Phil’s History:

Looking back and charting life’s journey, and recognizing the importance of those times when life beckons:

AD 30-ish: Death of Jesus Christ: my take, as of 2022, on JC's message is that it is summarised in five words from  the parable of the Good Samaritan: ".......and thy neighbour as thyself". ie the Golden Rule. All the rest of the New Testament is mere accretion arising from tribalism.Those five words are totally anti-tribal. They are the Kingdom of Heaven itself. The Old Testament is extreme historical tribalism and of no interest to me except as such.. Those five words summarise the key to life's mystery. It is all much too difficult for man to aspire to let alone actually do, so he builds tribalistic superstructures around it so as to divert attenton away from his failure to grapply seriously with the concept of the Kingdom of Heaven (KoH). The KoH is a mere metaphor or parable for JC's concept of integrity - which could not have been understood in those times if presented otherwise.

1337 - 1453: The '100 years war': a protracted atttempt by England to dominate France (from whence William the Conqueror came) - part of 500 years of wars, from 1066, between England and France, and part of 1,000 years of wars which were ended by the Iron-and-Steel Community/Common Market/EEC/EU from 1945 onwards, and which thus represents an effective anti-tribalistic-conflict force, which is treasonous to those who treasure the nationalism of the GB-v-FR wars and the Catholic-v-Protestant religious wars, and are seeking (as of 19.7.2019 as I enter this item) the extraction of GB from EU at any price whatsoever;

1517: Martin Luther publishes (in Latin) his 95 Theses (arguments) against the Roman Catholic church’s sales of ‘Indulgences’ (forgiveness of sins) as a means of raising money to fund the rebuilding of St Peter’s church in Rome. Luther called it a ‘fraud’ against the poor, because only God can forgive sins. Luther’s Theses were translated by his friends into German and printed and sold in vast numbers (following Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1447), thereby commencing the Reformation in Europe. Five-hundred years later, another equally reprehensible  ‘Fraud on the Poor’, or perhaps more accurately a ‘Fraud on the Gullible’ was perpetrated in England by the anti-Europe press and their acolytes in the Tory Party by persuading the less-well-off that all their woes were due to the European Community - which they understood so little about that the European parliament was thought to be of no significance and the absence of war for more than 70 years to be nothing significant. 

1530s: Henry VIII's moves against the Catholic Church in England for dynastic (need for a son), and financial (funds for a war with the Pope) reasons; England is entirely catholic at this point, with no interest whatsoever in Luther's initiatives, and thus the conversion of the country, over a period of about 50 years to a vehemently protestant one was initiated entirely at the behest of this ghastly tyrant; his portraits say everything about him: a self-centred bully and mafia boss with infinite power and willingness to inflict death in the cruelest possible way - which, of course, was the norm and expected of him, in those days; he started the religious anti-catholic tribalism which persists to this day in terms of seeing anything connected with continental europe as 'treasonous';

1550s: GB loses last possession in France (about 500 years after William the Conqueror arrived in 1066) - end of 500 years of struggle to maintain a foothold in France - but by this date Spain and Portugal have colonies in the Americas enabling them to bring home to Europe treasure in their so-called ’treasure fleets’ which were raided by British pirates like Francis Drake;

1588 Spanish Armada - attempted Catholic invasion by Spain to put a Catholic monarch on the British throne fails - and England is emboldened to plan its own colonies in emulation of Spain and Portugal, and in 1607 the first English colony in Virginia is started; these colonies were all sought and ultimately established in order to escape the confines and restrictions which were inevitable in the Home Country (Britain) where a history of thousands of years meant that there was overpopulation, a shortage of land, established systems of law and ownership of land of everything else, whereby government could not be readily changed or even influenced, nor could religion. Whereas in the wider world there was the prospect of being able to grab land, make money, practice religion without interference, and so on, which offered attractions which, for centuries have been irresistible;

1603: 24th March: Death of HMQ ‘Good Queen’ Bess, and accession of the protestant James, ‘Rex Pacificus’ Stuart, 1st, followed in June same year by another devastating outbreak of The Plague.  HMQ Elizabeth (Tudor) 1st had reigned for 45 years since her half-sister (‘Bloody’) Mary (Tudor) 1st, had died in 1558 at a (comparatively) young age of (probably) cancer of the bowel or uterus (which she had long believed, or anyway argued, was a pregnancy - she being married to Philip II of Spain, who was definitively, for the years 1555-1558, in true title: “King of England”, so, for those few years, we did have a “King Philip” (or was it “Phillip”? spelt with two “L”s?) of England;

1614, April 10th: 400 years before launch of this website;

1642 - 1651: English civil war. Won by the parliamentary side. Not a revolution like that of 1789 in France. No systematic elimination of privileged persons. But did result in temporary abolition of the Church of England including its bishops, and the execution of Charles I in 1649. Led to exaggerated later ‘reforms’ such as the Clarendon Code by way of restoration of all due dignity and influence to the C.of.E. Because the civil war had no effect on the traditional class-system of privilege in England, and the monarchy was restored after Oliver Cromwell died, the civil war had no ongoing effect (c.f. the case in France after 1789) on general levels of inequality in the population; a higher proportion of the population died in the nine years of the Civil War of 1642-1651 than in the four years of the Great War of 1914-1918; the Church of England was banned in the years of the Commonwealth, and when it was restored it flexed its muscles and banned, in retribution, all dissenting denominations which would not accept its 39 articles, which effectively excluded the Unitarian Movement - whose current ‘Freedom, Reason and Tolerance’ slogan derives from the subsequent ’Toleration’ Act, which removed this prohibition, but is widely (and perhaps intentionally) misunderstood as referring to its own ‘broad-mindedness’ rather than to the actual (of the time) less-restrictive attitude of the government in power.

1650 (nominal date): Slavery in the the West Indies  and the US colony in the 17th and 18th centuries amounted to what one might call 'pre-machine-age' agricultural power (ie human power), whereas in the 20th century onwards such human power was replaced by machine power, beginning with the Ferguson tractor which enabled a small light machine to do the work of previous monstrously heavy and inefficient predecessors; pba was involved with the technical side of the Ferguson System during his 1970-1978 years working in the patents department of Massey Ferguson at the Banner Lane tractor factory in Coventry, England;

1688: ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688: the landing by the protestant William III (of Orange) with Dutch troops to defeat the closet-Catholic James II, who eventually fled to France;

1707: Scotland joins UK approximately 100 years after King James I joined the monarchies of the two countries though they continued to be governed separately; Note: Ireland joined the UK in 1801, and left it in 1922 after a revolutionary war;

1714, April 10th: 300 years before launch of this website;

1768: William Reed born; married Mary Rowe: Millers at Bovey Tracey, Devon; (check): one son is Edward Reed, excise officer, father of Olive Emma Reed, who married Alfred George Archer; and Edward’s sister, Eliza, married Matthew Churchward (a farmer), brother of George Churchward, of Stoke Gabriel, Devonshire, who (George Churchward), was the father of George Jackson Churchward, Chief Engineer of the Great Western Railway (GWR) from 1902 to 1921;

1775-1783: American colony’s revolutionary war (of independence); up until this date the colony had been used as a prison colony (mainly in Georgie), after which AU took-over that function; the American colony was much assisted by a declaration of war by France against Britain, and involvement of  the French navy (in reprisals for the very recent French defeats by the British  in the battle for Canada) in the latter stages of this war, including a French blockade which prevented re-supply of the British army by sea before the battle which led to the victory of the colonists, and hence the war was really a victory for France and the colonists. Both sides accept that the American  Revolutionary war was really a proxy for a continuation of centuries of Britain-v-France wars in another theatre.

1776: United States Declaration of Independence,  adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. The text of the second section reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”. This has never been applied to the Native Americans, otherwise known as 'Indians', not least because it couldn't, because they were there before the Europeans came. The history of European domination of America's 'First Nation' (as they are now called in Canada) reflects the same characteristics as are to be seen in the British, Spanish, Portuguese and Roman empires, of: ruthless tribalism, racism, and exploitation, with no regard to the Christian virtues of the Golden Rule, and bare-faced justification of same on the ground of 'nature' etc. This all  comes to the surface in the American Civil War (1861-1865), and the 'Reconstruction' of the Union afterwards. The concepts of American 'exceptionalism' and 'manifest destiny' and 'city on a hill' all seek to highlight the achievements of US politics, but completely overlook the fact that overall, the new nation there exterminated the indigenous population, thereby starting with a 'clean slate', whereby all the history of man's development and evolution were obliterated, whereby the rights and traditions and history of existing peopes did not arise. Obviously, if that is what you are willing to do, incliuding stealing the entire country from its existing population, great  possibilities will arise, but they are equally obviously negated by the corresponding possibilitie that you have denied to the previous inhabitants whom you have exterminated. The same could be done anywhere, but it is not, for precisely that reason. This is not to deny the great achievements of the US, including in two world wars.

1780 - 1830: Golden Age of Britain’s canal network, supporting the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and its very necessary Transport Revolution. The same applied in the USA, perhaps a little later. Notably however, the US developed, some significant few years before railways began (in 1825)  in Britain (which also preceded railroads in the US), the world's first steam-boat transport system, with Fulton's steam-driven 'Show-Boat-like' rear-paddle-wheel-driven canal cargo boat, which revolutionised US transport in the immediate pre-railroad years.

1780: Gordon Riots in London: The Gordon Riots of 1780 were several days of rioting in London motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment. They began with a large and orderly protest against the Papists Act 1778, which was intended to reduce official discrimination against British Catholics enacted by the Popery Act 1698. Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association, argued that the law would enable Catholics to join the British Army and plot treason. The protest led to widespread rioting and looting, including attacks on Newgate Prison and the Bank of England^[1][2][3] and was the most destructive in the history of London.^[4][5]

1783: Treaty of Paris ends American War of Independence; in that war the colonists were supported by France, Britain's traditional opponent, and without the declaration of war by France against Britaian during that war, which automatically caused (as the French of course knew it would) the withdrawal of a large proportion of Britain's naval forces and of the army from the colony, without which the colonists could not possibly have succeeded;

1788: Centenary of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688: the landing by the protestant William III (of Orange) with Dutch troops to defeat the closet-Catholic James II, who eventually fled to France;

1788: Bicentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the combined forces of the weather and Elizabeth I's Navy;

1789: French Revolution.

1801 Ireland joins UK (and leaves 121 years later in 1922); the 1800 Act of Union was caused by the fears in the UK caused by the wars of the Franch Revolution ('Napoleonic wars'), that Irish revolutionaries might link up with a Franch invasion while UK is preoccupied with fighting in France. The Act of Union provided for 100 Irish MPs, but catholics were disenfranchised and made 2nd class citizens (which applied to the vast majority of the population, except in the '6 counties' of the North), so the Irish actually had far fewer advantages from the Act of Union than had had the Scottish population in 1707;

1807: Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade: seeks to stop the trading of slaves cf the 1833 Act to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire (excluding India); this is decades before the American Civil War (mid-1860s) which sought to abolish (eventually) slavery in the southern states of the US;

1808: Cornish mining engineer Richard Trevithick's 'Catch-me-who-can' steam engine demonstration in Euston Square region of London (a vertical axis piston driving rear wheels in an 2-2-0 configuration, the undriven wheels being the same diameter as the driven ones) is the first fare-paying (one shilling) passenger-carrying steam train. and achieved a claimed 12 mph.

1810s/20s/30s onwards: John Archer (Sen) & (Jun): are 'Common Brewers' in Oxford, at "Archer's Yard", St Aldates;

1812: Charles Dickens born (died 1870) into poverty and the family spent time in a debtors' prison, but saved by receipt of a small legacy;

1812-1815: US-v-UK war caused by UK blockade of French ports in Napoleonic wars, including several US invasions of Canada. The British army burned Washington DC;

1815: 2nd March 1815 Ann Archer Archer born in Oxford - destined to be known for her appliqué work in relation to the bedspread she made from the age of 6 onwards; Ann is 3 months and 23 days on 25th June, the day of the battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon was defeated by the combined forces of Britain and Germany inter alia; she died on 29th September 1906, aged 92;

1815: Battle of Waterloo ends Napoleonic wars. In the battle, the troop percentages were:  
Total troops at Waterloo:  EN (English): 25K = 13.5%  DE (Gernan/Holy Roman Empire): 71K =  38.4%  FR (France): 72K =  38.9%  NL (Dutch): 17K =  9.2%  Total 185K   Anti-French coalition 113K = 61%  Of which EN (English) = 13.5%  To put it another way: there were almost three times as many German troops as English, and almost exactly as many German troops as French, so the Dutch and English troops (42K) served entirely to outnumber the French. (23.3.18)

1815 to 1870:  the Golden Age of Britain's technical and financial supremacy in the world; thus the founding of Archer Cowley in 1857, though on a ‘low-tech’ basis (a pony and trap parcel business between Oxford and Abingdon), was at a time when the UK was ’The World Leader’ technically, and probably financially likewise, so that the opportunities for establishing a flourishing business were very favourable;

1819: Mary Ann Evans (no relation, sadly; better known as the author George Eliot) born at South Farm, Arbury, Warwickshire, daughter of Robert Evans, agent to the Newdigate family and manager of their Warwickshire estates;

1821 - 1825 George Stephenson builds the Stockton & Darlington Railway which opened in Septermber 1825 using the engine "Locomotion" with vertical-axis piston(s) and coupled driving wheels in (probably) 0-4-0 configuration, with very slow but powerful operating characteristics, this locomotive is believed to be very similar or identical to the ones at Beamish Museum in Northumberland (in 2018);

1830: Liverpool & Manchester Railway opens after the famous Rainhill trials won by Robert Stehenson's "Rocket" (vastly different from 'Locomotion'). Thus begins 'The Railway Age', in which transport is revolutionised and long-distance transportation of people and goods became possible, whereas previously only stage-coaches could convey people (at 10-20mph maximum) with frequent stops to change horses and to cross unbridged streams and rivers, and carriage of heavy goods was prohibitively expensive except by canal, and hence household removals were really only possible on a very short-distance basis. The roads for stage-coaches had in recent years been ‘macadamised’ which vastly improved them and the speed of transit, but nevertheless as soon as the railways arrived stage coaches were very quickly superseded and forgotten. 

1830s/1840s: Fox Talbot's developmen of photography;

1831, 1861, and 1882: reform of the British franchise, stage-wise, whereby most men (but no women) were entitled to vote; the Tories initially opposed the widening of the franchise, but later Disraeli accepted its inevitability and used it to their advantage in combination with jingoistic slogans from Northcliffe’s press, taking advantage of the naturally xenophobic nature of a very significant proportion of the population;

1833: Britain abolishes slavery in its empire and orders the Boers to release their slaves in South Africa. Rather than do this, the Boers leave, performing their "Great Trek" inland to found the states of 'Transvaal' and 'Orange Free State';

1835: Andrew Carnegie born (died 1919), one year before James Archer, the son of a Scottish hand-loom weaver who (his father) had been put out of work by the industrialisation of hand-loom weaving, and this experience was formative to Andrew in his later tenacioius adherence to using updated machinery. Emigrated to the US. Got involved in steel industry in the American civil war (1861-65, see below). Very successful steel-maker, based on constant innovation and updating of processes. Produced much of the steel for the rails of the entire US rail network constructed in the 1850s and 1860s. Under his leadership the US overtook GB in steel-production in 1869. Carnegie became famously-rich and endowed 2,800 public libraries. Advocated abolition of monarchies and supported the concept of Anglo-Saxon supremacy (as did presidents Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt).

1836: James Archer, founder of Archer & Co (later Archer Cowley & Co) born in St Aldates, Oxford, son of John Archer, brewer; James being a very successful self-made man, and almost exact contemporary of Carnegie; this was a good time for an entrepreneur to be born: 1815 to 1870 being the Golden Age of Britain's technical and financial supremacy in the world;

1837: Accession of Queen Victoria - due to multiple illegitimacies in the progeny of those higher in the list of those in-line to the throne (George III and IV, and William IV);

1838: On 4th June 1838 the first 22.5 miles of the Great Western Railway opened from Paddington station (London) to Maidenhead, and in 1842 Queen Victoria travelled on it at (ordered by her, but perhaps not adhered-to) the maximum speed of 40 mph.

1840s: Wm Fairburn, grandfather of WFH, is a sea captain, operating out of Hull- whose daughter was mother of WFH; steam ships were developed in this decade, and provided much faster travel to India and to the US;

1840s: Irish potato famine. Enormous deprivation and starvation in Ireland. British government fails to take seriously the gravity of the situation, due, not least, to the centuries-old 'us and them' attitude arising from the Catholic preponderance in Ireland remaining from Henry Viii's (followed by Edward Vi and Elizaeth 1st's) failure to do the same vicious conversion job that he had done in England, from 100 per cent Catholic, to protestant. Enormous numbers of Irish emigrate to the US and to England, incuding (eg JF Kennedy's grandfather/great grandfather?), and Bridget McKay (as a child?), Nancy Garner's forebear: who married Jonathan Wilkinson, and whose daughter Ellen Wilkinson married (in 1882) Martin Johnson, who, in 1871 was an 'indoor farm servant, at a farm in 'Walmesley-cum-Shutteworth, Lancashire '. Ellen and Martin's child, Minnie Johnson was Nancy's mother. 

1846: End of ‘Mail Coaches’ for carrying mail - this now being carried by train, using, initially at least, road-going mail coaches literally rolled-onto a railway truck and secured, which was a precursor of James Archer’s “By Rail” system of running road-going (horse-drawn) furniture wagons onto railway wagons for long-distance removals;

1848: Alfred George Archer (father of WGRA) born (the 11th of 13 children of John Archer, brewer) in St Aldates, Oxford, younger brother of James, and destined to become an Inland Revenue inspector and as such was posted to Wells, Somerset, where his boss was one Edward Reed, a member of a talented family, and Alfred George married his boss’s daughter, Olive Emma Reed, (cousin by marriage of GJ Churchward, who in 1902 became Chief Engineer of the GWR);

1848: Wm. Wells born at Charlwood, Reigate - destined to become a well-known grower of chrysanthemums;

1850: WFH (William Fairburn Hart) born at Brigg, Yorkshire, the market-town immortalised by Delius's "Brigg Fair"; and (1850s also) GGMH (George Gatton Melhuish Hardingham) born in Italy, son of a barrister;

1850 ('mid-19th century') and very little known about Africa whatsoever and exploreres like Livingstone, and Burton & Speke really did add vastly to the world's knowledge about this 'difficult to visit and explore' continent;

1851: The Great Exhibition at The Crystal Palace (in Hyde Park, and then moved to Penge Common, south London, where it burned-down in 1936), was the idea of Prince Albert, consort of Queen Vicotoria, and served as a focus and stimulus for British industrialisation and business-progress; James Archer was aged 15 in 1851: did he go to the exhibition and was he inspired to look ahead to an era of road-by-rail transport? We shall probably never know. Tory fears of assassins or chartists or revolutionaries attracted by tthe exhibition proved to be unfounded

1853: Transportation to Australia of criminals ceases, thereby ultimately changing Australia from a prison colony into a regular colony;

1857: James Archer at age 21 founds his carrier business based on a daily pony & trap run from Oxford to Abingdon. That business lasted 112 years until 1969. In 1857, the Great Western Railway had (according to Colin Maggs’ “History of the GWR”) reached Oxford (via Reading and Didcot) 13 years earlier on 12 June 1844 (opening date). This was the GWR’s broad (IK Brunel) gauge line, which was converted to standard gauge by 1892. So James Archer’s new carrier business in 1857 was operating in a transport environment which was in a state of radical change (from horse to steam power) in which speeds were increasing enormously and likewise the ability to carry massive weights. James Archer’s business became built on integration between road and railway-transport for long-distance removal of furniture and other goods. In this way James Archer offered a service that had not existed before: long-distance speedy removals of household furniture. 

1857: George Jackson Churchward, born at Stoke Gabriel, Devonshire. He was cousin by marriage of Olive Emma Reed, PBA's great grandmother. That is to say, Olive Emma Reed's father’s sister was Eliza Reed who married Matthew Churchward, brother of George Churchward, father of GJ Churchward. GJ Churchward is probably the most famous GWR chief engineer of all, being responsible for the designs of the Star and Saint classes, which were the predecessors of the Castles and Kings, and many other equally-important (but less eponymous) classes of steam engines. Churchward’s design influence was widely-spread in the subsequent decades, not least by his pupil (Sir) William A.Stanier (FRS) who moved to the LMS and designed the (recognisably-Churchward-influenced) ‘Black-fives’, ‘Black-eights’, and Jubilee and Coronation classes inter-alia, and these design-traits were yet-again reproduced in the post-World-War 2 ‘Standard’ classes such as the Brittanias and Clans and 9F (2.10.0s). It seems not-without-significance that in 1957, 100 years-on from GJ Chiurchward’s birth, PBA was a pupil at MCS, Oxford, (Magdalen College School, a direct-grant school) whose headmaster was Robert S. Stanier, a member of the very same family as  William A. Stanier. And in 1957 also, Archer Cowley  & Co celebrated its centenary, and foresaw in the dinner speeches at the Cadena Café, a prosperous future, but in 12 years the family business, founded on its integration with the railways, was sold, and in those 12 years the fate of steam on the railways was likewise sealed by the Beeching Report.

1850s/60s/70s (check exact dates): Reid paper mills established in GB and NL; these were the Reid family's contribution to the 19th century's Industrial Revolution - the Reid family is the family of Alfred George Archer's wife, Olive Emma Reid.

1858: 'The Great Stink’ in London - caused (in part) by excessive pollution of the river Thames;

1859: Death of IK Brunel: father of the Great Western Railway (London-Bristol, initially), and creator of the steamships “Great Western”, “Great Eastern” and “Great Britain”, including the first transatlantic crossing, and the use of such ships for cable-laying;

1860: The British were 'overlords' of all India: 30,000 British running 200 million Indians; spices from India wee then used as food-preservatives in the era before refrigeration was invented; India's structure was then comparable to that (then) of the Holy Roman Empire - comprising many small states;

1831, 1861, and 1882: reform of the British franchise, stage-wise, whereby most men (but no women) were entitled to vote;

1861-1865: Military part of American Civil War (about slavery); General Sherman (of that war, and of the ensuing Great Plains Indian exterminations), spoke of Indians as "enemies of our race and nation”; the American Civil War (ACW) mirrored the Brexit campaign in Britain in 2016-2019 which likewise was about withdrawal from a 'Union' (United States cf European Union) in order to be not bound by rules which relate to a matter of ethics or principles (slavery cf european war), and about which the opposing sides hold to their views sufficiently tenaciously to be willing to go to war against their fellow-citizens. The issues of the ACW are not fully resolved even to this day. Much the same may well apply to Brexit; note that secret ballots were not introduced in the US until 1888, so throughout the ACW there was great scope for intimidaiton of voters;

1862: Legislation on statute book relationg to limited liability companies, whereby the risk to investors arisiing from involvement with companies that got into difficulties was subject to limits, thereby encouraging investment; Archer Cowley became a limited liability company, but not, I recall, until many years after this change in the law;

1862: 29 January:  Frederick Delius born in Bradford;

1865/1870/1872: Laying of submarine cables to USA/India/Australia: transformed communication between Britain and its former and present colonies, in comparison with the time of about one year for a sailing vessel to sail to India and back in the 1700s;

1868: 25th May: Last public hanging in England, outside the walls of Newgate prison, London, before a crowd of 2,000, who jeered and sang mock hymns while two local churches tolled their bells, at the man convicted on very flimsy (probably framed) evidence by an alleged co-conspirator who was given free passage to Australia for turning "Queen's Evidence”, of the bomb outrage in Clerkenwell;

1869: Suez canal opened, built by Frenchman De Lesseps, thereby transforming the route to India, shortening it vastly, and rendering it unnecessary to round South Africa at Cape Town. 

1869: Opening of the trans-US railroad to the Pacific coast; this single step caused the greatest change of any one achievement in the development of the country, enabling small farmers to take over the prairie lands and transform them into a grain-growing monolith;

1869: 100 years before Archer Cowley & Co was to be sold by the Archer family to Cantays, of Cannock, presumably to capitalise on the asset-value of the firm, in the absence of a clear plan for continuing after the death of WGRA in any other way. In 1869, the firm was very probably still very much ‘Archer & Co’, entirely owned by James Archer, 12 years after its founding, and 7 years before Mark Cowley was taken on as a clerk;

1870s & 1880s: The building of the American railway system led to the flooding of the UK market with US-produced agricultural products and consequential loss of market-share for UK farmers. This effect was sadly compounded by a whole series of catastrophically-bad and coincidentally-timed cold wet summers. The combined effect was a severe depression of the whole UK agricultural sector, which led to problems for John Thomas Clarke, grazier, the builder (in 1888) of 'Somersday' in Lyddington, resulting in his eventual bankruptcy and ruin; which is a very sad state of affairs to contemplate from this distance of nearly 140 years in 2018;

1870s: WFH (Fairburn-Hart) and GGMH (Hardingham), founders of the patent practices that became Urquhart-Dykes & Lord both thought to have commenced practice in firms of (then) un-regulated patent agents;

1870: Alfred George Archer marries his (excise officer) boss Edward Reed's daughter, Olive Emma Reed, cousin by marriage (**) of George Jackson Churchward, in Wells, Somerset, and they subsequently live in Wells, Somerset, and Rothwell, Northants, and Shillingford, Oxon, and Oxford itself; (**) "Cousin by Marriage means, in this context, that GJC and OER were, respectively nephew and niece of the same person, Eliza Reed, sister of Edward Reed, she being, respectively, father's sister-in-law (of GJC) and father's sister (of OER);

1870: James Archer’s “By Road, By Rail, By Sea” advertisement posted at about  50 places in the Oxford area at a rental of about one shilling (5 new pence) per annum;

1871: James Archer advertises his ‘Repository’ for furniture etc in Shrimpton’s Popular Oxford Guide, the repository being located in New Road, close to County Hall. This was a few years before (in 1875) he purchased the Pembroke Street warehouse;

1871: “A (Methodist) mission established in Jericho in 1871 at first met in a house in Albert Street, but by 1873 a chapel had been built in Cranham Street. On the initiative of Hugh Price Hughes a new chapel, designed in gothic style by T. Mullett Ellis, was opened in Walton Street in 1883, but the Cranham Street chapel continued as a mission until 1918. Declining population in the area led to the closure of the Walton Street chapel in 1946.”

1872: Secret ballots introduced in General Elections thereby preventing intimidation of the kind so vividly described by George Eliot in 'Felix Holt';

1874 ("about"  per FEPL, Peter Lord): WFH (William Fairburn Hart, founder of the practice that became Urquhart -Dykes & Lord [Leeds office]), commences practice in Leeds;

1875 - 1885; Buffalo herds on the US plains wiped out by the coming of the railways, including eg use of Gatling guns mounted on trains for 'target practice’;

1875 James Archer purchases the Pemroke Street warehouse (per centenary advertisement);

1876: War on Sioux nation declared by US Army on a fabricated pretext relating to registration; 'Custer's last stand' and loss of 200 men causes US War Dept to decide to exterminate native Americans;

1876 Mark (‘Mack’) Cowley , former GWR railway clerk and son of a carpenter, joins James Archer as a clerk, age 20, at ‘Archer & Co’ household removals firm, inter-alia; he stays with the firm 57 years until 1933; from the perspective of 2020, it seems remarkable that a railway clerk's surname has equal status (arguably) with that of James Archer, in this old Oxford firm, but doubtless loyalty (and for all I know) ability may have counted highly in James Archer's decision to offer him a partnership;

1878: WGRA, William George Reed Archer, sixth child of Alfred George Archer and Olive Emma Reid.Archer born at Shillingford, Oxon, his father then being (according to one of his obituaries) 'chief of the Dorchester District’ (of the Inland Revenue), and working presumably at Dorchester, Oxon, not far from Shillingford;

1880: Mary Ann Evans.Lewes.Cross (George Eliot) dies and is buried in Highgate cemetery;

1880s and 1890s: blocking by Tories of Gladstone;s Irish Home Rule bills, led to the Easter Rising of 1916 and the 1916-1922 Revolution and Civil War in Ireland, after WW1. This Tory/Unionist blocking action denied the Irish 'Home Rule' movement, led by Parnell, any acceptable outcome;

1881: Lord Salisbury, leader of the Tories, likens the Irish to "Hottentots" (as being equally incapable of self-rule) in a debate on the Irish Home Rule question - the Tories opposing Home Rule and ultimately preventing it, and thereby causing the Irish Civil War and the division of Ireland into Eire and the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, and The Troubles (with the iRA) of the 1970s, and al the difficulties of The Irish Backstop in the Brexit crisis in 2016-2019. The Tories opposed the reform of the electorate and the franchise in the 1830s and 1860s and 1880s, and likewise the enfranchisement of women over the period of the 1880s to 1919. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a typical 'Tory hard-right public-school toff' (The commentator Suzanne Moore compared Rees-Mogg to Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Donald Trump, suggesting that like them "he embodies the three things that many people require of modern politicians: a veneer of authenticity; an ability to cut through perceived liberal wisdom; and enormous privilege that is flaunted, rather than hidden."^[141] Moore was of the view that he uses his "religious faith" in an attempt to "excuse his appalling bigotry".^[141]) who is leading the ERG group in the Brexit process and proud to be a jingoist and to have all the hard-right phrases and arguments at his command. They mean nothing except that he would be at one with the Priest and the Levite in the Good Samaritan story and preaches the gospel of 'passing by on the other side' rather than showing compassion. (28.3.2019).

1831, 1861, and 1882: reform of the franchise, stage-wise, whereby most men (but no women) were entitled to vote; and after the lattermost stage of this reform, prime-minister Disraeli, set in-train his most successful process of 'flattering the (working-class) voters' as a Tory policy, seeking to make them 'proud of belonging to a great country, and to wish to maintain its greatness'. This policy of 'unreflective jingoism' was effective to maintain public support for policies of self-interest, that could not be justified on any reasonable basis eg the Boer Wars and the 'Scramble for Africa' initiated by Bismarck, and military action in the eastern Mediterranean.

1883: “A mission established in Jericho in 1871 at first met in a house in Albert Street (doubtless named-thus in the 1860s after the death of Prince Albert, Victoria's husband and Prince Consort, in 1861), but by 1873 a chapel had been built in Cranham Street. On the initiative of Hugh Price Hughes a new chapel, designed in gothic style by T. Mullett Ellis, was opened in Walton Street in 1883, but the Cranham Street chapel continued as a mission until 1918. Declining population in the area led to the closure of the Walton Street chapel in 1946.”

1883: Corrupt practices Act comes into force - desgined to eliminate bribery in elections; believed not to apply to referendums such as the 2016 one on EU membership - presumably because its terms were not drafted in sufficiently broad terms

1884, November: Walter Gilder's 'labours' (**) at Oxford, prior to the family's move to Hinckley;  eldest daughter Elizabeth Emma is 'adopted' by her aunt, Sarah Blake ('Aunty Blake'), and then lives in relative affluence in George Blake's household from age 7 onwards, at (I believe) inter-alia the home in Little Clarendon Street (off Walton Street); she marries William Archer in 1902 at Walton Street Methodist chapel, where his father, Alfred George Archer not infrequently takes services as a lay-preacher after the family move to Oxford from Shillingford,  in about 1886; WGRA is aged 5-6 in 1884 and doubtless his wife-to-be is completely unknown to him at this early age, living in Shillingford as he does, and in Walton Street, Oxford, as she does (aged 7). They may have both attended the Walton Street Methodist Chapel’s Sunday school from about 1886 onwards (he aged 7-8 and she 8-9), and he went off to Holland in  1894, eight years later, and kept a diary. But her father, Walter Gilder and his (relatively) new wife (neé Collins) and the rest of the family had moved to Hinckley, and Lizzie Gilder was living with her (adoptive father) Uncle (George) Blake, so it is perhaps quite possible that any scandal attached to the family, as published in Jackson’s Oxford Journal in 1884, relating to those ‘labours’ had completely subsided and been forogotten amid the affluence of George Blake’s household and business in Little Clarendon Street, when, in the late 1890s (about 15 years later, and WGRA having been working in Holland for up to 6 years), probably, WGRA’s thoughts turned to marriage with Lizzie Gilder, the daughter of George and Sarah Blake, for whom he commmenced work in 1901, in their successful home furnishing shop, near St Giles. (**)  which may well have been a punitive prosecution brought at the height of the age of Victorian prurience, agains a solitary man merely taken-short in the Univerity Parks, and inevitably unable to provide defensive evidence relating to an inherently-private act, when faced with evidence by females who observed him;

1884: Frederick Delius leaves Bradford for Florida as a young man;

1884: Agricultural working class men enfranchised;

1888: PBA/RA's home (1994 onwards) ‘ Somersday’ in Rutland, built; at the same time as the Eiffel Tower is built in Paris (1887-1889) to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution;

1890: Richard Rippington joins James Archer in Archer Cowley & Co, of Pembroke Street, Oxford, as a clerk, the firm then being 33 years old. WGRA is only 12 years old, has not finished his education, and is thus too young to be taken on at that age, though he was 3 years later in 1893, as 'office boy', but evidently did not find that suitable - see below;

1891: GGMH (George Hardingham) publishes his pamphlet: "Patents for inventions and how to procure them;

1893/4 WGRA is ‘office boy’ to his paternal Uncle James Archer at Archer Cowley & Co, probably in Pembroke Street, the firm then being about 36 years-old, and with Mack Cowley and Richard Rippington on the strength of the firm for 17 years and 3 years respectively, beginning as clerks. But WGRA does not stay long, preferring to try his luck with his maternal Uncle Edwin Albert Reed at his dutch ‘Papierfabriek’ at Kaisersveer/Raamsdonksveer in the Netherlands, and stays there for 6 years until 1900. Exactly how long WGRA was office boy with his Uncle James is not clear - perhaps only a few months.  The caption (which WGRA very probably drafted himself) to WGRA’s photo in the company’s scrapbook and album says:  “Office Boy: June 1893 - 1894” ie does not specify the month in 1894 when his ‘office boy’ appointment ended. He returns to the removals firm 25 years later in 1919 (age 41) as James Archer’s heir to JA’s share of the business, and eventually (in 1933) buys-out Messrs Cowley and Rippington, who have by then been in the firm 57 and 43 years, respectively.

1894 - 1900: WGRA moves to Holland to work in Uncle Albert Reid's Papier Fabrik at Raamsdonksveer/Kaisersveer (diary: 1898): on his return to Oxford in 1900 he is entered in the 1901 census as a schoolteacher, but no evidence of any such activity has emerged, and in the same year (1901) he joins George Blake in his house furnishing business in Little Clarendon Street, and, in a move closely-mirroring his father's marrage to his boss (Edward Reed)'s daughter, WGRA marries in 1902, the (adopted - but not legally or formally) daughter, Elizabeth Emma Gilder, niece of George Blake's wife;

1897: Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee and the height of jingoistical 'empire fever' among the electorate at large

1897: 3 September: WUD (Bill Dykes) born at Raniket in northern India - his father being later and possibly already then, commander of a battalion of The Cameronians;

1900 The Labour Party created by The Trade Union Congress; 1900 - 1920: Liberal Party displaced by The Labour Party as the party of principal oppositon to The Tories, mainly as a result of the Irish Home Rule disaster caused by The Tories; while the reforms that The Labour Party achieved were undoubtedly needed, the effects of some trade union practices (to cause stagnation in social  mobility) are undoubtedly retrograde;

1901: James Archer erects warehouses in Park End Street, Oxford. The magnificence of the Park End Street frontage can certainly be seen as part of the Victorian and Edwardian late-flowering of British architecture at the height of the British Empire, before the hideousness of post-World Wars 1&2 brutal austerity set-in,  The centenary advertisement adds that: “Transport then consisted of 26 horses for vans, carts, stone-trucks, timber carriages, etc”. It adds: “First steam traction engine purchased”. This was the Wallis & Steevens steam locomotive bought on 15.11.1901 for £519.10.0d and shown in the  relevant  window in the Scrapbook album page herein.

1902: WGRA (William Archer) and EEG (Elizabeth Emma Gilder) married at Walton Street Methodist chapel, Oxford.

1902 - 1922: GJC (GJ Churchward, ‘cousin-by-marriage’ (**) of WGRA’s mother, Olive Reed) appointed Chief Engineer of the Great Western Railway, in succession to William Dean. As 'cousin - by - marriage' of great-grandma Reid, GJC was apparently completely unknown to my family;  (**) In other words, Olive Emma Reed’s father’s sister, Eliza Reed, married into the Churchward family (and became a Churchward), and thus was ‘Aunt Eliza’ to GJ Churchward, being his father’s sister-in-law, while simultaneously being Olive Emma Reed’s 'Aunt Eliza', because she was her father’s sister; or putting it another way, Eliza Reed was simultaneously 'Aunt Eliza to both GJ Churchward and to Olive Emma Reed (my paternal great-grandmother).

1902: Treaty of Vereeniging ends second Boer War. Seems likely that the bitterness (**) about the hostilities generally and aspects of the fighting (including British concentration camps for Boer women and children, in which thousands died of diseases) in Holland had contributed to WGRA's decision in 1900 to return from Kaisersveer to Oxford after working in NL for 6 years. (**) Entirely justified bitterness in my opinion in view of the gold-rush aspects of the continuation of the war following the Boers' withdrawal (to the Transvaal) in their 'Great Trek';

1903: Eric Blair (George Orwell) born at Motahari in India; AWA, Arthur William Archer born at 64 Kingston Road, Oxford on 5.11.1903 - first child of WGRA and Elizabeth Emma Gilder;

1903, December 17th: Wright Bros first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, N. Carolina;

1904: GJ Churchward's City of Truro reaches 100 mph on "Ocean Mails" express;

1904: Thermionic valve invented by English physicist John Ambrose Fleming, a consultant to Edison Swan, Edison Telephone, and Marconi  - the communications revolution begins;

1905: FGBA born, 64 Kingston Road, Oxford - second child of WGRA and Elizabeth Emma Gilder; and christened at Walton Street Methodist chapel; at this date the end of the Napoleionic wars (in 1815 with the battle of Waterloo) was only 90 years away; cf 90 years before PBA was born in 1941 was 1851, the  year of the Grat Exhibition at the Crystal Palace;

1906: Robert Penfold, brother of Frank Penfold (Phil's maternal grandfather), emigrates to NZ, marries a Maori, and never returns, but sends wonderfully valuable food parcels to his niece Gwen Archer (Phil's mother) during WW2.

1909: GMP born, Horsham, Sussex; Bleriot flies the channel 18 days later, on 25th July; Ernest Archer (elder brother of WGRA)’s interest in aviation probably commenced or increased; he is taken-on by the Dutch aviation authority as a pilot, trained as such at Bleriot's Franch aviation school, and flies (1910) one of the two Dutch Bleriot XI monoplanes at Twello inter-alia;

1911: William Alston Dykes, both father and son, die in same year;

1913: James Archer purchases his first steam furniture van (per centenary advertisement);

1914, April 10th: 100 years before this website was launched;

1914 - 1918: WWI, or “The Great War”, (Modern Man's greatest folly before climate change denial). (Quote from back cover of “Oxford in the Great War” by Malcolm Graham: “Oxford was transformed during the Great War. Soldiers and cadets occupied most men’s colleges,which were left virtually empty as undergraduates and some younger dons enlisted. Lecture rooms wereused for military training, practice trenches were dug in green spaces, and trainee pilots flew from a temporary Port Meadow airfield. The threat of invasion sparked the formation of a Dad’s Army, the Oxford Volunteer Battalion, and city streets and shop windows were blacked-out as a precauation against air raids.”  Thus, life in Oxford during those five (14/15/16/17/18) years. I have been unable to find any reference to anything that Archer Cowley may have been then doing, though no doubt they did do war-materials transportation, and I do vaguely remember hearing from someone (my cousin Pam Archer.Ince?) that they did some work connected with radiators (for vehicles?), perhaps ‘Osberton Radiators’?, but that would have been in WW2, I think, for Pam to have known about it from her Dad, Arthur William Archer, Transport Director of Archer Cowley (added 26.4.17)

1914: UK xenophobic UK fears (promoted by Lord Northcliffe's Tory press) that black soldiers from the British Empire would be cared-for by white nurses in battlefield situations leads to resistance to their use accordingly;

1915: WUD leaves school (Glenalmond, Perthshire);

1916: Percy Gilder whose home was in Hinckley, killed in Battle of the Somme (July to November 2016); Percy was my paternal grandma ‘Lizzie’ (whom I never met because she died of cancer in 1938, three years before I was born)’s younger half-brother (from her father Walter Gilder’s second family, after he moved to Hinckley, in (approx)1886; so Percy was my great-uncle, and, as far as I know, the only member of the family to be killed in the two world wars;

1916 - 1922: Irish revolutionary civil war (in which Bill Dykes flew for the RFC in 1919): resulting in the division of Ireland into Eire and The Six Counties (of Northern Ireland), caused by the Tories opposition to Gladstone's Irish Home Rule inititatives in the 1880s, which would have allowed Iraland to settle-down in a 'Canada-like' situation, thereby avoiding the civil war itself, The Troubles of the 1970s and The Irish Backstop complications connected with Brexit in the 2010s. The Irish War of Independence appears to be almost unknown in the UK in the sense that it is never mentioned as such in political discussions (eg in the relatively recent campaign for Scottish independence): though everyone knows that Eire or Ireland exists as an independent state of the EU, and that Northern Ireland is part of the UK, but no one seems to know how or when that state of affairs came about. This may well be because it was a guerilla-style conflict involving extreme brutality on both sides, leading to total separation of the two sides (ie divorce), and thus a total failure by the UK to manage its own affairs in a humane and admirable way (5.7.2019);

1917, 1st July: WUD posted to France, at St Omer and then Proven;

1917: WW1: Air raids by “Gotha” bombers on London. Frank Penfold (my Grandad Penfold) is an air-raid warden and is involved in some pretty gruesome situations (per his daughter, Gwen Penfold.Archer, my mother); the royal family changes its name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to “Windsor” in the teeth of much anti-German public sentiment;

1917 - 18: WUD serves in RFC, flying over Ypres in artillery observation, and later in Ireland; last flight on 22.07.1918 and clocked  up 586 hours, 20 mins;

1917: USA enters WW1 due to German submarine attacks on shipping; ie 3 out of 5 years of the war have already gone by; the US was strongly anti-colonial and determined to do nothing to prop-up the British Empire; BUT it needs to be said that the US is itself the most blatant example of man's infinite capacity for hypocrisy, since the US is an extreme case of a colony established by invasion of an already peopled country, and the exploitation and ultimate extermination of its native inhabitants; this statment is not tribal. It is our species that has this capacity. Not any one tribe of us: the British, the US, the French; only the EU has found a way to deal with this: by nations working together in a parliament, for peace.That, taking place in Brussels and Strasbourg, the two centres best-placed to represent the history of 1,000 years of European wars, is man's greatest achievement ever, say I; (25.10.19);

1918 onwards: GB post-WW1 literature: "Memoirs of an infantry officer" (Siegfried Sassoon) on the futility and brutality of WW1; “Goodbye to all that” (Robert Graves) ditto; “All quiet on the western front” (Paul Remarque) ditto. In 2016 onwards when the in-fighting in the Tory party caused Prime Minister Cameron to call a referendum on membership of the EU (which had kept the peace in Europe for 71 years, after a thousand or more years of intermittent wars), all this had been totally forgotten by a large section of the nation, which voted to leave in order to ’take back control’ of the destiny of the country

1920 ("early in" - per FEPL): WUD apprenticed to Mewburn Ellis & Co, and is pupil of George Ellis(*), qualifies, and after qualification buys (for £3,000) [approximately equivalent in 2016 to £139,500] into GGM Hardingham's practice in Surrey Street, London, comprising two typists and an office boy - the practice becomes "Hardingham & Urquhart Dykes"; (*)=George Beloe Ellis was the husband of WUD's cousin Agnes's husband's sister - hence the introduction; 

1921: James Archer purchases his first petrol-driven van (per centenary advertisement);

1922: WUD&RD (apparently completely by chance) buy their house in Ealing from Peter Lord’s (much older) sister (FEPL being then aged 10), and this simple chance event apparently led to him becoming interested in their racing exploits/meeting/etc etc and eventually to UD&L;

1922: Washington Naval Treaty to which UK was a party causes voluntary reduction in Royal Navy by scrapping of 650 ships, thereby producing parity with the US and marginal inferiority with Japan - surely a very significant step away from GB’s world-bestriding position in the 19th century;

1923: James Archer sells his last horses - per centenary advertisement); (or was it 1925? See item below;

1923 (December): deadline date shown on (surviving small pieces of) publicity material for sale of Somerville House, 130 Banbury Road, Oxford, which therefore represents, presumably, the date (approximately) by which WGRA purchased the house which became a significant symbol in my life, for the natural world and green values, and all which I am trying to replicate at 'Somersday' in Rutland in the 1990s/2000s/2010s/2020s.

1924: EM Forster writes “A passage to India” about racism and intolerance of the British imperialists in India, in which the (female) protagonist is accused of betrayal of her (British) race and class when she decides to tell the truth in court and admit that she was not sexually attacked by an Indian in the Marrabar caves, as she had alleged; George Orwell wrote about his life in the Police in Burma, including the essay “Shooting an Elephant” at a similar time, expressing his horror of many aspects of British imperialism, and being in favour of decency, freedom and economic justice, and being of the opinion that both imperialism and communism are enemies of this latter concept;

1924 - 1929: WUD's hobby: motor sport;  

1928: October: WUD takes Brooklands 1500cc 12 hour and 200km and 200 miles records in his Alvis Sports Beetle Back, which was un-supercharged and used domestically daily - from the supercharged Lea Francis;

1925: James Archer dies and leaves his nephew WGRA the residue of his £65K estate - whereby he becomes seriously wealthy;

1925: 1st October: Farm sale by Archer Cowley’s auctioneers, of all their horses and associated ‘farming’ equipment needed to produce the hay they needed. See corresponding scrapbook page;

1926: FGBA, Frederick George Blake Archer, my father, joins Archer Cowley & Co at the age of 20. This is the start of a career with the firm lasting 43 years; FGBA is then (or, at least, not long before then) living with his parents, William and Lizzie Archer at the semi-detached house at 64 Kingston Road, Oxford, not far from Walton Well Road (where 22 years later in 1948 onwards PBA went train-spotting), and then moved with them (first to Acacia Lodge, Banbury Road, I believe, but have no details) and then to Somerville, 130 Banbury Road, where the family lived from ‘the late 1920s’, where they all lived until FGBA married in 1936 and moved back into 64 Kingston Road (the house where he had been born and grown up to at least his late teens, I think), with his wife Gwen Penfold.Archer;

1926: Samuel Garner leaves Stand Grammar School (where he had studied after winning a scholarship), Whitefield, Manchester, at age 16, and joins Royal Insurance for a career lasting until his premature death in 1970, including  two years, 1962-1963 as Chariman of the Manchester Marine Insurance Association;

1927: WUD joins GGMH in his London practice, which is re-named "Hardingham & Urquhart Dykes" (no hyphen);

1927/8: WUD's main motor-racing exploits with Alvis at Le Mans and Brooklands; amazing that he should have time to do all this in the very year when he joins Hardingham as a partner in the latter's legal practice;

1928: FEPL got to know Bill & Ruth Dykes;

1928 - 1934: Eric Fenby's years as Delius's amanuensis at Grez-sur-Loing;

1929: 24th October: Wall Street crash begins; results in losses of $50bn between 1929 and1931 and the worst economic depression in US history;

1929: WUD drives Alvis new straight-eight at Brooklands on its first appearance and wins at 101 mph (average speed);

1929: Gwen Penfold’s visit to Germany to stay with the family connection made by William Wells’s eldest daughter Janey (mother of Elizabeth Milne-Redhead.Kirkby) in Frankfurt, and is smitten (at the age of 20) by the son of the family, and the family’s artistic/musical connections, and would have liked to invite him back to England/Brighton for Christmas, but her parents refuse, and put an end to the relationship, which otherwise might well have seen Gwen marrying and living in Germany, and thus an end to my potential existence;

THE 1930s: Peter Lord starts in IP //  Bill Dykes expands into Leeds  //  WGRA buys-out Cowley and Rippington from Archer Cowley & Co  //  The Holocaust begins in Europe  //  AC&Co land the Bodleian Science Library job in 1934  // FGBA and GMP marry in Kingston  //  Lizzie Gilder dies 1938  //  MJA born 1938 in Oxford  //  War begins 1939 in Europe - only a little over 20 years since the ‘Great War’ (1914-1918), the war to end all wars, had ended;

1932: 8th November: Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt defeats incumbent Herbert Hoover for his first of an unprecedented four US presidential terms;

1933: Sept/Oct: WUD offers FEPL (age 22) 6 weeks work experience - which he accepts;

1933: WUD inspects WFH Leeds practice;

1933: 27th February: An arson attack on the Reichstag building is blamed on the Communist party, causing it to be banned and giving HItler’s Nazi party a clear majority in government;

1933: 27th March: Germany’s first concentration camp opens at Dachau, near Munich;

1933: 10th May: Head of propaganda Joseph Goebbels encourages the burning of 25,000 ‘un-German’ books;

1933: 14th July: all political parties except the Nazis are banned in Germany;

1933, 30 Jan to 1945, 8 May: Holocaust: 5,860,000 Jewish people including 1,200,000 Jewish children killed; and about 5,000,000 non-Jewish people killed;

1933: William G.R. Archer buys-out Mark Cowley and Richard Rippington from James Archer’s firm, Archer Cowley & Co, of Oxford, following WGRA inheriting James Archer’s share of the firm in 1919; the caption to WGRA’s photo in the company’s scrapbook and album says:  “Office Boy: June 1893 - 1894. Partner July 1st 1919 - December 1933. Sole proprietor Dec 1933 - 1943. Now private limited company.” So, WGRA was indeed sole partner/owner for 10-ish years from 1933 to 1943, having been joint owner for the 14-ish years from 1919 to 1933;

193(4?): WUD purchases WFH's Leeds practice for £500;

1934: FEPL joins WUD as a pupil and trains, passing the Intermediate and Final exams at first attempts, and (1937) qualifies before reaching age 25, and has to wait several months before he can become a fellow of CIPA;

1934: Frederick Delius dies in France;

1934: Archer Cowley’s removal of 137 van-loads of books from the Bodleian Science Library to the new library in South Parks Road: the apogee of the firm’s technical and prestigious achievements in its 112-year history from 1857 to 1969; (this ‘main event’ of AC&Co’s business life, corresponds to PBA’s involvement in the Geber Case at UDL Peterborough, reported in 1995 RPC); 

1935: 11th April: Britain, France and Italy convene to discuss German rearmament; George V’s Silver Jubilee to mark which Stanier’s ‘Jubilee’ class 4-6-0 steam engines are named;

1936: 20th January: British King, George V dies and is succeeded by (his son) Edward VIII;

1936: Hitler's Berlin Olympic Games;

1936, Oct 31: GMP marries FGBA at Kingston-on-Thames; a pouring wet day;

1936 Archer Cowley purchases its first diesel-engined furniture van for long-distance road-removals (per centenary advertisement); this change from the road-rail system used since 1857 (or whenever after that, that household removals began, of which I am not aware that a date is allocated in the scrapbook or anywhere else), is very significant in marking a move away from James Archer’s ‘system’ of road-rail transportation which had made him so successful; 

1936: 10th December: Edward VIII abdicates in order to  marry the American divorcee Wallace Simpson. His younger brother is crowned George VI the following May (1937) - to mark which the LMS names its ‘Coronation Scot’ express train using streamlined Stanier ‘Duchess’ class locomotives; George VI reigns: 1936 - 1952;

1937: GMA almost leaves FGBA;

1937: 26th April: The Basque town of Guernica in Spain is bombed by the German and Italian air forces;

1938: 12th February: The first refugee children of the Kindertransport programme arrive in Britain. In all, 10,000 Jewish  children are sent from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia before the start of the second world war;

1938: August. Phil’s brother MJA born at Oxford. WGRA’s wife, Lizzie Gilder dies aged approximately 60;

1939: 15th March: Germany invades and occupies Czechoslovakia;

1939: 31st March: Britain guarantees the territorial integrity of Poland. The  government reluctantly starts to prepare for war;

1939: 3rd September: Britain declares war on Germany after its invasion of Poland; this is little more than 20 years since the previous ‘Great War’ of 1914-1918 ended;

1939 - 45: WW2: FGBA/GMA are living in Oxford where no bombs fell (except one in the country well towards Thame), and AC&Co do some war work; Vincent Penfold serves in Navy, his younger brother Raymond in the RAF, in radio/radar and acquires much technical expertise in telecomunications;

THE 1940s: PBA born Oxford 1941 // Five years of war in Europe  //  RG born  Radcliffe, Lancs, 1944 // birth of PBA’s railway hobby 1948;

1940s & 50s: FGBA/GMA Summer family holidays at Prestatyn, Abersoch, Camber Sands, Cromer; Ilfracombe;

1940: May 10th: Neville Chamberlain resigns after the shambles of the Norwegian campaign to resist the German invasion of Norway, and George VI invites Churchill to become Prime Minister

1940: June 4th: Winston Churchill’s  “We shall fight on the beaches” speech to Parliament following the ‘Dunkirk miracle’ of 335,000 men of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) being recovered by sea, but 30,000 killed, wounded and missing. The speech in its last paragraph refers to: “…..even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated  and starving……”. At this date in June my parents, FGBA and GMA had been married 3 years and 10 months and had one child (my brother Michael) aged 1 year and 10 months, and 7 months later I would be conceived. The war was going terribly badly, and yet life had to go on and somehow faith in a future had to be there; and that faith gave me life;

1940, September 15th: “Battle of Britain” day: Goering’s Luftwaffe launches what is intended to be its knockout blow to the RAF, which was the essential step prior to invasion, but the British lost only 26 aircraft and 13 pilots, and 5 days later Hitler postponed the invasion indefinitely;

1940: November 14th/15th (late night/early morning): 400 Luftwaffe bombers attack Coventry in ‘Operation Moonlight Sonata', and the glow in the (northward-looking) night-sky is visible to Gwen and Fred Archer, living in Headington, Oxford at a distance of 75 kilometres; the blitz on Coventry lasts 10 hours and the city was utterly devastated and in the morning looked to a resident like ‘a city of the dead’; my brother Michael is  aged two and I am not yet born; what a world it must have seemed! What confidence or love to go ahead with further childbirth at such a terrible time!

1941: PBA born at 386 London Rd, Headington, Oxford; second son, second child of FGBA and GMA;

1943, July: Operation ‘Gomorrah’ against Hamburg by RAF and USAF: (see Wikipedia text below pasted 26.4.17):

The attack during the last week of July 1943, Operation Gomorrah, created one of the largest firestorms raised by the Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Forces in World War II,^[2] killing 42,600 civilians and wounding 37,000 in Hamburg and virtually destroying most of the city.^[3] Before the development of the firestorm in Hamburg there had been no rain for some time and everything was very dry.^[4] The unusually warm weather and good conditions meant that the bombing was highly concentrated around the intended targets and also created a vortex and whirling updraft of super-heated air which created a 460 meter high tornado of fire, a totally unexpected effect. Various other previously used techniques and devices were instrumental as well, such as area bombing, Pathfinders, and H2S radar, which came together to work with particular effectiveness. An early form of chaff, code named 'Window', was successfully used for the first time by the RAF – clouds of tinfoil strips dropped by Pathfinders as well as the initial bomber stream – in order to completely cloud German radar. The raids inflicted severe damage to German armaments production in Hamburg.

1944: RG born at Bury Road, Radcliffe, Lancashire, first child of SG and ANPG; this child became the most important person in the whole world to me, and remains so (7.4.17);

1945: Thursday 5th July General Election: Labour Government, with majority of 180 seats, Clement Attlee Prime Minister, Winston Churchill opposition leader;

1946: “A mission established in Jericho in 1871 at first met in a house in Albert Street, but by 1873 a chapel had been built in Cranham Street. On the initiative of Hugh Price Hughes a new chapel, designed in gothic style by T. Mullett Ellis, was opened in Walton Street in 1883, but the Cranham Street chapel continued as a mission until 1918. Declining population in the area led to the closure of the Walton Street chapel in 1946.”

1946: AC&Co did a second very significant removal job for the Bodleian in 1946 as well as the 1934 task. And the 1946 job was much bigger than the earlier one, by a factor of 15/2 = 7.5 times larger. This is an astonishing record. Thank goodness it has come to light and can be published! (14.4.2017).

1946: MFW, age 17, joins John Selby & Miss Newton(?) as the third member of Leeds office staff of H&UD;

1946 PBA's family move to Sandfield Rd, Headington - halving the distance from Oxford;

194(7?): FEPL becomes partner with WUD;

1940s and 1950s: decades of hearing live wonderful music in our home: my mother playing Chopin etudes, impromptus, ballades, polonaises, waltzes, and glorious violin & piano pieces with my brother Michael - the significance of which has only been fully realised since leaving home and knowing what a love of such music it has given me and how rare such experiences are in people's lives;

1947: Name UD&L adopted by firm as a whole;

1948: 'Austerity' Olympics in London - rowing was at Henley; I have no recollection at all of the Olympics;

1948: PBA's 1st cycling accident (Sandfield Rd) and hospitalisation for 2 or 3 days;

1948 - 1954: PBA at Christ Church Cathedral Choir School, Brewer Street, St Aldates, Oxford - founded by Cardinal Wolsey;

1948: Railway hobby begins with "County of Merioneth" at Oxford station - shortly after Attlee's government makes policy decision to continue with steam for energy security reasons; that hobby lasts until about 1957, metamorphosing into a photographic-based interest in a collection of steam-days-photographs;

THE 1950s: The first 'decade of peace’ since the ‘thirty-years’-war (1914 - 1945). The decade of optimism. Festival of Britain 1951 and corresponding tuneful ‘confidence-in-the-future’ music by Eric Coates.  Cycling: everywhere - including significant cycling accident 1954 - and two cycle-tour holidays in Scotland and cycling to ‘Gran’ Rosa Penfold’s home at Kingston from Oxford.    Railway hobby giving rise to Phil’s concept of Technology's onward and upwards striding progress inspired by 70014 "Morning Star" on the 4.30 pm "Milk” train.   Magdalen College School  // Rowing years: 1956 -1965 transform PBA into a fitness-freak doing exercises daily for the rest of his life;

b)  AC&Co somewhat in its (latter-days) heyday, and enjoying its centenary in 1957;

c) The main decade of Phil’s railway hobby and two summer-holiday railway cycle-tours,  and schooldays rowing, and schooldays girl-friends;

1950s: PBA visits to locomotive works started an involvement with engineering processes;

1950: Eric Blair dies in hospital, London;

1950: Thursday 23rd February General Election: Labour Government, elected with majority of 17 seats, Clement Attlee Prime Minister, Winston Churchill opposition leader;

1951: Festival of Britain on Thames south bank; centenary of The Great Exhibition at Hyde Park, London;

1951: Thursday 25th October 1951 General Election: Conservative Government elected, with majority of 26 seats, Winston Churchill  Prime Minister, Clement Attlee opposition leader;

1954 - 1961: PBA attends Magdalen College School, The Plain, Oxford, under Bob Stanier, a Direct Grant school - and definitively not then the public school that it now is, with fees of £13,000 per annum; (added 3.4.18): I now see this as a 'golden era' in MCS's life when the entry spectrum of boys was so much wider than now and wide enough to include me;

1954: PBA's 2nd cycling accident at bottom of Headington Hill, and loss of top front teeth, due to failure to see van (fortunately parked facing up hill), on way to an evening swimming session after writing homework essay about "Commander Crab's exploits" in relation to a Russian 'spy' vessel; (added 3.4.18): did this cause the acoustic neuroma which surfaced in 2013? 59 years later?

1955: Thursday 26th May 1955 General Election: Conservative Government elected, with majority of 68 seats, Anthony Eden Prime Minister, Clement Attlee opposition leader;

1955 and 'Mid-1950s': Donald R Lee and Donald Knighton ministers at Wesley Memorial Methodist Church, New Inn Hall street, Oxford. DRL went on to become president of the Methodist Conference. He was known as 'Even-so' Lee, because so many of his prayers began with those words. Donald Knighton lived in Headington in (coincidentally) Knighton Road, one street west of the main Headington cross-roads. I was a fairly active member of the congregation and remember giving him a lift on the James motorbike to a preaching engagement at Noke or some such village, perhaps one of the villages in the sparsely-inhabited (can't remeber the name) plain up therein the Brill region.

1957 - 1965: Rowing years on Isis at MCS and on Bridgewater Canal at Umist. 1956: MCS ‘Colts' VIII - coached by Mike (MP) Cooper; 1957/8/9/60: MCS 1st VIIIs (under Ricky Gallop, Fred Marshall, Bill Simmons, Robert Herbertson, respectively, as Captains of Boats); 1961/2 UMIST VIII at London Head; 1965 rowed in St Edmund Hall 1st Schools VIII under N.Mc.N. Jackson (Neil Jackson), and bumped each of the four days and was awarded ‘oar’ - which never materialised (do they ever? I know not). We also won the Schools IVs event at the Serpentine Sprint Regatta (at Hyde Park) for the three consecutive years 1959-1961, but have the silver cups only for two of these because in one year of the three the name of one member of the crew did not exactly correspond with the name on our entry papers, and that was that. (Comment): How brief (compared with later periods) were those rowing years, yet how influential! They changed me from a non-sporting person, into…well, something else. .Click here to go to a graphic of one of the Sculloars crews.

1957: Centenary celebrations of AC&Co including dinner at Cadena (click here to go to a dinner photo) - PBA not there; this year was also the centenary year (but unknown to the family) of the birth of G.J. Churchward, the celebrated GWR  chief-engineer at Swindon from 1902 to 1921, who was ‘cousin-in-law’ (or cousin-by-marriage)[**]of PBA’s paternal great-grandmother, Olive Emma Reed. Only 12 years later, in 1969, Archer Cowley & Co was to be sold to Cantays, presumably to capitalise on its asset-value, in the absence of a clear plan for it to continue under family-management; [**] because Olive Emma Reed’s aunt Eliza Reed (her father’s sister) married GJC’s uncle Matthew Churchward (his father’s brother)

1957/8: Two cycling tours of railway centres in Scotland and The North with Graeme Donald Finlayson Burton; vast collection of unprinted black-and-white photographs assembled, most of which remain unprinted and unpublished;

1959: Schooldays girl-friends;

1959: Thursday 8th October 1959 General Election: Conservative Government elected, with majority of 107 seats, Harold Macmillan Prime Minister, Hugh Gaitskill opposition leader;

1959/60: Concept of progress via study/work/exams emerges, and is probably responsible for PBA’s decision not to follow FGBA into the family firm, AC&Co;

THE 1960s: The second 'decade of peace’ since the ‘thirty-years’-war (1914 - 1945). PBA at Manchester University & UMIST //  PBA meets RG at Union dance on 18.11.61 married on 10.9.66 at  Radcliffe, Lancs   //  Dunlop Rubber Co at Erdington, Birmingham 1965-1970 // sale of Archer Cowley & Co to Cantays: 1969 and FGBA retires after 43 years in the business

1963-1968: End of steam on British Railways;

1961: Berlin Wall goes up; (lasts 28 years);

1961 - 1965: Phil at UMIST Manchester, & OUED Oxford: B.Sc.Tech(chem), & Dip.Ed.; 1965 teaching appointment at Bolton School - not taken up;

1961: Nov 18: met RG at Union dance, Oxford Rd, Manchester;

1964: Thursday 15th October 1964 General Election: Labour Government elected, with majority of 14 seats, Harold Wilson Prime Minister, Alec Douglas Home opposition leader;

1965 - 1970: Dunlop Rubber Co, inventions and patents dept; starting in chemistry section and moving on to aviation, wheels & rims, brakes, and belting; Sid Jelly (CPA) was a motivating force in PBA moving on; 

1966: Thursday 31st March 1966 General Election: Labour Government elected, with majority of 110 seats, Harold Wilson Prime Minister, Edward Heath opposition leader;

1966, Sept 10: PBA/RG married at Bridge Methodist Church, Radcliffe, 5 years less 2 months and 8 days after meeting cf FGBA and GMP (Phil’s parents) married after a much shorter ‘engagement’ of 6 weeks (Gwen said);

1966 - 1968: PBA/RA living at 4 Royal Rd, Sutton Coldfield;

1964 - 1980s: years of 'own motor vehicle servicing and maintenance' - effectively learning about "automotive vehicles”;

1968 - 1974: PBA/RA living at 52 Hemlingford Rd, Sutton Coldfield; Graham born 1969;

1969: FGBA retires from AC&Co at age 65 and the firm is sold to Cantays;

The 1970s: The third 'decade of peace’ since the ‘thirty-years’-war (1914 - 1945). PBA at MF for most of the decade, then with Hestair Group. Helen born 1973;

1970 - 1978: PBA joins Massey-Ferguson patents dept, Banner Lane, Coventry, managed by John Wilson, CPA, with D. Bryn Jones (formerly at Dunlop, Erdington, Birmingham) as his deputy; PBA qualified as a Chartered Patent Agent in 1974; John Wilson had formerly worked with Harry Ferguson himself, and he died a few years before I left MF;

1970: PBA soon got to understand at MF the basis of the MF '3-point-hitch' system of tractor draft-control, whereby the 'suction' (ie downward force) generated by a plough can be controllably-applied to the rear driving wheels of a ligtweight tractor whereby it can acieve the tractive-effect of a much heavier machine. In this way the modern agricultural system of (rleatively) lightweight powerful machines for carrying out formerly manual-onl, or heavy-machine-only tasks was effectivly born. (30.6.19) At the time, it seemed important to be associated with such a significant techinical step forward. 

1970: Thursday 18th June 1970 General Election: Conservative Government elected, with majority of 43 seats, Edward Heath Prime Minister, Harold Wilson opposition leader;

1971: First PBA visit to Paris, on business with MF Patents Manager, Bryn Jones, to visit MF’s French engineering centre at the Le-Plessis Robinson Zipec, just south of Paris; first visit to offices of S.A. Fédit Loriot, and meeting with Jacques Loriot himself; thus begins or continues a love affair with ‘things French’, especially Jacques’ whole ethos;

1973: UK joins the EEC, and I remember (44 years later in 2017) that the MF product planning people (with whom I worked to some extent, to obtain forward planning information about MF products), used to complain about the “CAP” (the Common Agricultural Policy”), as it affected MF’s customers’ actions and policies; at the time I did not realise the significance of this act of positive anti-tribalism and outward-looking learning-from-history mature integration-to-prevent the horrors of war, not to mention the importance of the human-rights and climate-change-fighting and other environmental legal provisions that we never do on our own;

1974: PBA qualified as a Chartered Patent Agent (now called ‘Patent Attorney’), approximately 9 years after commencing training at Dunlops.

1974: GMA almost leaves FGBA - he visits us at 52 Hemlingford Rd. This is 37 years since the comparable event in 1937; looking back 43 years later in 2017 that visit seems so poignant. Dad was 69 years old. The family must have seemed to be coming apart at the seams; 37 years after our marriage was 2003, the year we acquired Fred our Bedlington terrier;

1974/5: Michael & Claudia.Arnatt.Archer divorce and Michael marries Susan Zimmerman; Michael and Claudia’s two children, Mark and Stewart, are aged about 10 and about 7;

1974: Thursday 28th February 1974, General Election, Labour minority Government elected with a labour majority of 5 seats (Liberals: 14 seats), Harold Wilson: Prime Minister; Edward Heath: opposition leader;

1974: Thursday 10th October 1974, General Election, Labour Government elected with a labour majority of 43 seats;  Harold Wilson: Prime Minister; Edward Heath: opposition leader; 

1974/5 (mid-1970s anyway): Phil's business visit to Massey Ferguson South Africa to oversee IP aspects of acquisition of peanut harvester company: Slattery at Pietersburg in the Transvaal. Stayed at hotel overlooking dam on Vaal river. Worked with Walter Ward of MFSA, and Eric Jarrard (MD of Slattery) and Andy Scholtz (pronounced 'Skole-ss') his colleague. MF's private single-engine air taxi to Pietersburg. Much work on MF's South African patent holdings to ascertain 'in-use' status was not particularly welcomed on my return. Lesson: people don't like you to try too hard. They feel threatened,  I suppose. This may well have been the start of my feelings that to get on I needed to be working 'for myself' and not as someone's side-kick. Eric Jarrard took me on an afternoon 'safari' into the local bush and we saw beautiful antelopes (eg Kudu). I also picked up 'bush fever' with symptoms like glandular fever emerging after my return to UK. Eric Jarrard had a minor low-speed car accident in a car park a year or two after this visit which left him significantly paralysed (age 35-45) and he told me it was 'like having the box of chocolates (meaning life) offered to you and then taken away'). Poor Eric. I lost touch. He was, I believe, very much connected in terms of ancestors with the Boors. Lovely man.  Also visited Peter Rattray at our big Johannesburg patent associates (name: xxxxx) and we lunched at the Rugby Club. Got the impression that he may also have had sympathies with the Boors. Indeed, I also do, as the British conduct during that war (then 72-ish years back) included the first use of concentration camps (for the women and children) in which tens of thousands died. (23.3.18).

1977: PBA’s patent-enforcing visit to SIMA at Porte de Versailles, Paris. Having already concluded a licence with Gebruder Claas of Harsewinkel, only to have it proved by the intended French combine-harvester manufacturer licensee that MF had themselves prior-used their invention before applying for their patent. This completely unknown to me duplicitous background to a vast amount of my enforcement work caused me to leave MF the following year and changed many things in my life. Possibly I may not have moved to Rutland otherwise;

1974 - 1978: PBA/RA living at 10 Dockers Close, Balsall Common, Coventry;

1979 - 1994: PBA/RA living at 2 Pinfold Lane, South Luffenham;

1978 - 1980: Phil is in-house patent agent at Hestair Group’s Farm Equipment Division (HFE), Second Drove, Fengate, Peterborough; leading to contacts with Hestair Eagle/Hestair Dennis; and Hestair Kiddicraft - all of whom became represented by PBA and his UDL colleagues in due course. This work commenced on 1st May 1978, the day on which both the European Patent Office and the Patent Co-operation Treaty (PCT) commenced operations; that day represents the epitome of European involvement and inclusiveness in PBA’s life and contrasted so starkly with the situation 38 years, one month, and 23 days later (the Brexit referendum).

1979/80: PBA starts own part-time practice to supplement income, work received from Jacques Loriot at S.A. Fedit Loriot of Avenue Hoche, Paris;

1979: Thursday 3rd May, 1979 General Election: Conservative Government elected, with majority of 71 seats, Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister, James Callaghan opposition leader;

The 1980s: The fourth 'decade of peace’ since the ‘thirty-years’-war (1914 - 1945). PBA’s 22 years with UDL begin. A life-changing experience. In March 1980, when I was interviewed at UDL London’s Tottenham Court Road office, UDL consisted of London, Leeds and Birmingham offices, the Birmingham office being an experiment. I knew nothing of this at the time.

1980: February: PBA made redundant by Hestair; Patrick Haycock, Phil’s director at HFE, suggests approaching UD&L for employment because he (Haycock) has worked with Fred Walters’ father at PE Consultancy; Haycock provides PBA with a letter of introduction to UDL, which proves a life-changing document;

1980 - 2002: PBA's UDL years; 1980: March: UDL Peterborough opens at Archdeaconry House, with Hestair as company clients, at Gravel Walk: PBA and Fiona Combeer, then Linda Miller (secretaries); UDL was, in retrospect, one of the very best aspects of my working life; it was fun to work in UDL, as the “UDL News” so clearly shows;

The 1980s: Ruth does her Open University degree (early 1980s) in The Arts and History. Some visits to Northampton and some to Nottingham. Shared transport with Ruth Baines who was living at Somersday in a nearby Rutland village, and picked her up there. The OU degree was a wonderful thing to do. Good old Harold Wilson!

1981 (March) to November 1982: UDL News publiched by UDL Leeds in 14 issues, this publication providing a window into the world of UDL showing its refreshingly lighthearted approach to some of the issues that confront a lawyer in the patents field;

1982: Margaret Thatcher rescued from political obscurity by the Falklands War with the enthusiastic support of Admiral Sir John Leach and the Murdoch Press;

1983 Thursday 9th June, 1983 General Election: Conservative Government elected, with majority of 188 seats, Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister, Michael Foot opposition leader;

1983: PBA N.American visits to clients and contacts in Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Ohio, and Hartford;

1985: P/boro office moves to Trinity Court, and CLB joins the office;

1987 Thursday 11th June, 1987 General Election: Conservative Government elected, with majority of 146 seats, Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister, Neil Kinnock opposition leader;

1988: MFW's retirement (after 42 years) do at Devonshire hotel, Oxford Street, and MFW passes-on WUD's clock made from the wood of his WW1 aircraft propeller to DGG as an S.Ptnr icon, and altercation between Tony Wood and Charlie Foot; PBA/ RA visit Barbara (“Mrs H”) Hirtenstein at Chilton-Foliat on way back from the event;

1988: MRH leaves UDL for Dibb Luptons, solicitors - never to return;

1989: Berlin Wall comes down - after 28 years;

1989: First visit to GM: impressed by non-religious sermon and non-evangelical prayers and hymns;

1989/90: Gerber -v- Lectra case taken over by PBA from FBM and transferred from Joynson-Hicks, solicitors, Tottenham Court Road, London, to Greenwoods Solicitors, Peterborough, with Phil Sloan, solicitor, in charge, instructing Christopher Floyd, QC;

The 1990s: The fifth 'decade of peace’ since the ‘thirty-years’-war (1914 - 1945). UDL Peterborough’s growth continues;

1990: LFC joins UDL Poole and moves on to P/boro in 1991 when UDL Poole closes;

1990, March: 10 year anniversary of UDL P/boro at Swallow Hotel, P/borough; MFW attends and takes a bookfull of photos with his own captions added on 'Post It’ notes, which ‘immortalise’ for me the only anniversary event for UDL Peterborough in its 32-year history (1980-2012);

1990/91: FGBA/GMA conflict at same time as FGBA's health crisis, during which he was at the “JR” (John Radcliffe) hospital (then) at the back of Sandfield Road, for (inter-alia) jaundice, at age 85;  

1991: Saturday 12th January: Gwenda Morgan’s obituary (click here) published in the Independent and seen by PBA in the aircraft on the way back from oral proceedings at the European Patent Office in Munich;

1991 - 1995:  Soviet Union breaks up, and Bosnian war breaks out, causing 100,000 deaths and a massacre of 8,000 unarmed Muslim men at Srebrenica;

1991: May 1st: FGBA dies  age 85 and 8 months: funeral at Wesley Memorial, 8.5.91;

1991: First Kenmore holiday, and purchase of the September/October week; (24.5.22): still going strong 31 years later, with a second week (in May) having been added in about 1995; so we have been holidaying in Scotland for well over one third of our lives;

1991: December: UDL P/boro moves to New Priestgate House;

1992 Thursday 9th April, 1992 General Election: Conservative Government elected, with majority of 65 seats, John Major Prime Minister, Neil Kinnock opposition leader;

1993/4: TMG problems at MK - office run for 6 or more months by PBA and P/boro colleagues until SMR recruited; at this time, for a good many months PBA was going to the EPO for oral proceedings about once-a-month;

1993/4: Kenmore holiday with MRH/HH and purchase of 50% share in 3 Chitty Street; (added 24.5.22): now moving to sell the flat as MRH/HH are minded to do the same;

Mid-1990s: Helga Moore/ Chapman recruited: she stays long enough to get qualified and moves to EP&C, and is not replaced;

1993: PBA/RA 2nd N.American client tour including New Orleans meeting of INTA;

1994: Phil and Ruth plus Graham and Helen move from S.Luffenham to ‘Somersday’ at another Rutland village - and so begins an idyllic period of home and family and garden. The house at Somersday is exactly the same age (built 1888/9 - 100 years after The French Revolution [1789]) as Le Tour Eiffel in Paris. That monument was to a revolution  - which the English ruling classes were so afraid of, and which England never had - hence the present English class and public school system and massive inequality, in the 21st century. 

1995: Raymond Penfold dies in great pain; PBA leads the service at the Leatherhead crematorium; (added 24.5.22): he had contracted 'poly-arteritis', an immune-system pathology, after visiting New Zealand, and I wonder whether that is a factor in common with Ruth's current fatigue and related PMR/GCA illnesses?

1995: Helga Chapman moves (her home)  to Nottingham and has interview for working with ENL&T;

1995 RPC reports Gerber -v- Lectra in High Court: Gerber represented by Christopher Floyd instructed by Greenwoods and UDL P/boro; and makes spare parts liable for patent damages; this case is PBA’s counterpart of the Archer Cowley & Co's Bodleian Library move to South Parks Road, Oxford in 1934. Philip Sloan of Greenwoods was an inspirational leader of the case, with Christopher Floyd

1996, Thursday 10 October: inaugural Puddles meeting: FEPL / MFW / DGG / FJW at White Horse, Sutton, Sussex; UDL has sixteen offices listed in February "UDL Brief”;

1997/8: Fred (a much-loved Bedlington terrier)'s d.o.b.(estimated by vet);

1997: Golden Jubilee of name UDL celebrated by dinner at Chester; (100th anniversary of WUD's birth overlooked), including attendance by FEPL who made a speech including the “Fax it up then - yes, it does rather doesn’t it” joke;

1997 Thursday 1st May, 1997 General Election: Labour Government elected, with majority of 253 seats, Tony Blair Prime Minister, John Major opposition leader;

1997 - 2007: Ruth's 10 years as a County-Councillor; (added 24.5.22): looking back 25 years later, this was a seriously-important heyday in our lives when Ruth achieved so much and was at the absolute height of her powers in every way. We had no idea then, of course, that PMR would strike in 2015, to be followed by GCA in 2018 and chronic fatigue in close succession;

1999: Herrick Close arrangement with RDAS/AS;

1999: PBA/HLA publish Bill Dykes' Reminiscences;

1999: GJA does Q.Mary College IP masters course;

1998 - 2000: Bill Orr senior partner ahead of PBA (with my agreement) to meet particular 'political' requirements in Leeds; proposed merger with Brookes & Martin is the major preoccupation and this is killed by Internet searches by Neil Pawlyn showing that B&M's growth figures were entirely spurious. This was admitted by their entire failure to reply when the evidence was given to partners Woodcraft and Hughes; Woodcraft was later apoplectic over one of my 'threats' letters to one of his clients - about which he could do absolutely nothing (because of the statutory defence); and Hughes was the Tunbridge Wells councillor who proudly told me (and obviously meant it) that he 'never, as a point of principle' read any of the papers' before a council meeting - this at a time when Ruth knew from her 10 years on Rutland County Council, that to do a proper job as a councillor is to make it almost a full-time job;

The 2000s: The sixth 'decade of peace’ since the ‘thirty-years’-war (1914 - 1945). PBA senior partner of UDL from 1.5.2000 to 30.4.2002. And retires on that latter date also. First eight years of retirement. ‘The Golden First Five Years’ include Editor of GM Newsletter, Chair of GM Vestry, Treasurer of Great Meeting, Leicester, and Treasurer of Music in Lyddington for 6 years to 2012. The loft conversion at Somersday. The coming of Fred our Bedlington terrier in June 2003, and much else besides; PBA takes over from MFW as convener of Puddles and it settles down at the OWH at Lyddington;

2000 - 2002: PBA senior partner: issues re HWA's hidden case-losses, and PRW's work-and-time issues; HWA leaves the firm on a 'retirement' package according to advice from solicitors Hammond Suddard; RMP & AEL taken-on 2000;

2000: PBA/RA attend INTA meeting at Denver, Colorado, USA, instead of MCG who has to attend a wedding;

2000: ANPG moves from Whitefield to Rutland: 1RC; hence begin the ‘Mum-years’ - which ended 17 years later on 31.7.2017 when she died at Braeburn Lodge nursing home after 17 months there, preceded by 3 years 4 months at Somersday, Rutland; preceded by two years at Farleigh Court, Uppingham, and preceded by 10 years at Rutland Close, Uppingham;

2000, Nov: 1st Puddles for PBA at White Horse, Sutton, Sussex (5th overall), with FEPL, who attends two more (2001&2) at that venue and dies a few days after the latter (=7 overall at that venue); 

2001 Thursday 7th June, 2001 General Election: Labour Government elected, with majority of 246 seats, Tony Blair Prime Minister, William Hague opposition leader;

2002: April 30: PBA retires; 22 years from commencing in March 1980 (age 38) - 20 years less service than MFW who had commenced at age 16;

2002, November: FEPL dies aged 90 - memorial service attended by PBA/MFW/others;

2002-3: PBA & Gerry Schofield do GM 10 years accounts backlog at same time as GM Garden Room improvements; 

2003 - 2011: My "Little Fred" years;

2003 Puddles is at the OWH Lyddington, as are 2007 onwards, with a couple at Chez Gerard, Charlotte Street, WC2, in between, perhaps 2005/6;

2003: June 1: Little Fred arrives from Newcastle;

2003 - 2011: My "little Fred" years: a walk every day; in the latter years listening to audiobooks and podcasts as I walked, in the early years the fitness of jogging up Colley Hill, the joy of the love of life and nature;

2002/3/4 (at most): ongoing work for UDL Peterborough;

2003&4, June(ish): PBA/LFC lunches at Olive Branch, and PBA to P/boro Office Xmas lunch approx 2002/3/4, and Xmas cards received a little longer;

2004: Feb: Ventnor holiday with little Fred;

2004, June 25: Graham & Paula's wedding at Newcastle, and Xanthe born October;

2004, November 25: Helen & Martin's wedding in NZ; P&R's 1st NZ trip - Fred to Jane Phillips and on to kennels;

2004 Dec: Fred runs away on Seaton walk;

2004: Massey Firguson''s Banner Lane, Coventry tractor factory closes (per The Lady, March 2019), where Phil worked from 1970 to 1978, and about which it was proverbial that 'if Banner Lane sneezed the whole MF empire caught a cold';

2005: summer: loft conversion at Somersday transforms upstairs facilities;

2005 Thursday 5th May, 2005 General Election: Labour Government elected, with majority of 157 seats, Tony Blair Prime Minister, Michael Howard opposition leader;

2005: Sept: Centenary of FGBA's birth. PBA publishes in Oxford Times a piece about him and AC&Co but GMA disapproves; (14.5.18): this leads indirectly to discovery of the AC& Co album and its return to the Archer family;

2006 Nov - 2007 Jan: First 3 Gatherings at GM, RDAS attended 3rd and said 'No more'; at same time PBA involved in issues arising from management of car expenses and getting new boiler quotations and chapel-cleaning, and realises that GM is about providing Sunday services, not about ethical issues (which was my need) - this marked the end at that time, for P, of all rapport with GM on ethical issues generally; (14.5.18): there may be a parallel between this event and the EU referendum 10 years later in which inward-looking forces prevailed over the opposite ones and the country took an enormous backward step of self-inflicted harm;    

2007, Feb: Fred's first major health crisis on day before RDAS & AS visit; later, he starts jumping over the wall to No. 25 after starting thyroid tablets;

2008, April: Rebecca born in Auckland, P&R visit for 6 weeks - end of P's involvement with GM vestry, accounts and newsletter; Fred stays at 23 Orchard Road;

2009, July 7: GMA's 100th birthday party at 17SR;

2009 Oct 31: GMA dies on 73rd wedding anniversary; funeral at Oxford crematorium with contributions by all three sons - a fitting farewell;

The 2010s: The seventh 'decade of peace’ since the ‘thirty-years’-war (1914 - 1945). The decade when rude ‘good health’ as a ‘norm’ departed for Ruth and for me. Mum came to live with us (October 2012 to February 2016). The decade when (2016) normal rational politics came to an end with Brexit and Trump. But, counter to all that, on 9th May 2016, at age 2 calendar months and 5 days, Mac came into our lives, with his wonderful blend of youth and good-looks and energy. Our beautiful pure-bred Bedlington terrier. And we began to find our way back to the our former health and strength. 

2010: 1st Sept: ANPG moves to 8FC before R&P fly to NZ for birth of Daniel;

2010, Sept: Daniel born, Auckland - P&R visit for 6 weeks, and Paula, Christine, and Heather look after Fred in relays;

2010/11: Hard winter and much illness - Ruth has 'flu for 6 or so weeks after NZ visit;

2010 Thursday 6th May, 2010 General Election: Conservative/Lib Dem coalition Government elected, with majority of 48 (+ Lib Dems: 57) seats (= 105), David Cameron Prime Minister, Gordon Brown opposition leader; Nick Clegg Deputy PM;

2011: Feb 14: LFC departs unannounced,  and no other office manager can be found so office closes; RMP has already gone and AEL in due course goes on 'garden leave' and has vacation in AU;

2011: Feb 24: Fred, a much-loved Bedlington terrier, (click here for image) dies, age about 13/14;

2012: Feb 8: PBA farewell lunch with CLB/EHP/RB at Gt Northern hotel;

2012: March 31: UDL P/boro closes after 32 years including Gerber -v- Lectra (1995 RPC), and a period in the 1990s of being generally at the top of the TGP-per-equity-partner figures for the firm as a whole; at 31.3.12 UD&L has 5 offices: London, Leeds, Milton Keynes, Cardiff and Newcastle;

2012: October 22: ANPG arrives at 33MS to recover from gastric-vomiting condition, and remains; 12 months later is put on end-of-life care when a cold turns to a chest infection; continuous care (bedridden-care of 6-person-hours-per-day) provided by care firm Pink Glove at a very high standard whereby Mum’s health becomes stable-with-dementia on a long-term basis; (added 25.11.16): looking back, at this date ended our (Ruth’s and my) then-lifelong ‘permanent good-health’ phase, and we entered a perhaps permanent period of uncertain health punctuated by serious events such as my atrial fibrillation (see below) 5 months later, Ruth’s atrial fibrillation in 2015, her polymyalgia rheumatica and my acoustic neuroma both starting at imprecise dates during this phase; my brother Michael warned me about the potential effects of care in our home, but there was nothing else we could do but care for Mum when she needed it. Life has its consequences;

2013: March 19 to 29: PBA in Glenfield hospital with atrial fibrillation;

2013: April 26: Actual completion of sale of 8 Farleigh Court;

2013: May 21: MiL AGM: PBA completes 6 years of treasurership and website set-up and maintenance, and resigns from the committee;

2014: April 10th: This website launched;

2015 Thursday 7th May, 2015 General Election: Conservative Government elected, with majority of 99, David Cameron Prime Minister, Ed Miliband  opposition leader;

2015: 12th July: RA in Doncaster Royal Hospital, with atrial fibrillation, en-route to Rowlands Gill. Wonderful overnight treatment by NHS, and journey resumed next day;

2015: Summer: PMR commences for RA, which was diagnosed on 6.6.2016 approximately 12 months later by Dr Fox and treated (miraculously-effectively) by tablets of Prednisolone; (added 25.10.19): thus began four or more years of health difficulties based on stress or air-pollution or both or something else, and relating to the immune system: PMR, then GCA, and all the related matters like steroid-induced diabetes; including high-dosage of steroids (prednisolone) and related side-effects;

2016: Jan 1st to Feb 29th: RA and PBA’s NZ trip: Ruth’s brother Andrew (AG) and his wife Jonnet (JG) come to Lyddington to look after Mum (ANPG): the trip is truly a ‘health-break’ and many other beneficial things for RA and PBA, including especially the chance to get to know the grandchildren, Rebecca and Daniel, again at 7 and 5 years since our previous visits for their births;

2016:  26th February: ANPG (‘Mum’) moves to Braeburn Court, Deeping St James, and 3 years, 4 months, and 4 days of caring for her under our roof, of which all but about one year was ‘end-of-life-care’ involving up to 6, 7 or 8 person-hours of carer time per day, comes to an end, including all washing and associated medicinal requirements provision; before she came PBA/RA took no tablets and were in relatively robust good-health. In those three and a quarter years that has been utterly changed by attrial fibrillation, COPD, PMR, and BPPV, with all the attendant medication. Had we been aware of the medical risks of ‘trying to help’? Well. We thought we were robust. But we weren’t. Heigh-ho.

2016: approximately March: Unitarian publication (Title: to be inserted) including chapter by Ruth on Democracy in Local Government, published;

2016: 1st May: 25 years since Dad (FGBA) died at ‘Sandycroft’ (name mis-remembered?) nursing home, Sandfield Road, Headington, at age 86 on 1st May 1991, 18 years and 5 months and 30 days before his wife Gwen Penfold.Archer (GMA) died on 31st October 2009, aged 100 and 3 months and 24 days; I remember Dad with warmth and affection. He lived a simple life which had much to commend it: home/church/business, with faithful service to all.

2016: 5th May: Mac arrives. Our second Bedlington terrier after Fred. Collected Mac from Newcastle-under-Lyme. He cried on Ruth’s knees, all the way to Kegworth, and then was peaceful. Lovely puppy. About 18 or 19 years ‘younger’ than Fred, a rescued dog, who, the vet estimated at our first vet visit in May 2003, was then about 5 or 6 (judging from his teeth);

2016: May: PBA sets up Sandvox version of MRH’s website (commenced 29.5.15 in Weebly) by transferring to alternative host, at www.mrh-ip.com; 

2016: (Thursday) June 23rd: Referendum on membership of the EU called by Conservative Prime Minister Cameron (to appease pressure from his own party’s ‘Brexiters’ - those wanting Britain to Exit from the EU, and an attempt to squash UKIP once and for-all) backfires utterly: the vote was 52:48 in favour of leaving the EU, and the country is left divided and rudderless and in chaos. Cameron resigns (effective in 3 months). It is clear now (4.7.2016) that no scintilla of a plan exists for dealing with what has actually happened. Cameron's only plan existing was to win the referendum and stay in the EU. That failed. Nigel Farage the beer-swilling braggart leader of UKIP has won! He claims that he said 17 years ago that he would get the UK out of Europe and he has done it. And very easily too. With much help from many Conservatives. By stirring up anti-immigration mean-spirited anti-good-samaritan nationalism, using nasty images of immigrants, especially Turkish immigrants, queuing-up 20-deep to come to Britain. And all the attempts to appeal to people’s generous outward-looking inclusive and sharing instincts have failed. Probably because of the government’s austerity policies. This is a catastrophe. All the lessons from the 20th century wars have been forgotten. History (properly taught) is probably more important than mathematics or science at times like this. (Added 3.9.16): And it has been rightly said by Tim Farron the Lib Dem leader that the UK is a laughing-stock worldwide in allowing itself to be led ‘by-the-nose’ into such madness by such ‘trivialities’ as Farage, Johnson and Gove. The vote was in fact a ‘Fraud on the Poor’ by the anti-Europe press (Murdoch, Dacre and the right-wing of the Tory Party) much worse than that complained-about by Luther against the Catholic Church five-hundred years before in 1517, which started the Reformation. 

2016: Saturday July 23rd: The Archer Cowley history scrapbook/album recovered today from John Chipperfield of the Oxford Mail. This is a direct result of the Memory Lane Article about Dad’s 100th anniversary on 11th September 2005 and the very recent update of that which John Chipperfield did, including a reference to the lost scrapbook/album. As a direct result, it has been found by an ex-employee, and returned to me as ‘the rightful owner’, for which I am immensely grateful - a gratitude that I have expressed in person, and seek to underline here in a permanent way. The book is a veritable storehouse of historic information and graphics about the firm, which I will seek to put online so that others may have the benefit of it also. (pba: 24.7.16). It’s not that AC&Co is now of any actual importance. It has gone completely, along with all the good will of its many customers, which was such an important part of its operations, and which stretched the length and breadth of the country. But it was the mainstay of significant parts the Oxford branch of the family for, I suppose, around a century.  And the information in the album relates strictly to the Archer family part of the history, rather than to the subsequent events. Click here to go to the page of graphics showing the history scrapbook/album.

2016: Saturday September 10th (at 2156hrs): Today, this moment, really is "Golden Wedding Day". Health issues rather prominent today, but so much to be thankful for. Loving good wishes from friends and family, and almost 55 years of love and companionship to look back on. Found the wonderful informal photo from our wedding day itself, which I call ‘Younger Than Springtime’ because Ruth has the sparkle of youth and joy. And in the same photo you can see Mum (who made Ruth’s beautiful wedding dress), Claudia (my brother Michael’s first wife), Uncle Frank (Ruth’s father’s older sister’s husband), and Dave Parker (who did ‘Chemistry’ with me at Umist and got a first), not to mention the back of my head. All 50 years older today.  Mum is 96 and Uncle Frank (20 years older than Mum) died many years ago. My parents’ Golden Wedding was 30 years ago (married in 1936), but the day passed without anything to mark it. Heigh-ho. We have had celebration lunch or dinner with Helen and Martin and family (February in the Sky Tower, Auckland); just the two of us on 30.8.16 at Titchwell Manor, Norfolk; with Sheila Richardson at Titchwell Manor (31.8.16); and with friends Ioan and Joy Jones, plus Roger and Theresa Edwards (is scheduled) for 12.9.16. Other friends and family in due course. (Added 24.5.22): Yes, those other celebration meals did take place, very happily, at The Marquess of Exeter, Lyddington, (twice) the latter being with Mary and John Twidell, plus Les and Polly Moverley.

2017 Thursday 8th June, 2017 General Election: Conservative minority Government elected, with majority of 56 over Labour, but Lib Dems (12) and Others (58) cause minority status; Theresa May Prime Minister, Jeremy Corbyn opposition leader;

2017: Monday 31.7.2017 ANPG dies at Braeburn Lodge nursing home, thus ending 17 years of caring for her, beginning with assisting the financing of the move to Rutland Close, Uppingham, from Whitefield, Manchester; and those seventeen years ‘mirroring’ the seventeen years of Ruth’s age when I met her at the Oxford Road, Union Building dance, that Saturday night, on 18.11.1961 - the most important meeting of my whole life! The funeral on 24th August at Kettering Crematorium and Uppingham Methodist Church was a splendid celebration of her life, very ably conducted by Rev Leo Osborne, with readings (by Graham Archer) of Helen Bowler’s ‘Farewell Gran’ email from New Zealand thanking her for being such a wonderful grandmother, and (by Phil Archer) of the 23rd Psalm (which Nancy had read at the age of 9 years to her dying mother) and (by Andrew Garner) of a poem chosen by him for his mother. A slide show projected onto the chapel wall before the service comprised about 60 photos of Nancy over her whole life well-illustrating her full life. (Added 24.5.22): the 'wake' at The Falcon hotel, Uppingham, more or less 'across the road' from the Uppingham Methodist church, was well-attended. Michael and Susan Archer, came from Wimbledon, and all the available members of Ruth's 'Bridge' family cousins were there, including cousin David's son, Andrew, who so nicely said he was representing his father. 

2017: 18th December 2017: Completion day on Somersday II at Rowlands Gill. This is the Northumbrian outpost of this branch of the Archer Clan. Amazing dog-walks along disused railway lines, through ‘The Birks of Rowlands Gill’. Mac loves it.

2018: May and September: the year of the Kenmore timeshare holiday medical crises: May holiday abandoned entirely due to onset of GCA and September attended but only in 'survival' mode with precious little walking and managed to see 'Before the Meeting' at PFT but only just. PBA to Perth on the Wednesday with MRH for brilliant attention to back-pain from osteopath Gareth Magee. We both had heavy catarrhal coughs and colds almost the whole of the holiday, beginning with PBA - a most unforrtunate juxtapositon of timing. Stayed at Somersday II en route both ways, including (not yet done as write this) Cambridge/Addenbrooke's hospital visit on Thursday of 'return' week. We are at month 5 of at least 20 of the GCA-steroid-medicated months-to-recovery. Close friends MRH and HH's company at Kenmore as ever a wonderful plus. The 20-or-more months of the GCA medication may be the most difficult of my life and possibly the most significant in terms of potentail achievement. 

2019: 27th March: Brexit process still entirely out of control. Initiated by Prime Minister Cameron to solve the perennial Tory 'What do we do about Europe' crisis, and who 'abandoned-ship' immediately after the referendum of June 23 2016, leaving his party and country to sink or swim with the 'Jingoists' of the hard-right in control. On 23.3.2019 on Channel 4 News at 7 pm I saw film of Nigel Farage (of the UKIP, now called "Brexit" party) at the European Parliament making a speech or rant in which he chanted 'We won the war/We won the war/We won the war' in a childish sing-song voice, that is so embarrassing because you cannot just dismiss him as an idiotic childish ranter (though he is that), because UKIP actually 'won' the last UK EU elections by winning a majority of the seats (and they don't attend or join in the debates properly at all, though of course they draw their EU salaries). This gives you the measure of the horrors of the Brexit process going on at present. This is 'our country' that is being shown up in these ways as cheap, nasty, self-centred, exclusive, non-inclusive, lacking in all that is civilised and lasting and of good report,  lacking in all that is worithy of respect and admiration, trustworthiness,  lacking in all that has a proper scale of values and is possessed of sound judgement, lacking in things that are true and lovely and sound and inspiring and inclusive - and  yet not looking too good nor talking too wise, nor blaming nor scapegoating. 

2019: October 15th to 31st: PBA and RA Canada trip: by air to Toronto, overnight there at Royal York hotel opposite the station, then VIA rail four days to Vancouver, and 11 days in an Airbnb apartment ten blocks from Andrew and Jonnet Garner (Ruth's brother and sister-in-law); this is a 'proving we can still do it' (despite GCA and AN, and all their attendant complications);

2019: December 12th: Boris Johnson wins general election with massive majority on the slogan "Get Brexit Done". Well that tells you a lot about the British people: endemically xenophobic, as for centuries previously (witness the empire, slavery, treatment of Ireland, the opium wars, extermination of native americans in the U.S., and so on); I am resigned to this lunacy - it is only the same sort of stuff that recurs forever in the history of the world;

2020: March 23rd: Corona virus  ("Covid-19" is official name) pandemic lockdown implemented by government, requiring social isolation.

2020: April 6th Boris Johnson in St Thomas's hospital with Covid-19 and now moved into intensive care. The main novel thing about this virus is that it can be lethal, especially to the elderly (of which I am one at age 78), and THERE IS NO TREATMENT OR MEDICATION OR VACCINE. We have to rely entirly on the body's own defences, and people die, including quite fit people.quite quickly and unexpectedly, while others are hardly affected at all. Boris Johnson could easily die within a few days. I wish him well of course, and a speedy recovery. 

2021: October: Announcement that UDL became part of the Murgitroyd Group. And thus lost its identity. So sad. Murgitroyds was started by Ian Murgitroyd who was a Technical Assistant at Fitzpatricks when I was at Massey Ferguson in the 1970s. Well, well. He seems to have been interested in business size rather than qualtiy of work. That was the impression I got. He died in 2020 I believe, of covid. Well, well. Such things happen. All businesses change in time. (24.2.22 - the day Putin invaded Ukraine). Another ex-Fitzpatricks firm member was John Wilson, who was patents manager at Massey Ferguson's patent department, when I joined it in January 1970, and who (I recall) had been (in charge of?) Fitz's office in Ireland (Dublin?) where he had acted for Harry Ferguson himsel, and had eventually left to work for his client (in Coventry). 

2022: May: (on way home from Kenmore week): health issues are evermore the dominant factors in our llives. Ruth's steroid taper-off ended in August 2020 (yes, almost 2 years ago) and although we were told to expect to 'turn a corner' at 10 or 3 or zero months before that date, here we are at 21 months after it, still in dire straits, with steroid-induced chronic fatigue, and (presumably) inactivity-induced moderate osteo-arthritis causing unbearable pain on movement. We are currently taking hydroxycholorquine (HCQ) prescribed by Dr Geoff Clarke, in the hope that it (a "disease-modifier") may reduce the fatigue and pain. Apparently it requires at least about 12 weeks to work, and we are only at week 2 at present. If only!