Creative History

  On June 22, 1861 the day of the fire, Arthur Munby, a local resident who was attempting to get back to his home via horse drawn omnibus in London that night, wrote in his diary, “ From Epsom and Cheam we saw a great fire in the direction of London.   A pyramid of red flame on the horizon sending up a column of smoke that rose high in the air and then spread like that over Vesuvius.” What Munby was describing as he rode towards his home that summer night was the infamous 1861 Tooley Street Fire--the largest conflagration to consume London in nearly 200 years since the Great Fire of 1666.   The Tooley Street Fire of 1861, parts of which would burn continuously for up to two weeks, was started sometime around what we today would call rush hour at about 5 in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 22.  It is believed that at about that time, as a warehouse worker was closing up shop for the day along one of London’s many wharves packed with textiles, specifically at a ...

  “I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the modern memory of man.”  The words of Anglican clergyman William Derham when describing the winter of 1709 as he witnessed it in London. William Derham was both a minister and a natural scientist who lived in a suburb of London over three hundred years ago at a time when religion and science weren’t necessarily constantly at war with one another.  Today, Derham is best remembered as the person who first came up with an accurate way to measure the speed of sound, but while he was alive, in addition to giving thundering sermons from the church pulpit, Derham was also an enthusiastic meteorologist who kept detailed records of weather conditions and who beginning in 1697 and stretching all the way to 1735 religiously recorded the temperature several times a day--no pun intended. One such day when William Derham recorded the temperature was January 5, 1709, and on that day, he recorded...

  Imagine a world where the day to day calendar--something as simple as what day in the year it actually is--could vary from place to place.  The New Year might begin as late as March 25th, or much earlier, and things like holidays and the start and end of the seasons could fluctuate from year to year based on the phases of the moon or some other quirk of astronomy much like Easter Sunday and Passover week do to this day.   Well, that is exactly the type of world that citizens of Great Britain and her colonies--including our forefathers here in America--lived in until the year 1752.  In that momentous year everything changed.  Our calendar was completely reset, eleven days from the month of September simply vanished into thin air and for a brief moment in time the entire English speaking world nearly descended into chaos--or did it? But not everyone lived that way until as recently as 1752.  In fact, most Catholics (and many other people who weren’...