^* His title referred to the French town of Orange near Avignon, which had once belonged to his family.

 

^† William had his own, more distant claim to the throne, as the son of Charles I’s daughter Mary (see family tree, p. xi)

 

^* The playing of ‘God Save the Queen’ reflects the confusion as to whether the inhabitants of the British Isles are primarily British or, more fundamentally, English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh. Their sporting teams tend to prefer their own local anthems, ‘Land of Our Fathers’ (Wales), ‘The Soldier’s Song’ (Ireland) and ‘Flower of Scotland’, with England’s supporters favouring ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ (at the Commonwealth Games) and, recently, at rugby matches, the African-American gospel hymn ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, originally sung in homage to the hat-trick of tries scored against Ireland in 1988 by Chris Oti, England’s first black player for eighty years. When it comes to the Olympic Games, however, it is ‘God Save the Queen’ to which all British athletes stand to attention – and sometimes cry.

 

^* His Majesty’s Armed Vessel.

 

^* Modern research has established that Captain Bligh flogged his sailors less than any other British commander in the Pacific Ocean in the late eighteenth century. But he had a vicious tongue. After one incident he showered his officers and crew with an array of insults – ‘damn’d Infernal scoundrels, blackguard, liar, vile man, Jesuit, thief, lubber, disgrace to the service, damned long pelt of a bitch’ – and he told them he would make them ‘eat grass like cows’.

 

^* ‘An Act to Prevent Unlawful Combinations of Workmen’ was passed in 1799, and was reaffirmed and supplemented by a second Combination Act the following year. Prompted by government fears of unrest and that revolution might spread from across the Channel, the combination laws drove trades union activity underground until their repeal in 1824-5. Even then fresh legislation undermined the workers’ power to bargain collectively: they had to operate on the fringes of the law until 1860.

 

^* Known as ‘Number One, London’ because it was the first house you met as you entered London through the tollgate.

 

^* The word ‘dinosaur’, coined in 1842, means ‘terrible’ or ‘fearfully great’ lizard.

 

^* Tola owned the land in 1050. Nearby villages on the River Piddle (a variant of Puddle) included Affpuddle, almost certainly named after Alfridus who was the landowner in 987.

 

^* In modern times the liberated Xhosa have provided the first two presidents of democratic South Africa, Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki.

 

^* In 1853 British and French forces invaded the Crimean Peninsula in southern Russia, ostensibly to protect the interests of Ottoman Turkey, but primarily to check Russian ambitions in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

 

^* A league is three miles – about five kilometres.

 

^* Britain’s pre-eminent biology fellowship, named after the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern plant and animal classification.

 

^* Full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

 

^* Self-Help was published on the same day, and by the same publisher (John Murray), as Charles Darwin’s Origin Of Species.

 

^* Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, became Prime Minister in 1894, but did not live up to his promise, resigning thefollowing year. He is better remembered for his empire-based foreign policy in the tradition of ‘splendid isolation’ – he invented the phrase ‘the British Commonwealth of Nations’ – and as an owner of racehorses. He won the Derby three times. He was one of the last British prime ministers to sit in the House of Lords.

 

^* The word comes from the Victorian music-hall song – ‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too.’

 

^† A hymn sung at the end of a church service, as the choir and clergy leave the church.

 

^* The kops of English football: Anfield (Liverpool); Bloomfield Road (Blackpool); Bramall Lane (Sheffield United); County Ground (Northampton Town); Elland Road (Leeds United); Highfield Road (Coventry City); Hillsborough (Sheffield Wednesday); Home Park (Plymouth Argyle); Leeds Road (Huddersfield Town); Meadow Lane (Notts County); Prenton Park (Tranmere Rovers); Racecourse Ground (Wrexham); Recreation Ground (Chesterfield); St Andrews (Birmingham City); Valley Parade (Bradford City); Filbert Street (Leicester City); York Street (Boston United).

 

^* The captain’s other nickname was ‘Titus’ after the notorious Oates (no relation) who stirred up national hysteria in the reign of Charles II over the so-called ‘Popish Plot’ (see Great Tales, vol. 2, pp. 220-5).

 

^* The Derby takes its name from the sporting Earl of Derby who founded the race in 1780. Anmer was a wood where George V particularly enjoyed shooting, near the village of Anmer on the royal estate of Sandringham in Norfolk.

 

^* More than fifty pals’ battalions were formed in 1914/15 from communities all over the country. Among them were the ‘bantam’ battalions – men who were less than the regulation army height of 5 feet 3 inches (but taller than 5 feet).

 

^* The Somme offensive continued until 18 November 1916, with the British and the French eventually advancing some 7.5 miles (12 kilometres) – at a cost of some 420,000 British missing, dead or wounded, and a further 200,000 French casualties. German casualties were estimated at 500,000. The village of Serre remained untaken.

 

^* From the Latin, armistitium, literally the arms-stopping, or truce, signed in France on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. This moment is marked today – as it was on 11 November 1920 – by the nationwide observance of two minutes’ silence.

 

^† Holders of the Victoria Cross, the supreme award for valour in battle, created after the Crimean War in the name of Queen Victoria (and manufactured from the metal of Russian guns captured at the siege of Sebastopol).

 

^* Based on the Old Testament (2 Chronicles 24:16), these words were inscribed by Richard II on the tomb of his treasurer, John Waltham, Bishop of Salisbury, buried in Westminster Abbey.

 

^* Following England’s defeat by Australia in 1882, the Sporting Times published a mock obituary of English cricket which concluded: ‘the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia’. This prompted the burning of a cricket stump whose ashes were placed in an urn and presented to the English team next time it won. Since then the little black urn has been the trophy for which the two countries compete at cricket – though whichever side wins, the urn remains permanently at Lord’s Cricket Ground in north London, headquarters of the MCC, the Marylebone Cricket Club, cricket’s governing body since 1787. Until 1976 the English cricket team travelled under the name of the MCC who organised the tours.

 

^* ‘Plus-fours’ were loose knickerbockers often worn by golfers, deriving their name from the extra four inches (about 10 cm) of cloth required for the overhang at the knee.

 

^* The King did not enjoy the sacrifice, which was greeted with ribaldry rather than respect, particularly since the announcement of the self-denying edict from Windsor was followed by the words: ‘The Earl of Rosebery and the Rt. Hon. A.J. Balfour, M.P., have left the Castle.’ Lloyd George himself did not stop serving alcohol in Downing Street.

 

^* Germany’s first Reich, or empire, was the Holy Roman Empire, the confederation of German and central European states that dominated much of Europe in the Middle Ages. The second was the unified nation state of Germany that lasted from 1871 to 1918. Hitler’s ambition was to create a Drittes Reich, a Third Empire, larger and longer-lived than either.

 

^* Theosophy was a movement seeking a universal truth common to all religions. Among its adherents was Annie Besant (see pp. 179-182).

 

^* ‘White Papers’ set out the proposals of government departments for future policy following a process of consultation and research. Originally they were bound with white covers.