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Corinthia Hotel London
The Corinthia Hotel London, at the corner of Northumberland Avenue and Whitehall Place in central London, is a hotel and former Government of the United Kingdom, British Government building, located on a triangular site between Trafalgar Square and the Thames Embankment. Originally opened in 1885 as the Metropole Hotel, its location close to the Palace of Westminster and government offices in Whitehall meant it was commandeered in both world wars. After the Second World War, it was purchased by the Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom), Ministry of Defence and used as government offices until it was declared surplus to requirements and sold by Crown Estates in 2007. It was then restored as a hotel and renamed the Corinthia Hotel, a combination of hotel and residential building. History Metropole Hotel Commissioned by the Gordon Hotels company, construction was started in 1883. The hotel opened in 1885, with an 88-page brochure which claimed: The hotel was the venue for the ann ...
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London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a major settlement for two millennia. The City of London, its ancient core and financial centre, was founded by the Romans as '' Londinium'' and retains its medieval boundaries.See also: Independent city § National capitals The City of Westminster, to the west of the City of London, has for centuries hosted the national government and parliament. Since the 19th century, the name "London" has also referred to the metropolis around this core, historically split between the counties of Middlesex, Essex, Surrey, Kent, and Hertfordshire, which largely comprises Greater London, governed by the Greater London Authority.The Greater London Authority consists of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly. The London Mayor is distinguished fr ...
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King Edward VII
Edward VII (Albert Edward; 9 November 1841 – 6 May 1910) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Emperor of India, from 22 January 1901 until his death in 1910. The second child and eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and nicknamed "Bertie", Edward was related to royalty throughout Europe. He was Prince of Wales and heir apparent to the British throne for almost 60 years. During the long reign of his mother, he was largely excluded from political influence and came to personify the fashionable, leisured elite. He travelled throughout Britain performing ceremonial public duties and represented Britain on visits abroad. His tours of North America in 1860 and of the Indian subcontinent in 1875 proved popular successes, but despite public approval, his reputation as a playboy prince soured his relationship with his mother. As king, Edward played a role in the modernisation of the British Home Fleet and the reorgan ...
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Prince Alexander Obolensky
Prince Alexander Sergeevich Obolensky KStJ (russian: Александр Серге́евич Оболенский; 17 February 1916 – 29 March 1940) was a Rurikid prince of Russian origin who became a naturalised Briton, having spent most of his life in England, and who went on to represent England in international rugby union. He was, and remains, popularly known as "The Flying Prince", "The Flying Slav", or simply as "Obo" to many sports fans. Biography A member of the Rurik dynasty, he was born at Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) on 17 February 1916, the son of Prince Sergei Alexandrovich Obolensky, an officer in the Tsar's Imperial Horse Guards and his wife Princess Lubov' (''née'' Naryshkina). The family name derives from the ancient Russian city of Obolensk; they fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and settled in Muswell Hill, London. He was appointed a Knight of St John in 1938. Obolensky was educated at The Ashe boys' preparatory school, Etwall an ...
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Rugby Union
Rugby union, commonly known simply as rugby, is a close-contact team sport that originated at Rugby School in the first half of the 19th century. One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand. In its most common form, a game is played between two teams of 15 players each, using an oval-shaped ball on a rectangular field called a pitch. The field has H-shaped goalposts at both ends. Rugby union is a popular sport around the world, played by people of all genders, ages and sizes. In 2014, there were more than 6 million people playing worldwide, of whom 2.36 million were registered players. World Rugby, previously called the International Rugby Football Board (IRFB) and the International Rugby Board (IRB), has been the governing body for rugby union since 1886, and currently has 101 countries as full members and 18 associate members. In 1845, the first laws were written by students attending Rugby School; other significant even ...
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England National Rugby Union Team
The England national rugby union team represents England in men's international rugby union. They compete in the annual Six Nations Championship with France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales. England have won the championship on 29 occasions (as well as sharing 10 victories) – winning the Grand Slam 13 times and the Triple Crown 26 times – making them the most successful outright winners in the tournament's history. They are currently the only team from the Northern Hemisphere to win the Rugby World Cup, having won the tournament in 2003, and have been runners-up on three other occasions. The history of the team extends back to 1871 when the English rugby team played their first official test match, losing 1–0 to Scotland. England dominated the early Home Nations Championship (now the Six Nations) which started in 1883. Following the schism of rugby football in 1895 into union and league, England did not win the Championship again until 1910. They first played aga ...
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Mantovani
Annunzio Paolo Mantovani (; 15 November 1905 – 29 March 1980) was an Anglo-Italian conductor, composer and light orchestra-styled entertainer with a cascading strings musical signature. The book ''British Hit Singles & Albums'' stated that he was "Britain's most successful album act before the Beatles ... the first act to sell over one million stereo albums and avesix albums simultaneously in the US Top 30 in 1959". Biography Mantovani was born in Venice, Italy, into a musical family. His father, Benedetto Paolo "Bismarck" Mantovani, was a violinist and served as the concertmaster of La Scala opera house's orchestra in Milan, under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. The family moved to England in 1912, where young Annunzio studied at Trinity College of Music in London. After graduation, he formed his own orchestra, which played in and around Birmingham. He married Winifred Moss in 1934, having two children: Kenneth (born 12 July 1935) and Paula Irene (born 11 April 1939) ...
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Saxophone
The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to produce a sound wave inside the instrument's body. The pitch is controlled by opening and closing holes in the body to change the effective length of the tube. The holes are closed by leather pads attached to keys operated by the player. Saxophones are made in various sizes and are almost always treated as transposing instruments. Saxophone players are called '' saxophonists''. The saxophone is used in a wide range of musical styles including classical music (such as concert bands, chamber music, solo repertoire, and occasionally orchestras), military bands, marching bands, jazz (such as big bands and jazz combos), and contemporary music. The saxophone is also used as a solo and melody instrument or as a member of a horn section in som ...
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Band Leader
A bandleader is the leader of a music group such as a rock or pop band or jazz quartet. The term is most commonly used with a group that plays popular music as a small combo or a big band, such as one which plays jazz, blues, rhythm and blues or rock and roll music.''Club Date Musicians: Playing the New York Party Circuit''. Bruce A. MacLeod. University of Illinois Press. (1993) Most bandleaders are also performers with their own band, either as singers or as instrumentalists, playing an instrument such as electric guitar, piano, or other instruments. Roles The bandleader must have a variety of musical skills. A bandleader needs to be a music director who chooses the "setlist" (the list of songs that will be played in a show), sets the tempo for each song and starts each song (often by "counting in"), leads the start of new sections of songs (e.g., signalling for the start of a guitar solo or drum solo) and leads the endings of each song. The bandleader is also onstage with the g ...
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Bert Firman
Bert Firman (born Herbert Feuerman; 3 February 1906 – 9 April 1999) was an English bandleader of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. He was born in London. His mother was of Polish stock and his father was a professional musician who had settled in Britain from Austria-Hungary in the late 1880s. His three elder brothers were also musicians. He took up the violin at an early age and won a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music. Firman’s first job, at the age of thirteen, was at the Playhouse Theatre, London, where he was part of a quintet playing entr'acte music. A year later his father negotiated a position for him in the orchestra at the Victoria Hotel in Northumberland Avenue. After only three months in this job he secured the part of Sascha, a gypsy violinist in the musical ''Sally'' at the Winter Garden Theatre, Drury Lane. The production opened on 10 September 1921, running for 383 performances. During this run, at the suggestion of the producer, George Grossmith J ...
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Midnight Follies
Midnight is the transition time from one day to the next – the moment when the date changes, on the local official clock time for any particular jurisdiction. By clock time, midnight is the opposite of noon, differing from it by 12 hours. Solar midnight is the time opposite to solar noon, when the Sun is closest to the nadir, and the night is equidistant from dusk and dawn. Due to the advent of time zones, which regularize time across a range of meridians, and daylight saving time, solar midnight rarely coincides with 12 midnight on the clock. Solar midnight depends on longitude and time of the year rather than on time zone. In ancient Roman timekeeping, midnight was halfway between sunset and sunrise (i.e., solar midnight), varying according to the seasons. In some Slavic languages, "midnight" has an additional geographic association with "north" (as "noon" does with "south"). Modern Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Serbian languages preserve this association wit ...
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Douglas Haig
Field marshal (United Kingdom), Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, (; 19 June 1861 – 29 January 1928) was a senior Officer (armed forces), officer of the British Army. During the First World War, he commanded the British Expeditionary Force (World War I), British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front (World War I), Western Front from late 1915 until the end of the war. He was commander during the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Arras (1917), Battle of Arras, the Battle of Passchendaele, Third Battle of Ypres, the German Spring Offensive, and the Hundred Days Offensive.Sheffield 2002, p. 21.Sheffield 2002, p. 263.Hart 2008, p. 2. His military career included service in the War Office, where he was instrumental in the creation of the Territorial Force in 1908. In January 1917 he was raised up to the rank of Field Marshal, subsequently leading the BEF during the final Hundred Days Offensive, when it crossed the Canal du Nord and broke through the Hindenburg l ...
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John French, 1st Earl Of Ypres
Field Marshal John Denton Pinkstone French, 1st Earl of Ypres, (28 September 1852 – 22 May 1925), known as Sir John French from 1901 to 1916, and as The Viscount French between 1916 and 1922, was a senior British Army officer. Born in Kent to an Anglo-Irish family, he saw brief service as a midshipman in the Royal Navy, before becoming a cavalry officer. He achieved rapid promotion and distinguished himself on the Gordon Relief Expedition. French had a considerable reputation as a womaniser throughout his life, and his career nearly ended when he was cited in the divorce of a brother officer while in India in the early 1890s. French became a national hero during the Second Boer War. He won the Battle of Elandslaagte near Ladysmith, escaping under fire on the last train as the siege began. He then commanded the Cavalry Division, winning the Battle of Klip Drift during a march to relieve Kimberley. He later conducted counter-insurgency operations in Cape Colony. During the Ed ...
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