Ferguson's Gang
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Ferguson's Gang
Ferguson's Gang, formed during a picnic at Tothill Fields in London in 1927, was an anonymous and somewhat enigmatic group that raised funds for the National Trust from 1930 to 1947. The members hid their identities behind resplendent masks, punny pseudonyms, and mock-Cockney communiqués. ''Bill Stickers'' was the leader (there was no actual "Ferguson"), taking her ''nom de guerre'' from the commonplace signs in Britain that discourage putting up illegal posters on buildings: "Bill stickers will be prosecuted". The inner-circle was composed of five other young society women: ''Sister Agatha; Kate O'Brien The Nark; Red Biddy (''aka ''White Biddy);'' ''The Lord Beershop of the Gladstone Islands'' ''and'' ''Mercator's Projection'' (''The Bloody Beershop,'' or ''Is B''); and ''Shot Biddy''. The gang was influenced by Clough Williams-Ellis's publication ''England and the Octopus'', which denounced insensitive building and ugly development. They determined to save what they could. Th ...
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Tothill Fields
Tothill Fields was an area of Westminster in the county of Middlesex that lay south of St James's Park on the north bank of the river Thames. One of its main features was the Tothill Fields Bridewell penitentiary. Between 1735 and 1752, it was the home venue of the Westminster Cricket Club. The earliest known match there was in August 1735, when Westminster defeated London by 3 wicket In cricket, the term wicket has several meanings: * It is one of the two sets of three stumps and two bails at either end of the pitch. The fielding team's players can hit the wicket with the ball in a number of ways to get a batsman out. ...s. Records have survived of two Westminster matches there in 1752, both against Addington. The result of the first is unknown and Westminster won the second by 10 runs.Buckley, pp.29–30. References External links * 1735 establishments in England Cricket grounds in Middlesex Cricket in Middlesex Defunct cricket grounds in England Defun ...
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Lake District
The Lake District, also known as the Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous for its lakes, forests, and mountains (or ''fells''), and its associations with William Wordsworth and other Lake Poets and also with Beatrix Potter and John Ruskin. The Lake District National Park was established in 1951 and covers an area of . It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017. The Lake District is today completely within Cumbria, a county and administrative unit created in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972. However, it was historically divided between three English counties ( Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire), sometimes referred to as the Lakes Counties. The three counties met at the Three Shire Stone on Wrynose Pass in the southern fells west of Ambleside. All the land in England higher than above sea level lies within the National Park, including Scafell Pike, the highest mountain in England. ...
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1920s In England
Nineteen or 19 may refer to: * 19 (number), the natural number following 18 and preceding 20 * one of the years 19 BC, AD 19, 1919, 2019 Films * 19 (film), ''19'' (film), a 2001 Japanese film * Nineteen (film), ''Nineteen'' (film), a 1987 science fiction film Music * 19 (band), a Japanese pop music duo Albums * 19 (Adele album), ''19'' (Adele album), 2008 * ''19'', a 2003 album by Alsou * ''19'', a 2006 album by Evan Yo * ''19'', a 2018 album by MHD (rapper), MHD * ''19'', one half of the double album ''63/19'' by Kool A.D. * ''Number Nineteen'', a 1971 album by American jazz pianist Mal Waldron * XIX (EP), ''XIX'' (EP), a 2019 EP by 1the9 Songs * 19 (song), "19" (song), a 1985 song by British musician Paul Hardcastle. * "Nineteen", a song by Bad4Good from the 1992 album ''Refugee (Bad4Good album), Refugee'' * "Nineteen", a song by Karma to Burn from the 2001 album ''Almost Heathen''. * Nineteen (song), "Nineteen" (song), a 2007 song by American singer Billy Ray Cyrus ...
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National Trust
The National Trust, formally the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, is a charity and membership organisation for heritage conservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, there is a separate and independent National Trust for Scotland. The Trust was founded in 1895 by Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley to "promote the permanent preservation for the benefit of the Nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest". It was given statutory powers, starting with the National Trust Act 1907. Historically, the Trust acquired land by gift and sometimes by public subscription and appeal, but after World War II the loss of country houses resulted in many such properties being acquired either by gift from the former owners or through the National Land Fund. Country houses and estates still make up a significant part of its holdings, but it is also known for its protection of wild lands ...
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YouTube
YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the List of most visited websites, second most visited website, after Google Search. YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos each day. , videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute. In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. Google's ownership of YouTube expanded the site's business model, expanding from generating revenue from advertisements alone, to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content produced by YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. YouTube also approved creators to participate in Google's Google AdSens ...
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Guildford
Guildford () is a town in west Surrey, around southwest of central London. As of the 2011 census, the town has a population of about 77,000 and is the seat of the wider Borough of Guildford, which had around inhabitants in . The name "Guildford" is thought to derive from a crossing of the River Wey, a tributary of the River Thames that flows through the town centre. The earliest evidence of human activity in the area is from the Mesolithic and Guildford is mentioned in the will of Alfred the Great from . The exact location of the main Anglo-Saxon settlement is unclear and the current site of the modern town centre may not have been occupied until the early 11th century. Following the Norman Conquest, a motte-and-bailey castle was constructed, which was developed into a royal residence by Henry III. During the late Middle Ages, Guildford prospered as a result of the wool trade and the town was granted a charter of incorporation by Henry VII in 1488. The River Wey Navig ...
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Yvonne Arnaud Theatre
The Yvonne Arnaud Theatre is a theatre located in Guildford, Surrey, England. Named after the actress Yvonne Arnaud, it presents a series of locally produced and national touring productions, including opera, ballet and pantomime. The theatre has two performance venues, the main auditorium and the smaller Mill Studio. History Replacing a former repertory theatre in North Street which had been gutted by a fire in 1963, the present complex was opened in 1965 in a riverside site, incorporating a restaurant and bar available to non-theatregoers. Sir Michael Redgrave had ceremonially driven the first pile in October 1962. The foundation stone was laid by Vanessa Redgrave, in September 1963, who commemorated the occasion by casting her foot in concrete. Susan Hampshire "topped out" the roof of the theatre on 11 November 1964. The company opted to dispense with traditional repertory theatre in favour of a more flexible model in which actors are cast as appropriate to different produc ...
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Margaret Steuart Pollard
Margaret Steuart Pollard, née Gladstone (1 March 1904 – 13 November 1996), was a scholar of Sanskrit, a poet and bard of the Cornish language. She was the founding member of Ferguson's Gang, a secret society of supporters of the National Trust, who had their headquarters at Shalford Mill. She was the great great-niece of Liberal prime minister William Gladstone. From 1920, she attended Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was the first woman to gain first-class honours in Oriental Languages. She married Captain Frank Pollard, an expert on Cornish history, and they lived in Truro, Cornwall. By 1938, she had become a bard, and a member of the Cornish Gorsedd. She published ''Bewnans Alysaryn'', a Cornish-language miracle play, in 1941. She was an enthusiastic supporter of campaigns to defend the landscape, language and traditions of Cornwall and rural England. On one occasion she donated £100 to the National Trust as part of Ferguson's Gang, wearing a full mask to preserve ...
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Bard
In Celtic cultures, a bard is a professional story teller, verse-maker, music composer, oral historian and genealogist, employed by a patron (such as a monarch or chieftain) to commemorate one or more of the patron's ancestors and to praise the patron's own activities. With the decline of a living bardic tradition in the modern period, the term has loosened to mean a generic minstrel or author (especially a famous one). For example, William Shakespeare and Rabindranath Tagore are respectively known as "the Bard of Avon" (often simply "the Bard") and "the Bard of Bengal". Oxford Dictionary of English, s.v. ''bard'', n.1. In 16th-century Scotland, it turned into a derogatory term for an itinerant musician; nonetheless it was later romanticised by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). Etymology The English term ''bard'' is a loan word from the Celtic languages: Gaulish: ''bardo-'' ('bard, poet'), mga, bard and ('bard, poet'), wlm, bardd ('singer, poet'), Middle Breton: ''barz'' ('m ...
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Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies. Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rig Veda, a colle ...
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Oxbridge
Oxbridge is a portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge, the two oldest, wealthiest, and most famous universities in the United Kingdom. The term is used to refer to them collectively, in contrast to other British universities, and more broadly to describe characteristics reminiscent of them, often with implications of superior social or intellectual status or elitism. Origins Although both universities were founded more than eight centuries ago, the term ''Oxbridge'' is relatively recent. In William Makepeace Thackeray's novel ''Pendennis'', published in 1850, the main character attends the fictional Boniface College, Oxbridge. According to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', this is the first recorded instance of the word. Virginia Woolf used it, citing Thackeray, in her 1929 essay ''A Room of One's Own''. The term was used in the ''Times Educational Supplement'' in 1957, and the following year in ''Universities Quarterly''. When expanded, the universities are almost always referr ...
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Rachel Pinney
Rachel Pinney (11 July 1909 – 19 October 1995) was a British medical doctor who pioneered therapeutic approaches to children's development in the 1960s which she termed "Creative Listening" and "Children's Hours". From 1927 to 1934 she was a member of the clandestine Ferguson's Gang, a group of eccentric philanthropists who donated money to the National Trust and other rural conservation appeals. In her alter-ego as Red Biddy, Pinney, cloaked and masked, delivered Ferguson's Gang's first donation to the National Trust offices in 1933. The delivery of £100 in silver for the endowment of Shalford Mill to the National Trust was reported in ''The Times''. Unorthodox in many ways, Pinney kept a vow of silence on Wednesdays, and was a committed peace activist. Life Her father, Reginald Pinney, was a major-general in the British army. She obtained a medical degree and practiced as a GP until 1961, as well as acting s a police surgeon. She worked with the distinguished child therapist Dr ...
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