Great British Railway Journeys - Series 3

The exciting things

I always want to be fascinated, amused, amazed and sometimes surprised by things I see, hear, read or experience, I am, I hope a sponge for knowledge and insight about things, whatever they might be.

History resonates with me, the way one can glean knowledge from all sorts of things like this afternoon, I found myself watching Michael Portillo’s presentation of the Great British Railway Journeys now on repeat on BBC 2, is just good tonic for the brain.

He was travelling from Great Yarmouth down the eastern seaboard of Anglia through Essex to London and in the process showing the linkages between his experiences and historical events using George Bradshaw’s Railway Companion published in the Victorian times as his travel guide.

History, geography and politics

In the third series filmed in 2012, the episodes 1 to 4 now available in BBC iPlayer, the history of the founding of the railways linked up with grave robbing [On YouTube] in Great Yarmouth along with a law - The Anatomy Act 1832 - that passed to allow the corpses of paupers to be used for anatomical research, then to the lost city of Dunwich which was at one time as large as London and the capital of the East Angles but all lost to sea - dubbed our own Atlantis.

He comes face-to-face with the skull of Simon de Sudbury – Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor who introduced the Poll Tax in the 14^th Century and was beheaded for it by the Peasants' Revolt, a lesson of history that Margaret Thatcher did not seem to have learnt when she got Micheal Portillo to introduce the Poll Tax in the 1990s almost bringing down the government because of the Poll Tax Riots that followed the implementation.

History will repeat itself if we fail to learn the lessons it teaches studiously, thoroughly and with proper attention to situation and circumstance.

Places and events

Really fascinating stuff like visiting Waltham Cross which apparently derives its name from being one of the 12 night-time resting places of the body of Eleanor of Castile, the wife of Edward I when she was borne from Lincoln to London at Charing Cross – the king erected lavish stone crosses in all these towns in memory of her.

This all culminated in Hackney where we are told of the first railway murder – a city banker, Thomas Briggs was killed by Franz Muller, a German tailor – that did fill people with fear about travelling on trains.

Great and beautiful Britain and Northern Ireland

This was compelling stuff, I cannot wait to see the other episodes as they come online and I have seen many other episodes over the years that just give you the idea that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are such beautiful and wonderful places to visit as you tease out snippets of history, legends and yarns from city, town and village alike, of people, industry, events and change – I love this stuff.

The official website for the Great British Railway Journeys can be found here – If you can playback BBC iPlayer content, then if you are as curious as I am, that would have been time well spent.

Stripping the "Great" out of Britain

Returning home for Easter

And so the naval personnel would return home just in time for Easter and the UK-Iran Crisis of 2007 is over.

Well, many would assume it is, the people are free, and the Iranian diplomat who was abducted in Iraq suddenly materialised at the Iranian embassy yesterday and it appears another consular official would be able to see the 5 Iranians who have been in American custody since January.

They were granted their freedom as a gift to Great Britain by Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the firebrand, hard-line President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the adjectives the West has bestowed on this man become almost irrelevant in the face of this humanity and kindness.

Agree to disagree

We can as well agree to disagree that our naval personnel were arrested in Iraqi or Iranian waters depending on whose map you are viewing, or basically, it was fair game on either side. As for the patrolling of Iraqi waters with a UN mandate, let us not plumb the depths of the dishonesty that has brought us thus far in the Middle East.

We can however recall that this time 25 years ago, Mrs. Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the Prime Minister then was busy putting the Great back in Britain and with it sowed the seeds that kept the Conservative Party in power for another 13 years.

Then, the territory under dispute since 1830 but deferring to the British was overrun by the military junta of Argentina; the 3 lions roared and thumped the Argentines out of the Falkland Islands with the loss about 1,000 lives however, leaving Great Britain beaming with patriotic fervour - Rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves was the waking call of anyone who deigned to be British.

Nothing great going on

Today, we cannot say great diplomacy was at play, no great satisfaction that we have proven our point, no great triumph having been overwhelmed at sea by Iranians who have suffered sanctions for decades.

It is arguable that tepid warnings from the UN, the strident support of the EU and the bluster of the US did nothing to help the situation; our diplomats had to relearn the principles of bilateral negotiations rather than the failed US policy of international isolation.

Them and us

The naval personnel would return and be made to recant all their recorded confessions of having trespassed on Iranian nautical territory; the tabloids would lay out full spreads of the gallantry of the lady and the men in the midst of enemy territory.

And whilst making a public show of these detainees could have been against the Geneva Conventions, they were portrayed in places that no one could fault as being inhospitable or uncomfortable.

We, the stricter adherents of the Geneva Conventions would probably not even provide that quality of facility to those in our Western detention centres; at least, recently, we have heard more of their people being tortured and mistreated amongst us and seen lots of our people being well treated amongst them, except in Iraq of course amongst the insurgents.

However, by the time the tabloids have unravelled this saga and milked every ounce of newsworthiness out of this farce, nothing great would have been achieved for Great Britain.

The future can be bleak

In fact, the danger is if any of our people do end up trespassing in Iranian territory again; their treatment may not be as lovely as we have once seen and then a trial on the tenets of Sharia Law might just be the trigger for another poorly fought war in the Middle East.

Surely, this is all has just stripped the Great out of Great Britain; one wonders what great adventure our leaders might seek to repair the damage done, in the near future.

Welcome Home! But heroes would be too strong a word to use in any context.