DROCHAID AN EILEIN SGITHEANAICH IS OPENED IN 1995

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Drochaid an Eilein Sgitheanaich, the road bridge over Loch Alsh in Scotland, that was opened on a day like today in 1995.

The Skye Bridge, in Scottish Gaelic Drochaid an Eilein Sgitheanaich, is a road bridge over Loch Alsh, Scotland, connecting the Isle of Skye to the island of Eilean Bàn. The name is also used for the whole Skye Crossing, which further connects Eilean Bàn to the mainland across the Carrich Viaduct. The crossing forms part of the A87.

Traditionally, the usual route from the mainland to Skye was the shortest crossing, with a length of around 500 metres, across the sound between the villages of Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland and Kyleakin on the island's east coast. A ferry service operated from around 1600, run by private operators and latterly by Caledonian MacBrayne.

Road and rail connections to Kyle of Lochalsh were constructed towards the end of the 19th century and various parties proposed building a bridge to the island. Although the engineering task was well within the capability of the age, the crossing is shorter and shallower than that bridged by the Forth Bridge, the island's remoteness and small population meant that the cost could not be justified.

By 1971 the two 28-car ferries carried more than 300,000 vehicles. Increased prosperity in the islands and a healthy summertime tourist traffic led to traffic queuing for the ferries. This brought renewed calls for the construction of a road bridge.

In 1989 Conservative junior minister Lord James Douglas-Hamilton announced a bidding round, requested tenders to construct a toll bridge. A variety of locations and designs were proposed, and the contract was awarded to Miller-Dywidag, a consortium composed of Scottish construction company Miller Construction, German engineering company DYWIDAG-Systems International, and financial partner the Bank of America.

The Miller-Dywidag proposal, designed in collaboration with civil engineering firm Arup, was for a single-span concrete arch, supported by two piers resting on caissons in the loch and using Eilean Bàn as a stepping-stone. The PFI plan was accepted, and received support from local MP Charles Kennedy and the local council in the full knowledge that it would be on a high-toll basis for a limited period.

Although the bridge itself was built with PFI, the approach roads were the responsibility of the Scottish Office, which paid £15 million for the roads and associated improvements, and to cover the costs associated with decommissioning the ferry. Construction began in 1992 led by Project Director John Henderson and the bridge was opened by Secretary of State for Scotland Michael Forsyth on 16 October 1995. Then the ferry service ceased, and the bridge and the Mallaig-Armadale ferry were the only year-round connections to the mainland.

The two caissons that the main span stands on were cast as hollow cylinders in the old Kishorn Dry Dock and floated to site where they were sunk onto the prepared loch bed. Kishorn Dock had been built for the oil industry, but only built the one rig -Ninian Central.

More information: Undiscovered Scotland

It so happens that the work which is likely
to be our most durable monument,
and to convey some knowledge of us
to the most remote posterity,
is a work of bare utility; not a shrine,
not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.

Montgomery Schuyler

LLUÍS COMPANYS, THE EXECUTED CATALAN PRESIDENT

Today, The Grandma wants to remember and homage Lluís Companys i Jover, the President of Catalonia who was executed by firing squad in 1940 under the dictatorship of Franco.

Companys was born on a day like today in 1882 and lived the proclamation of the Catalan Republic, the Spanish Civil War, the exile, a fake trial and an illegal execution. 

 

He is the only European elected President executed in the history.

History helps us to understand our present because we are the result of our past. The words of Lluís Companys are alive as never were and now, Catalan people know that we will suffer again, we will fight again, and we will win again.

Lluís Companys i Jover (June 21, 1882-October 15, 1940) was a Catalan politician. He was the President of Catalonia, from 1934 and during the Spanish Civil War.

He was a lawyer and leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) political party. Exiled after the war, he was captured and handed over by the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, to the Spanish State of Francisco Franco, who had him executed by firing squad in 1940.

Born in El Tarròs, on June 21, 1882, into a peasant family with aristocratic roots, he was the second child of ten. His parents were Josep Companys and Maria Lluïsa de Jover. His parents sent him to Barcelona in order to study at the boarding school of Liceu Poliglot. Later, after obtaining his degree in law from the University of Barcelona, where he met Francesc Layret, Companys participated in the political life of Catalonia from a young age.

In 1906, as a result of the military attack on the offices of Catalan newspapers Cu-Cut! and La Veu de Catalunya, and after the passing of the Ley de Jurisdicciones, Law of Jurisdictions, which made speech against Spain and its symbols a criminal offence, he participated in the creation of Solidaritat Catalana.

Later, he became affiliated with the ephemeral Unió Federal Nacionalista Republicana, where he was president of the youth section. He was investigated for his intense youth activities and was jailed fifteen times, being classified after the Tragic Week of Barcelona as a dangerous individual in police records.

With Francesc Layret, Companys represented the left-wing labour faction of the Partit Republicà Català, Catalan Republican Party, for which he was elected local councilor of Barcelona in 1916.

More information: The Culture Trip

In November 1920, he was arrested together with Salvador Seguí, known as El Noi del Sucre, Martí Barrera and other trade unionists and he was deported to the Castell de la Mola in Maó, Menorca. Shortly afterward, Layret was assassinated while preparing his defence.

Despite having been deported, Companys was elected member of parliament for Sabadell in the 1920 Spanish legislative elections, taking the place of Layret, who would have taken that seat had he not been assassinated. This gave him parliamentary immunity, which secured his release from prison.

Companys was one of the founders of the Unió de Rabassaires in 1922, where he worked as lawyer and director of the La Terra magazine during the years of the Primo de Rivera regime in the 1920s

Detained again, he was unable to attend the Conferència d'Esquerres, Conference of Leftists, held from March 12 to 19, 1931 that produced the political party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, Republican Left of Catalonia; however, he was elected as an executive member of that party, representing the Partit Republicà Català.

Thanks to the bonds between the Spanish labour movement and the Spanish trade union movement, the election of Companys to this position gave the ERC great prestige amongst left-wing public opinion as it would otherwise have been regarded as a party of the progressive petty bourgeoisie.

In the 1931 Spanish local elections ERC won a surprise victory in Barcelona and other municipalities of Catalonia.

After knowing the results, in April 14, Companys, who was elected a city representative, and other ERC candidates together with the Party's leader Francesc Macià, decided to take over by surprise the office of Mayor and assaulted the City Hall.

At gunpoint, the transitional Mayor was deposed and Companys was proclaimed new Mayor. Subsequently, he hung a tricolour Spanish Republican Flag from the City Hall's balcony and proclaimed the Republic. Shortly after, Francesc Macià proclaimed the Catalan Republic within the Federation of Iberian Republics, a project that was later abandoned after gaining the promise of regional devolution and the restitution of the Catalan Generalitat, as an autonomous government, from the new Republican government.

More information: Barcelonas

After controlling the Barcelona City Hall, Macià ordered Companys to take the office of Gobernador Civil of the Barcelona province, provincial political authority, which at that time held considerable powers, policing included, which had been controlled by republican radicals during the process of the Republic proclamation.

Macià probably wanted a less public office for Companys, whom he thought of as a political rival. Companys ran as a Barcelona provincial candidate in the December 1931 Spanish Legislative Elections. After gaining a seat he led the ERC representation and the Catalan minority group in the new Republican Parliament.

He described his political objectives in Madrid as: We, the Catalan members of the Parliament, have come here not only to defend our law of autonomy, Statute, and the fraternal and democratic understanding of the members of Parliament; but, also to participate in matters that affect the greatness of Spain: the Constitution, the agrarian reforms and social legislation. 

In 1932 Companys was elected Speaker of the Parliament of Catalonia.

After the death of Francesc Macià in December 1933, at that time presiding over the Generalitat of Catalonia, Companys was elected the successor President of the Generalitat by the Catalan Parliament.

In October 6, 1934, Companys led a Catalan Nationalist uprising not supported by the centre and conservative Catalan representatives, against the centre and right-wing republican government, and proclaimed the Catalan State, Estat Català, within the Spanish Federal Republic, for which action he was arrested and sentenced to thirty years in prison.

This action was seen as an attempt at a Coup d'État as Companys revolted against the newly elected center-right republican government and joined the Asturias miners revolution.

Companys asked Manuel Azaña, who happened to be in Barcelona during the events, to lead a newly proclaimed Spanish Republican government, a proposition that Azaña rejected. After the 1936 election and the victory of the left-wing coalition Frente Popular, he was set free by the new government and the Catalan government was restored.

More information: El Nacional

When the Spanish Civil War began shortly after, in July 1936, Companys sided with the Second Spanish Republic against the Nacionales rebels and was instrumental in organizing a collaboration between the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias, which was sponsored by his Catalan government, and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), a revolutionary anti-Stalinist communist party, and Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), an anarchist syndicalist trade union.

During the war, Companys attempted to maintain the unity of his political coalition, but after the Soviet Union's consul, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, threatened that his country would cut off aid to Catalonia, he sacked Andreu Nin from his post as minister of Justice in December 1936.

Exiled to France in 1939 after the Civil War, Companys had passed up various chances to leave France because his son Lluís was seriously ill in a clinic in Paris.

He was arrested in La Baule-les-Pins near Nantes on August 13, 1940, and detained in La Santé Prison. He was then extradited by Nazi German authorities to the Spanish government in Madrid in early September 1940 and imprisoned in the cellars of the headquarters of the Dirección General de Seguridad, State Security, at the Real Casa de Correos in Puerta del Sol.

He was held there for five weeks, kept in solitary confinement, tortured and beaten, while senior figures of the Francoist State visited his cell, insulted him and threw coins or crusts of bread at him.

In a military trial which lasted less than one hour and lacked legal guarantees, he was accused of military rebellion and sentenced to death.

During the trial Companys was defended by Ramón de Colubi, a young soldier who had fought the war on the side of the rebels. Surprisingly, Colubí defended Companys with courage to the point of receiving threats and risking his own life. Colubí asked Franco to pardon Companys, but was ignored.

As a consequence of his role as defence attorney, Colubí was forced to go into exile. Víctor Gay Zaragoza, a Catalan writer found that Companys and Colubí were relatives.

More information: ARA

All these efforts were useless and Companys was executed at Montjuïc Castle in Barcelona at 6:30 a.m. on October 15, 1940. Refusing to wear a blindfold, he was taken before a firing squad of Civil Guards barefoot and, as they fired, he shouted Per Catalunya!, For Catalonia!.

He is buried at the Montjuïc Cemetery, near the castle. The cause of death was given as traumatic internal haemorrhage.

The main stadium used for the 1992 Summer Olympics, located on Montjuïc, is officially named in his memory. 

In 1998 a monument to Companys was installed near Arc de Triomf, on Passeig de Lluís Companys in Barcelona. A friend of Companys, Conxita Julià, is portrayed next to Companys' image in the monument. Several streets and squares in many cities and villages of Catalonia are named Lluís Companys after him.

His personal archive is located in the Pavelló de la República CRAI Library -University of Barcelona. It consists of correspondence about him, as well as discourses and declarations between 1936-1938.

More information: Pinterest

 

 

My smallness could not hope 

for a more dignified death.

MHP Lluís Companys i Jover

CLAUDE GRAHAME-WHITE, AVIATION ENGLISH PIONEER

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Claude Grahame-White, the English pioneer of aviation, who landed his aircraft on Executive Avenue near the White House in Washington, D.C., on a day like today in 1910.

Claude Grahame-White (21 August 1879-19 August 1959) was an English pioneer of aviation, and the first to make a night flight, during the Daily Mail-sponsored 1910 London to Manchester air race.

Claude Grahame-White was born in Bursledon, Hampshire in England on 21 August 1879, and educated at Bedford School. He learned to drive in 1895, was apprenticed as an engineer and later started his own motor engineering company.

Grahame-White's interest in aviation was sparked by Louis Blériot's crossing of the English Channel in 1909. This prompted him to go to France, where he attended the Reims aviation meeting, at which he met Blériot and subsequently enrolled at his flying school.

Grahame-White was one of the first people to qualify as pilot in England, becoming the holder of Royal Aero Club certificate No. 6, awarded in April 1910. He became a celebrity in England in April 1910 when he competed with the French pilot Louis Paulhan for the £10,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail newspaper for the first flight between London and Manchester in under 24 hours. Although Paulhan won the prize, Grahame White's achievement was widely praised.

On 2 July 1910, Claude Grahame-White, in his Farman III biplane, won the £1,000 first prize for Aggregate Duration in Flight (1 hr 23 min 20 secs) at the Midlands Aviation Meeting at Wolverhampton. In the same year he won the Gordon Bennett Trophy race in Belmont Park, Long Island, New York, for which he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Aero Club.

On 14 October 1910, while in Washington, D.C., Grahame-White flew his Farman biplane over the city and landed on West Executive Avenue near the White House. Rather than being arrested Grahame-White was applauded for the feat by the newspapers.

On 26 September 1911 at an International Air Meet at Nassau Boulevard Long Island New York attended by Eugene Ely, George W. Beatty, Harry Atwood, Bud Mars, J. A. D. MucCurdy and Matilda Moissant, Grahame-White won a prize of $600.00 in a speed contest for flying his monoplane ten miles at a speed of 61 and 1/2 miles per hour.

He is known for activities related to the commercialisation of aviation, and he was also involved in promoting the military application of air power before World War I with a campaign called Wake Up Britain, also experimenting with fitting various weapons and bombs to aircraft. He appeared in the 1914 film Across the Atlantic (also titled Secret of the Air) with fellow aviator Gustav Hamel; the film was directed by Herbert Brenon and starred King Baggot.

Grahame-White trained several women to fly and he had formed the Women's Aerial League in 1909. The membership of this league included test pilot Mrs Winifred Buller, Lady Anne Savile and Eleanor Trehawke Davies and the suffragette leaders Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. He established a flying school at Hendon Aerodrome. Cheridah de Beauvoir Stocks, the second British woman to gain a Royal Aero Club aviator's licence, trained at the school, earning her certificate in November 1911. 

In 1912 Grahame-White gave H. G. Wells his first flight.

During World War 1, Grahame-White flew the first night patrol mission against an expected German raid on 5 September 1914. Hendon Aerodrome was lent to the Admiralty (1916), and eventually taken over by the RAF in 1919. It was purchased by the RAF in 1925, after a protracted legal struggle. After this he lost his interest in aviation, eventually moving to Nice in his old age, where he died in 1959 having made a fortune in property development in the UK and US.

Hendon Aerodrome later became RAF Hendon but after flying ceased there in the 1960s it was then largely redeveloped as a housing estate which was named Grahame Park in tribute to Grahame-White. An original World War I Grahame-White aircraft factory hangar was relocated a few years ago to the Royal Air Force Museum London, where it houses the museum's World War I collection and is named the Grahame White Factory.

Grahame-White was a co-founder of Aerofilms Limited in 1919.

In 1911 The Grahame-White Aviation Company was formed to cover his aviation interests, including aerodromes and aircraft design, development, and construction.

More information: Smithsonian Magazine

First Europe, and then the globe,
will be linked by flight,
and nations so knit together t
hat they will grow to be next-door neighbours...
What railways have done for nations,
airways will do for the world.

Claude Grahame-White

DARIO FO, THE ITALIAN ILLEGITIMATE FORMS OF THEATRE

Today, The Grandma has been reading some works written by Dario Fo, the Italian playwright and actor, who died on a day like today in 2016.

Dario Luigi Angelo Fo (24 March 1926-13 October 2016) was an Italian playwright, actor, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter, political campaigner for the Italian left wing and the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature.

In his time he was arguably the most widely performed contemporary playwright in world theatre. Much of his dramatic work depends on improvisation and comprises the recovery of illegitimate forms of theatre, such as those performed by giullari (medieval strolling players) and, more famously, the ancient Italian style of commedia dell'arte.

His plays have been translated into 30 languages and performed across the world, including in Argentina, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yugoslavia. His work of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is peppered with criticisms of assassinations, corruption, organised crime, racism, Roman Catholic theology, and war.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he took to lampooning Forza Italia and its leader Silvio Berlusconi, while his targets of the 2010s included the banks amid the European sovereign-debt crisis. Also in the 2010s, he became the main ideologue of the Five Star Movement, the anti-establishment party led by Beppe Grillo, often referred to by its members as the Master.

Fo's solo pièce célèbre, titled Mistero Buffo and performed across Europe, Asia, Canada and Latin America over a 30-year period, is recognised as one of the most controversial and popular spectacles in postwar European theatre and has been denounced by Cardinal Ugo Poletti, Cardinal Vicar for the Diocese of Rome, as the most blasphemous show in the history of television. The title of the original English translation of Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga! has passed into the English language, and the play is described as capturing something universal in actions and reactions of the working class.

His receipt of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature marked the international acknowledgment of Fo as a major figure in twentieth-century world theatre. The Swedish Academy praised Fo as a writer who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden. He owned and operated a theatre company. Fo was an atheist.

An eldest child, Fo was born at Leggiuno, Sangiano, in Lombardy's Province of Varese, near the eastern shore of Lake Maggiore.

He considered his artistic influences to include Beolco, Brecht, Chekhov, De Filippo, Gramsci, Mayakovsky, Molière, Shaw and Strehler.

On 13 October 2016 Fo died at the age of 90 due to a serious respiratory disease which had previously forced him to recover for 12 days in the Luigi Sacco hospital in Milan.

More information: Bomb Magazine

I am the jongleur.
I leap and pirouette, and make you laugh.
I make fun of those in power,
and I show you how puffed up
and conceited are the big shots
who go around making wars
in which we are the ones who get slaughtered.
I reveal them for what they are.
I pull out the plug, and... pssss... they deflate.

Dario Fo

AMERICA'S FIRST INSANE ASYLUM IS OPENED IN 1773

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Eastern State Hospital, the psychiatric hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia, that was the America's first insane asylum opened, on a day like today in 1773.

Eastern State Hospital is a psychiatric hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia. Built in 1773, it was the first public facility in the present-day United States constructed solely for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. The original building had burned but was reconstructed in 1985.

Eastern State Hospital traces its foundation to a speech by Francis Fauquier, Royal Governor of the colony of Virginia, on November 6, 1766. At the House of Burgesses' first meeting since the Stamp Act and Virginia Resolves, Fauquier primarily discussed the relationship between the Mother Country and these colonists, and expressed optimism for their future. His speech also unexpectedly addressed the mentally ill, as follows:

It is expedient I should also recommend to your Consideration and Humanity a poor unhappy set of People who are deprived of their senses and wander about the Country, terrifying the Rest of their fellow creatures. A legal Confinement, and proper Provision, ought to be appointed for these miserable Objects, who cannot help themselves. Every civilized Country has a Hospital for these People, where they are confined, maintained and attended by able Physicians, to endeavor to restore to them their lost reason.

About a year later, on April 11, 1767, Governor Fauquier addressed the same issue before the next House of Burgesses, thus:

There is a subject which gives me concern, on which I shall particularly address myself to you, as it is your peculiar province to provide means for the subsistence of the poor of any kind. The subject I mean is the case of the poor lunatics. I find on your journals that it was Resolved, That a hospital be erected for the reception of persons who are so unhappy as to be deprived of their reason; And that it was Ordered, that the Committee of Propositions and Grievances do prepare and bring in a bill pursuant to the above resolution. But I do not find that any thing more was done in it. It was a measure which I think could offend no party, and which I was in hopes humanity would have dictated to every man, as soon as he was made acquainted with the call for it. It also concerns me much on another account; for as the case now stands, I am as it were compelled to the daily commission of an illegal act, by confining without my authority, a poor lunatic, who, if set at liberty, would be mischievous to society; and I would choose to be bound by, and observant of, the laws of the country. As I think this is a point of some importance to the ease and comfort of the whole community, as well as a point of charity to the unhappy objects, I shall again recommend it to you at your next meeting; when I hope, after mature reflection, it will be found to be more worth your attention than it has been in this.

Governor Fauquier's benevolent and bold expressions did eventually lead to the establishment of the Eastern State Hospital, although he died March 3, 1768, before it was built. His compassion and humanitarian care for those who needed it the most, made it easier for his ideas to be developed and a facility built.

Fauquier's concern probably rested in Enlightenment principles, which were so widespread throughout the time. The 18th century was a time for rejecting superstitions and religions, and substituting science and logical reasoning. The philosophers David Hume and Voltaire were studying and investigating the worth of human life, which would ultimately alter perceptions of the mentally ill. 

During this time in London, insane people were viewed and used for as entertainment and comical relief. The Bethlehem Royal Hospital, sometimes called Bedlam, attracted many tourists and even held frequent parades of inmates. Enlightenment attitudes encouraged more sensitivity towards the mentally ill, rather than treating them as outcasts and fools. Some started to believe that being mentally ill was, in fact, an illness of the mind, much like a physical disease or sickness, and that these mental illnesses were also treatable.

Before Governor Fauquier's speeches, a person who was mentally ill was not diagnosed by a doctor, but rather judged by 12 citizens, much like a jury, to be either a criminal, lunatic or idiot. Most classified as lunatic were placed in the Public Gaol in Williamsburg. Taxpayers probably appreciated the hospital idea only if they had a family member or close friend who was mentally ill. The only hospital where mentally ill patients were sometimes taken before Eastern State Hospital was built, was the Pennsylvania Hospital, a Quaker institution in Philadelphia. Until a campaign by Benjamin Rush in 1792 to establish a separate treatment wing, mentally ill patients were kept in the basement and out of the way of regular patients who needed medical assistance.

Percival Goodhouse was thought to be one of the first patients admitted to the Eastern State Hospital after its opening on October 12, 1773.

In the following decades, the increasingly crowded hospital saw a regression in methodology as science was increasingly viewed as an ineffective means of dealing with mental illness. During this era of custodial care, the goal became not to cure patients, but to provide a comfortable environment for them, separate from society.

On June 7, 1885, the original 1773 hospital burned to the ground due to a fire that had started in the building's newly added electrical wiring, a consequence of the great expansion of facilities at this time.

By 1935 Eastern State Hospital housed some 2,000 patients with no more land for expansion. The restoration of Colonial Williamsburg and development of the Williamsburg Inn resulted in the facility being at the center of a thriving tourist trade. The hospital's location and space issues made a move necessary. Between 1937 and 1968, all of Eastern State's patients were moved to a new facility on the outskirts of Williamsburg, Virginia, where it continues to operate today.

In 1985, the original hospital was reconstructed on its excavated foundations by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

More information: Colonial Williamsburg

Mental health can be just as important
as physical health -and major depression
is one of the most commonly
diagnosed mental illnesses.

Michael Greger

ANNA ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, DIPLOMACY & ACTIVISM

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Eleanor Roosevelt, the American political figure, diplomat, and activist, who was born on a day like today in 1884.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884-November 7, 1962) was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms as president, making her the longest-serving first lady of the United States.

Through her travels, public engagement, and advocacy, she largely redefined the role of first lady. Roosevelt then served as a United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952, and took a leading role in designing the text and gaining international support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1948, she was given a standing ovation by the assembly upon their adoption of the declaration. President Harry S. Truman later called her the First Lady of the World in tribute to her human rights achievements.

Roosevelt was a member of the prominent and wealthy American Roosevelt and Livingston families and a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. She had an unhappy childhood, having suffered the deaths of both parents and one of her brothers at a young age. At 15, she attended Allenswood Boarding Academy in London and was deeply influenced by its founder and director Marie Souvestre. Returning to the U.S., she married her fifth cousin once removed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1905.

Between 1906 and 1916 she gave birth to six children, one of whom died in infancy. The Roosevelts' marriage became complicated after Eleanor discovered her husband's affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, in 1918. Due to mediation by her mother-in-law, Sara, who was a strong financial supporter of the family, the liaison was ended officially. After that, both partners started to keep independent agendas, and Eleanor joined the Women's Trade Union League and became active in the New York state Democratic Party.

Roosevelt helped persuade her husband to stay in politics after he was stricken with a paralytic illness in 1921, which cost him the normal use of his legs, and she began giving speeches and appearing at campaign events in his place. Following Franklin's election as governor of New York in 1928, and throughout the remainder of Franklin's public career in government, Roosevelt regularly made public appearances on his behalf; and as first lady, while her husband served as president, she significantly reshaped and redefined the role.

Roosevelt was, in her time, one of the world's most widely admired and powerful women. Nevertheless, in her early years in the White House she was a controversial first lady for her outspokenness, particularly with respect to her promotion of civil rights for African Americans. She was the first presidential spouse to hold regular press conferences, write a daily newspaper column, write a monthly magazine column, host a weekly radio show, and speak at a national party convention.

On a few occasions, she publicly disagreed with her husband's policies. She launched an experimental community at Arthurdale, West Virginia, for the families of unemployed miners, later widely regarded as a failure. She advocated for expanded roles for women in the workplace, the civil rights of African Americans and Asian Americans, and the rights of World War II refugees. Following her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt remained active in politics for the remaining 17 years of her life.

She pressed the United States to join and support the United Nations and became its first delegate to the committee on Human Rights. 

She served as the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights and oversaw the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later, she chaired the John F. Kennedy administration's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. By the time of her death, Roosevelt was regarded as one of the most esteemed women in the world; The New York Times called her the object of almost universal respect in her obituary.

In 1999, Roosevelt was ranked ninth in the top ten of Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century, and was found to rank as the most admired woman in thirteen different years between 1948 and 1961 in Gallup's annual most admired woman poll. Periodic surveys conducted by the Siena College Research Institute have consistently seen historians assess Roosevelt as the greatest American first lady.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884, in Manhattan, New York City, to socialites Anna Rebecca Hall and Elliott Roosevelt.

In April 1960, Roosevelt was diagnosed with aplastic anemia soon after being struck by a car in New York City.

In 1962, she was given steroids, which activated a dormant case of tuberculosis in her bone marrow, and she died, aged 78, of resulting cardiac failure at her Manhattan home at 55 East 74th Street on the Upper East Side on November 7, 1962, cared for by her daughter, Anna.

More information: Women & The American Story

Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being.
With freedom comes responsibility.
For the person who is unwilling to grow up,
the person who does not want to carry his own weight,
this is a frightening prospect.

Eleanor Roosevelt

WINDSCALE FIRE, THE UK WORST NUCLEAR ACCIDENT

Today, The Grandma has been reading about the Windscale fire, he worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom's history, that occurred on a day like today in 1957.

The Windscale fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom's history, and one of the worst in the world, ranked in severity at level 5 out of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The fire was in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale site on the north-west coast of England in Cumberland, now Sellafield, Cumbria. The two graphite-moderated reactors, referred to at the time as piles, had been built as part of the British post-war atomic bomb project. Windscale Pile No. 1 was operational in October 1950, followed by Pile No. 2 in June 1951.

The fire burned for three days and released radioactive fallout which spread across the UK and the rest of Europe. The radioactive isotope iodine-131, which may lead to cancer of the thyroid, was of particular concern at the time. It has since come to light that small but significant amounts of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210 were also released. It is estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal.

At the time of the incident, no one was evacuated from the surrounding area, but milk from about 500 km2 of the nearby countryside was diluted and destroyed for about a month due to concerns about its radiation exposure. The UK government played down the events at the time, and reports on the fire were subject to heavy censorship, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan feared the incident would harm British-American nuclear relations.

The event was not an isolated incident; there had been a series of radioactive discharges from the piles in the years leading up to the accident.

In early 1957, there had been a leak of radioactive material in which strontium-90 was released into the environment. Like the later fire, this incident was covered up by the British government. Later studies on the release of radioactive material due to the Windscale fire revealed that much of the contamination had resulted from such radiation leaks before the fire.

A 2010 study of workers involved in the cleanup of the accident found no significant long-term health effects from their involvement.

The December 1938 discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann following its prediction by Ida Noddack in 1934 -and its explanation and naming by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch- raised the possibility that an extremely powerful atomic bomb could be created.

During the Second World War, Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham calculated the critical mass of a metallic sphere of pure uranium-235, and found that as little as 1 to 10 kilograms might explode with the power of thousands of tons of dynamite.

In response, the British government initiated an atomic-bomb project, codenamed Tube Alloys. The August 1943 Quebec Agreement merged Tube Alloys with the American Manhattan Project. As overall head of the British contribution to the Manhattan Project, James Chadwick forged a close and successful partnership with the Americans, and ensured that British participation was complete and wholehearted.

After the war ended, the Special Relationship between Britain and the United States became very much less special. The British government had assumed that America would continue to share nuclear technology, which it considered a joint discovery, but little information was exchanged immediately after the war. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act) officially ended technical cooperation. Its control of restricted data prevented the United States' allies from receiving any information.

The British government saw this as a resurgence of United States isolationism akin to that which had occurred after the First World War. This raised the possibility that Britain might have to fight an aggressor alone. It also feared that Britain might lose its great power status, and therefore its influence in world affairs. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Clement Attlee, set up a cabinet sub-committee, the Gen 75 Committee (known informally as the Atomic Bomb Committee), on 10 August 1945 to examine the feasibility of a renewed nuclear weapons programme.

The Tube Alloys Directorate was transferred from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research to the Ministry of Supply on 1 November 1945, and Lord Portal was appointed Controller of Production, Atomic Energy (CPAE), with direct access to the Prime Minister. An Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) was established at RAF Harwell, south of Oxford, under the directorship of John Cockcroft. Christopher Hinton agreed to oversee the design, construction and operation of the new nuclear weapons facilities, which included a uranium metal plant at Springfields in Lancashire, and nuclear reactors and plutonium processing facilities at Windscale in Cumbria. He established his headquarters in a former Royal Ordnance Factory at Risley in Lancashire on 4 February 1946.

In July 1946, the Chiefs of Staff Committee recommended that Britain acquire nuclear weapons. They estimated that 200 bombs would be required by 1957. The 8 January 1947 meeting of the Gen 163 Committee, a subcommittee of the Gen 75 Committee, agreed to proceed with the development of atomic bombs, and endorsed Portal's proposal to place Penney, now the Chief Superintendent Armament Research (CSAR) at Fort Halstead in Kent, in charge of the development effort, which was codenamed High Explosive Research. Penney contended that the discriminative test for a first-class power is whether it has made an atomic bomb and we have either got to pass the test or suffer a serious loss of prestige both inside this country and internationally.

Through their participation in the wartime Tube Alloys and Manhattan Project, British scientists had considerable knowledge of the production of fissile materials. The Americans had created two kinds, uranium-235 and plutonium, and had pursued three different methods of uranium enrichment. An early decision had to be made as to whether High Explosive Research should concentrate on uranium-235 or plutonium. While everyone would have liked to pursue every avenue, like the Americans had, it was doubtful whether the cash-strapped post-war British economy could afford the money or the skilled manpower that this would require.

More information: BBC

The scientists who had remained in Britain favoured uranium-235, but those who had been working in America were strongly in favour of plutonium. They estimated that a uranium-235 bomb would require ten times the fissile material as one using plutonium to produce half the TNT equivalent. Estimates of the cost of nuclear reactors varied, but it was reckoned that a uranium enrichment plant would cost ten times as much to produce the same number of atomic bombs as a reactor. The decision was therefore taken in favour of plutonium.

The reactors were built in a short time near the village of Seascale, Cumberland. They were known as Windscale Pile 1 and Pile 2, housed in large concrete buildings a few hundred feet apart.

On 7 October 1957, Pile 1 reached the 40,000 MWh mark, and it was time for the 9th Wigner release. This had been carried out eight times in the past, and it was known that the cycle would cause the entire reactor core to heat up evenly. During this attempt the temperatures anomalously began falling across the reactor core, except in channel 20/53, whose temperature was rising. Concluding that 20/53 was releasing energy but none of the others were, on the morning of 8 October the decision was made to try a second Wigner release. This attempt caused the temperature of the entire reactor to rise, indicating a successful release.

Early in the morning of 10 October it was suspected that something unusual was going on. The temperature in the core was supposed to gradually fall as Wigner energy release ended, but the monitoring equipment showed something more ambiguous, and one thermocouple indicated that core temperature was instead rising. As this process continued, the temperature continued to rise and eventually reached 400 °C.

In an effort to cool the pile, the cooling fans were sped up and airflow was increased. Radiation detectors in the chimney then indicated a release, and it was assumed that a cartridge had burst. This was not a fatal problem, and had happened in the past. However, unknown to the operators, the cartridge had not just burst, but caught fire, and this was the source of the anomalous heating in channel 20/53, not a Wigner release.

Speeding up the fans increased the airflow in the channel, fanning the flames. The fire spread to surrounding fuel channels, and soon the radioactivity in the chimney was rapidly increasing.

A foreman, arriving for work, noticed smoke coming out of the chimney. The core temperature continued to rise, and the operators began to suspect the core was on fire.

Operators were unsure what to do about the fire. First, they tried to blow the flames out by running the fans at maximum speed, but this fed the flames.

Next, the operators tried to extinguish the fire using carbon dioxide.

At 01:30 hours on Friday 11 October, when the fire was at its worst, eleven tons of uranium were ablaze. The magnesium in the cartridges was now ablaze, with one thermocouple registering 3,100 °C, and the biological shield around the stricken reactor was now in severe danger of collapse.

Water was kept flowing through the pile for a further 24 hours until it was completely cold. After the water hoses were turned off, the now contaminated water spilled out onto the forecourt.

There was a release into the atmosphere of radioactive material that spread across the UK and Europe. The fire released an estimated 740 terabecquerels of iodine-131, as well as 22 TBq of caesium-137 and 12,000 TBq of xenon-133, among other radionuclides. The UK government under Harold Macmillan ordered original reports into the fire to be heavily censored and information about the incident to be kept largely secret, and it later came to light that small but significant amounts of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210 were released during the fire.

The original report into the incident, the Penney Report, was ordered to be heavily censored by prime minister Harold Macmillan. Macmillan feared that the news of the incident would shake public confidence in nuclear power and damage British-American nuclear relations. As a result, information about the release of radioactive fallout was kept hidden by the government. It was not until 1988 that Penney's report was released in full.

More information: International Atomic Energy Agency

We must not let ourselves be swept off
our feet in horror at the danger of nuclear power.
Nuclear power is not infinitely dangerous.
It's just dangerous, much as coal mines,
petrol repositories, fossil-fuel burning a
nd wind turbines are dangerous.

David J. C. MacKay