Lowry at Tate Britain

Enjoyed the Lowry exhibition so much I could not resist getting my paints out and having a go




                                                         

 

School is Out

 

 

 

 

                                              Saturday Night

 

Impressionist Impressions

So hot outside I found myself painting and ebaying again after a big break.

Walking Through The Wheat



Monet today. Working on a Lowry now.

Royal Tea Recipes -article upload to Amazon

I have just about mastered how to up load an article to Amazon for use on a Kindle complete with illustrations. This is not as easy as it is made out to be. I will not use any numbers or spots again to make points in the recipes.

Wanted to make it free but I cannot work out how to do this.


Royal Tea- teatime recipes with royal connections



                                                                 

Example

Edward and Mrs Simpson, introduced the Club Sandwich to England

Country Gardens

Visited lovely gardens at Bateman's in Kent and Penshurst Place in Sussex.

Bateman's was the home of the author Rudyard Kipling. The house is Jacobean and the interiors left very much as they were in Kipling's lifetime. Now owned by the national Trust the interiors are charming, I could move in tomorrow, .The gardens are as lovely as an English garden can be, kitchen garden orchard, herbaceous borders and a woodland walk.
The tea room is excellent with delicious cakes. The shop has a specialist book area with Kipling's works on sale at a reasonable price.

Penshurst Place

The interior of this castle, once the home of Sir Philip Sydney but now owned by the aristocratic de L'Isle family is dark and dreary. A tedious collection of armour, paintings by unknown artists and the third best porcelain. The restaurant was dismal, the coffee was good but the food poor, heavy use of catering quality margarine in the cakes. Several rooms were closed because of a wedding.Eat at the Porcupine Café before you go in, the light snacks there were better.

The gardens are a different matter. Extensive, formal parterre gardens, orchards, a woodland walk and an adventure playground for children,worth the visit. The shop is full of meritricious rubbish.


                                              

                                                             

 

NHS Doctors Too Busy to See Patients

No appointments to see my NHS GP in Cambridge are available for 2 weeks, 28th May the soonest offered.
The surgery and the GPs are too busy with a contract with the military from Wisbech .Now  NHS medical practices  have control of their budgets they are fixed on money making enterprises and their regular patients  can drop dead. Felt sorry for the students trying to get appointments during their very stressful examination period. Doubt many of the GPs have the expertise to become entrepreneurs and the whole thing will be a total mess.


No wonder the Hospital Accident and Emergency Departments cannot cope -- they are stuck with the overflow from this hopeless new system. What do the government think people are going to do if they are ill?
                                                               

Victorian Women--Illegitemacy--Foundlings

The social stigma and lack of any financial provision for  having a child out of wedlock was impossible for many young women to bear . A Foundling Hospital such as this one was the answer to the problem in 1883.





                                                     


The Foundling Hospital , Guildford Street, London 1883

                                                                                  

 

Victorian Grandmothers

Fish Wives


Fisher girls had a hard life packing herrings caught off the east coast of England in barrels of salt and brine for curing and delivery inland.They had a reputation for being tough, hard swearing and drinking women.Hardly surprising when you think how cold it must have been  by the ocean .Raw hands and the  smell of fish hanging around you were an added burden.

Victorian Grandmothers

Rural Occupations


Lace Makers



                             

If you have ancestors from Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire then some of them would probably have been lace makers.These children and women look romantic in their country setting but the interiors of the cottages were damp, dark and overcrowded , many of them died young from tuberculosis.The light was better outside .
They were paid a pittance for the very hard work needed to produce pillow lace but it was the difference between the family having a living wage and extreme poverty, their husbands and fathers were mainly agricultural labourers.At least you were excused chores such as potato picking as your hands had to be kept soft to handle the lace.

Family History Sites

I have spent hours trying to get into findmypast .co.uk to be told constantly that they are busy. I have paid the top subscription to this site .When my subscription runs out I will not join again. Ancestry is so much better..

Bought some old books at a book sale on Saturday ,some interesting illustrations


Did your ancestors emigrate ?

And for those of us still in the UK this is the interior of a Northamptonshire cottage, the condtions that people wanted to leave

More will follow

Ancestors and Lace Makers

For my next family history article I am looking at my husband's lace making ancestors from Olney.In the 1850s there were hundreds of women making pillow lace at home.Most of them were the wives and daughters of agricultural labourers and the money they brought in kept impoverished families going.
At the age of four little girls were sent to a school to learn lace making and their catechism. If their attention wandered they had their noses rubbed raw in the sharp pins holding the lace.

I have a small collection of bobbins from the 1850s with the names of their owners inscribed like the one named Betsy.

                                                                  







It is getting hard to find original old photos of these ladies that do not have copyright.