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Beer

British Sailors and Prohibition: the experience of going “dry” in the USA during the Empire Cruise

Despite the cleansing of the sailor image during the late Victorian era, many contemporaries viewed sailors’ predilection for drink as a worrying problem.[1] In particular, Agnes Weston used the image of a drunken sailor riding a barrel to make her case for the temperance movement, although this portrayal was condemned by sailors.[2] Yet, the image […]

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Dead Men Telling Tales: Maritime Gibbet Lore in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

The practice of gibbeting, also known more specifically as hanging in irons, or hanging in chains, was a particularly macabre punishment for a variety of convicted felons, and yet it is the image of the pirate cadaver swinging eerily in the breeze, which appears to have become most engrained in popular culture since the eighteenth […]

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New Scholarship on the Press Gang – Part 2 of 2

In The Myth of the Press Gang, J. Ross Dancy offers a quantitative approach to the subject. He developed a sampling system and entered the details as recorded in individual ships’ muster books covering the period 1793-1801. Data entry took twenty two weeks. The end result was a database including 27,174 individuals, “roughly a 10 […]

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Channel Island evacuees outside St Mary’s Church after one of their wartime services

Service in Stockport to Mark ‘Return Home’ of Channel Island Evacuees in 1945

Port Towns & Urban Cultures contributor Gillian Mawson is organising a Channel Islands Evacuee’ church service at St Mary’s, Stockport Market Place on Sunday 23 August at 10.30am. The event will mark the 70th anniversary of the time when thousands of Channel Island evacuees left Stockport, and the surrounding area, to return home in 1945. […]

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