Dot Halfhide 💙 🌷

I once had to go to Peterborough to get a same day passport. While waiting I walked about and found the Cathedral. I hadnt realised Catherine of Aragon was buried there. Her grave was covered in pomegranates and messages from a school trip. She was instrumental in the right of education for girls. I like her.

This is what our Christmas cake looks like. This is what happens when a 6 and 7 year old take charge!! 🥰🤣🎄

Woman of the Day social reformer and social worker Octavia Hill born OTD 1838 in Wisbech, who pioneered the development of social housing and co-founded the precursor to the National Trust. Her determination to provide community space, community halls and well-maintained, attractive housing to the poor anticipated the fundamental basis of town planning by some fifteen years. Octavia started working at 14. Her father had been made bankrupt and her mother managed a socialist cooperative in London, the Ladies Guild, where Octavia was placed in charge of a workroom for girls. It had a profound effect on her. She had never seen such poverty before. Slum housing in London in those days was notorious for its shoddy and hazardous condition. Slum landlords could only lease land for 21 years so their buildings were hastily erected, had no real foundations, had walls that were just half a-brick thick, and were so unstable that they would often collapse, usually with fatal consequences. Octavia rolled up her sleeves and tackled the problem of slum housing in quite a different way to anyone else at the time. In 1864, she persuaded John Ruskin to buy three dilapidated properties, renovated them to a good standard and found tenants from the most deprived areas, taking them under her wing. She then used the rents to buy other neglected and decaying properties in London, overhauling them and transforming their tenants’ lives. Her principle was: "Where a man persistently refuses to exert himself, external help is worse than useless”. Octavia encouraged her tenants to take personal responsibility. Arrears were dealt with promptly but in return, she appointed reliable caretakers and kept on top of repairs and improvements. Families were carefully placed so that they were never in overcrowded conditions and she made no rules that could not be properly enforced. Within ten years, Octavia was managing the tenancies of about 3,000 people. She preferred to employ women as rent collectors. Women were more successful at keeping arrears in check but they also acted as early social workers, spotting problems and encouraging families to be self-reliant. She was not a supporter of women’s suffrage but she helped Barbara Bodichon to campaign for the Married Women’s Property Act, which allowed any money earned by a married woman to be treated as her own property, and not her husband's. It was widely believed that Octavia would have been the first woman member of a Royal Commission if she hadn’t had such a forthright and forceful personality. After meeting her for the first time, the Bishop of London said: “She spoke for half an hour…I never had such a beating in all my life." William Gladstone approved of her principles but thought her “too difficult”. (Does that sound familiar?) Octavia founded the charity that later became Family Action, which in turn, set up Citizens Advice Bureaux. She was dedicated to making green open spaces easily available to poor people, helping to save Hampstead Heath and many woodlands. “We all need space; unless we have it we cannot reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us.”

Excited about this! 👇🏻

As it is National Care Leavers Week please share this Observer Cover story where I brought together some people who had been in care. The headline reads "A historic portrait of Care system success". Success is living with the past. #foundlingmuseum theguardian.com/society/2022…

Woman of the Day Nellie Bly, the nom-de-plume of investigative journalist Elizabeth Cochran (1864-1922) of Pennsylvania, who completed a round-the-world journey in a record-breaking 72 days in 1890 travelling east to west by steamship and train. She pitched the idea to her editor of turning Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days into fact. He gave the go-ahead with just 48 hours’ notice so Nellie boarded a steamship bound for England wearing just the clothes she was standing up in and carrying a small bag with changes of underwear and essential toiletries. Nellie sent short progress reports by newfangled electric telegraph. Longer dispatches were sent by regular post and took several weeks to arrive. Nellie also pretty much invented investigative journalism. At 21, she wrote a series of hard-hitting investigative articles about the terrible working conditions for women factory workers in Pittsburgh. Factory owners complained so forcefully to the editor that Nellie was reassigned to the women’s pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening. It drove her round the bend so she decided "to do something no girl has done before." She went to Mexico as a foreign correspondent. Mexico was then a dictatorship and in one report, Nellie protested about the imprisonment of a local journalist for criticising the Mexican government. She had to flee the country to avoid arrest but once safely back in the US, she wrote another article accusing the Mexican dictator of being a tyrant and controlling the press. The newspaper took no further chances and assigned Nellie to the theatre and arts pages again so she quit her job. News editor after news editor rejected her job applications - a woman journalist? Lord, no! - but she talked her way onto a newspaper owned by Joseph Pulitzer, and agreed to take on an especially risky undercover assignment: feigning insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York. Nellie checked into a boarding house called Temporary Homes for Females, deprived herself of sleep to give herself a wild staring look, and scared so many of the other occupants with her crazy ways that someone called the police. They took her to the nearest courthouse to be examined by a doctor, a police officer and a judge who concluded that she needed to be transferred to Blackwell’s Island. Her experience - she was only released when Joseph Pulitzer intervened - was published as “Ten Days in a Mad House” and was an overnight sensation. Nellie’s work shed light on the lives and experiences of marginalised women and the public outcry forced the asylum to implement reforms. Nellie covered the Woman Suffrage Procession of 1913 under the headline "Suffragists Are Men's Superiors", predicting that it would be 1920 before women in the USA would be given the vote. She was spot-on. The 19th Amendment, known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, was ratified in 1920.

The house is shut - gardens still open

#PostboxSaturday, Another treat from last weekends @FenEdgeTrail Thorney section. @dot_thorney thank you for being our guide..

Attended an 80th birthday party last night at Bedford Hall, Thorney … superb venue, good bad, friendly people. Well worth seeking out for your own event …

Attended an 80th birthday party last night at Bedford Hall, Thorney … superb venue, good bad, friendly people. Well worth seeking out for your own event …

After chatting to the group who gathered at #Ramsey we headed on to #ThorneyAbbey. Percy as Rahenald of Ramsey, Hereward's Standard Bearer, led us in. Hereward's link to Thorney is not well known... #HerewardTrail #FiveMonasreriesTour #CelebrateTheFens #WakeHereward #Hereward

Today my 7 yr old child discovered James Blunt and she said ‘I really like this’. And we’ve had to listen to ‘You are beautiful’ all day. All day. Please respect our family’s privacy during this difficult time. Good night.