In 1887, Queen Victoria’s Jubilee year, the first organized attempt was made to signalize the day of rejoicing by beacon-fires throughout the land.  Colonel Milward, M.P., of Worcestershire, used the Malvern heights as a starting point to send the fiery cross of rejoicing north, south, east, and west.  If Macaulay’s ballad was in the mind of Colonel Milward as he organized bonfires in the Midlands with the Malvern Beacon for their centre, the same poem was in the ears of Canon Rawnsley when he determined to rouse with the “red glare of Skiddaw, the burghers of Carlisle.”  Not since 1815 had a bonfire been lit upon that ancient Cumbrian height.  Then, as Southey has put on record, on a moonlit night he accompanied James Boswell, Lord Sundelin, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, and his son, and with a great crowd of Keswick folk shouted “God save the King” round the most furious body of flaming tar barrels that he ever saw.  It was not only round the bonfire that Southey and his friends danced and shouted that night in honour of Waterloo, for Wordsworth, who was wearing a red cloak and looked like a Spanish don, had inadvertently kicked the kettle over which was needed for the making of more punch, and the Greta Hall contingent got round him, holding him a prisoner in their midst, punished him for his carelessness by singing in chorus, “’Twas you that kicked the kettle down, ’twas you, sir, you.” (p. 7)

Canon Rawnsley, taking Skiddaw as his centre, organised the bonfire in Cumberland, and with the help of Mr. Cooper, of Monk Coniston, and Mr. Baddeley, of Windermere, the Lake Country heights north and south of Dunmail Raise answered one another as star to star.  On June 22nd, 1887, those who climbed up Skiddaw top saw no fewer than 140 bonfires gleaming like diamond points on mountain height and littoral height. (p. 8)

Ten years later a more determined effort was made to organise the bonfire movement.  After conference with Sir Matthew White Ridley, the Home Secretary—from whom it was ascertained that though the Queen, from personal considerations, could not allow any signal for lighting the fires to be made at any of the Royal seats, she was in sympathy with the movement—a meeting of friends was called at the House of Commons on April 8th, Lord Cranborne in the chair, and a representative Committee was appointed, with Colonel Milward, M.P., Canon Rawnsley, and Major F. C. Rasch, M.P., as Hon. Secretaries, and it was unanimously resolved that the Lord-Lieutenants and Chairmen of County Councils should be asked to invite their counties to co-operate in a national scheme for bonfire illuminations on Queen’s night, June 22nd, 1897.  The scheme was warmly taken up, and, though many bonfires did not report themselves, the committee in their final report were able to enumerate 2,548, of which nearly 2,000 were in England and the remainder in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the Channel Islands. (p. 8)

The largest number of fires counted from any one point was seen from the Mendip Hills, where more than 200 were counted; 142 were counted from Broadway, in Worcestershire, and 132 were seen from the Malvern Beacon.  How the bonfires were seen from Skiddaw was described in the papers at the time.  On that occasion a “Lucal,” or oil flare, was used upon the Coniston Old Man with great success.  It is interesting to remember that the evening was so fine that only one bonfire was postponed, and that in the Isle of Man; and only one bonfire was fired before the time—this at Cleeve-Cloud.  The story goes that the watchman told off to guard the great bonfire, which had been built up with great labour and material at the cost of £70, fell asleep, but, dreaming that Jubilee night had come, woke to find his bonfire unlit, and incontinently put match to it.  It is fair to say that the Cleeve-Clouders were equal to the occasion, and in their loyalty rebuilt the pile, and so did double honour to the Queen. (pp. 8-9)

At the time of King Edward’s Coronation, in 1902, a central committee, with Lord Cranborne in the chair, Colonel Griffith Boscawen, M.P., Mr. G. A. Milward, son of the late Colonel Milward, and Canon Rawnsley, as co-secretaries, sent a similar circular and appeal to county and city authorities.  Owing to the King’s illness, the bonfires, which had been built in readiness for June 22nd, remained unlit till Sunday, June 29th.  On that day telegraphic communication was sent by the Chairman from London, urging that all bonfires should be lighted on the following night, Monday, June 30th.  The time given was too short to allow of a full response, for many bonfires had been partially dismantled, and arrangements had been made to make others the crowning feature of village entertainments, which could not possibly be prepared at such short notice, but 1,722 were chronicled at headquarters. (p. 9)

(The Book of the Coronation Bonfires, 1911, pp. 7-9)

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I had come in the last week of April, by courteous invitation, to renew acquaintance with that fast-growing colony of black-headed gulls that make the dunes of Ravenglass famous. (p. 60)

A boat was called, and leaving the pebbly beach that ‘Stott of Oldham’ so delights to paint, we rowed across the flooding tide of the Ravenglass harbour to the sand-dunes of happy quietude, where the oyster-catchers were sunning themselves, and where the sheldrake in her nesting season loves to hide.  As one went forward over the dunes one felt back in the great desert of the Badiet-Tih, and expected to see Bedouins start from the ground, and camels come in single file with solemn sway round the sedge-tufted, wind-blown hillocks and hummocks of glaring sand. (p. 61)

Then suddenly the silence of the waste was broken by a marvellous sound, and a huge cloud of palpitating wings, that changed from black to white and hovered and trembled against the grey sea or the blue inland hills, swept by overhead.  The black-headed gulls had heard of our approach, and mightily disapproved of our trespass upon their sand-blown solitude. (p. 61)

We sat down and the clamour died: the gulls had settled.  Creeping warily to the crest of a great billow of sand, we peeped beyond.  Below us lay a natural amphitheatre of grey-green grass that looked as if it were starred with white flowers innumerable.  WE showed our heads and the flowers all took wing, and the air was filled again with sound and intricate maze of innumerable wings. (pp. 61-62)

We approached, and walking with care found the ground cup-marked with little baskets or basket-bottoms roughly woven of tussock grass or sea-bent.  Each casket contained from two to three magnificent jewels.  These were the eggs we had come so far to see.  There they lay—deep brown blotched with purple, light bronze marked with brown, pale green dashed with umber, white shading into blue.  All colours and all sizes; some as small as a pigeon’s, others as large as bantams.  Three seemed to be the general complement.  In one nest I found four.  The nests were so close to one another that I counted twenty-six within a radius of ten yards; and what struck one most was the way in which, instead of seeking shelter, the birds had evidently planned to nest on every bit of rising ground from which swift outlook over the gull-nursery could be obtained. (p. 62)

Who shall describe the uproar and anger with which one was greeted as one stood in the midst of the nests?  The black-headed gull swept at one with open beak. And one found oneself involuntarily shading one’s face and protecting one’s eyes as the savage little sooty-brown heads swooped round one’s head.  But we were not the only foes they had had to battle with.  The carrion crow had evidently been an intruder and a thief; and many an egg which was beginning to be hard set on, had been prey to the black robber’s beak.  One was being robbed as I stood there in the midst of the hubbub. (pp. 62-63)

Away, for what seemed the best part of a mile, the ‘gullery’ stretched to the north in the direction of Seascale; and one felt that, thanks to the public-spirited owner of the seaboard, and the County Council of Cumberland, the black-headed gull was not likely to diminish in this generation. (p. 63)

(Lake Country Sketches, pp. 59-68)

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Sir,—The Bulgar and atrocities are synonymous, but, although the Bulgars treated the Serbians with brutality beyond words, they appear to have behaved fairly well to some, at any rate, of the English, French, and Italian prisoners.  It was not till the German came on the scene that the reign of Prussian frightfulness began in Serbia.  An English lad who witnessed the following episode was nursing in a Red Cross hospital largely used by the Bulgarians for sending prisoners to whom by ill-usage they had brought to death’s door.  Six Serbian prisoners were sent to the hospital—such living skeletons as my informant had never seen even in the famine-stricken districts of India.  Whilst they were waiting outside for admission, she ordered a cup of tea to be given to each.  The blonde beast, in the form of a Prussian officer, came upon the scene, and inquired who had given them the tea, and when told by my friend that she had given it, he stormed at her for daring to break rules, inasmuch as, though the men had been sent down to the hospital, their papers of admission had not yet been signed.  “Somebody will have to be punished for this,” he said, and “you Englishwomen make such a fuss about being punished.”  Whereupon he ordered 10 lashes to be given to each of the dying, emaciated skeletons, and in his merciless brutality mercifully hastened their end.  When the full story of the blonde beast is written, the book, so far as our women and children are concerned, will have to be kept under lock and key.

(Times, 29 October 1918, p. 8)

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 (In the Plain of Abydos)

 Like a black ghoul upon his heap
    Of clods, the slinger sits all day;
That so the harvestman may reap,
    He needs must scare the birds away.

Then up he rises, flings aside
    His ‘abba’ of dark camel’s hair,
And stands aloft, in strength and pride,
    And shines, bronze-hued of skin, and bare.

He takes his palm-rope sling in hands,
    Puts on his thumb the twisted thong,
Then whirrs, and thro’ the humming strands
    The air is shaken into song.

And suddenly a ringing crack
    Above the silent corn is heard,
Forth flies the stone upon its track,
    Forth hies the startled robber-bird.

Ah I would to heaven, above our patch
    Of fruit, for mortals in our day,
Such slinger stood, so true to watch,
    So sure to scare ill thoughts away.

(Idylls and Lyrics of the Nile, p. 97)

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