s skull, a pipe, a bicycle pump, a clump of dried seaweed and even his faithful Irish terrier, Bob.

Not satisfied with that, he had himself delivered, not once but three times, including being sent, along with his bicycle, by registered mail. An official form acknowledges ‘Delivery of an Inland Registered Person Cyclist’ to Bray’s home address for a charge of 3d a mile.

This is certainly not a facility provided by the Royal Mail today. However, one of the few living creatures still permitted to be sent through the postal system are live bees. It’s good to see that at least part of their original slogan ‘as small as a bumblebee and as large as an elephant’ still holds true.

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Map of the week – Magna Charta Island

Runnymede is a Thames-side water meadow between Egham and Old Windsor. It is currently managed by the National Trust and is a beautiful though unremarkable example of a ‘Thames Basin Lowland’. Its fame, though, is not due to its topography.

In the north part of Runnymede is an island. It was here, so most historians agree, that on 15 June 1215 King John was compelled by his leading subjects to sign a document addressing their grievances. The name ‘Runnymede’; derives from the Anglo-Saxon for ‘a meeting place in a meadow’. Few place names have better lived up to their linguistic origins.

The document, of course, was Magna Carta. It has been cited as the inspiration for many later expressions of liberty including the English parliament, the English Civil War and the US Constitution. Many people have believed it to have been many things. It¹s easier to describe it in terms of what it was not.

It was not effective, remaining in force for only three months and not preventing civil war. It was not revolutionary, being but one episode in the medieval  barons’ constant attempts to force the king to respect their traditional role as his principal advisors. It was not an assertion of individual liberty, rather an attempt to preserve aristocratic privileges. It was not well-observed, being re-issued over 30 times over the following two centuries: indeed, re-issuing Magna Carta was an instinctive response to most late-medieval constitutional crises.

A small island but a large international legacy, however unintentional or misconstrued. Perhaps much the same could be said of Britain itself. As for the name, Magna Carta is the Latin for ‘great charter’. You knew that, of course; even if David Cameron didn’t…

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Vintage Rude Map Cards

Britain is awash with extraordinary place names, as anyone from Lumps of Garryhorn, Nempnett Thurbwell or Nether Wallop (to choose but three) will be well aware.
Cassini has decided that some of these are so spectacularly rude that they deserve wider publicity; and, to prove that they’ve existed for years and that they are real names, we’ve located each of them on a historical map and turned them into a unique set of greeting cards.

The cards were first seen at this year’s Spring Fair at the NEC in early February 2011. The interest and popularity of the cards at the show persuaded us to bring forward their publication.

Old Hag, Hairy Ness, Ugley and Boobys Bay are here; so are Brownwilly, Pratt’s Bottom,Sandy Balls, and many others too rude to publish here.

Each has a dated historical map centred on the unfortunate place name and a grid reference should you want to visit it for yourself. The inside is blank for further insults, or explanations. There are 24 cards in this first series, with more series planned for later in 2011. They’ll bring a laugh out loud, a smirk or a grimace – either way, they’ll entertain and appeal to everyone. So now, when you send a greeting card, you can say what you really mean…