PALACE OF WESTMINSTER, UK PARLIAMENT & FALCONS

Today, The Winsors and The Grandma have visited the Palace of Westminster, seat of the UK Parliament and one of the places where you can see pairs of peregrine falcons in London.

Chloe Winsor, the Norwegian falconer, has demonstrated her skills with her falcon Oluv inside this incredible building, and the family has listened some stories about Franciscans and falcons in Sant Boi de Llobregat and Mallorca.

Before this, The Winsors have studied some English grammar with the Interrogative Pronouns and the syntactic order of the questions.

More information: Interrogative pronouns

More information: The Order of Friars Minor Capuchin in Sant Ramon

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The Palace of Westminster is the meeting place of the Parliament of the United Kingdom and is located in London, England. It is commonly called the Houses of Parliament after the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the two legislative chambers which occupy the building. The palace is one of the centres of political life in the United Kingdom; Westminster has become a metonym for the UK Parliament and the British Government, and the Westminster system of government commemorates the name of the palace.

The Elizabeth Tower of the palace, nicknamed Big Ben, is a landmark of London and the United Kingdom in general. The palace has been a Grade I listed building since 1970 and part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.

The building was originally constructed in the eleventh century as a royal palace and was the primary residence of the kings of England until 1512, when a fire destroyed the royal apartments. The monarch moved to the adjacent Palace of Whitehall, but the remainder of the palace continued to serve as the home of the Parliament of England, which had met there since the 13th century. In 1834 a second, larger fire destroyed the majority of the palace, but the twelfth century Westminster Hall was saved and incorporated into the replacement building.

The competition to design the new palace was won by the architect Charles Barry, who chose a Gothic Revival style for the building. Construction started in 1840 and lasted for 30 years, suffering delays, cost overruns, and the deaths of Barry and his assistant, Augustus Pugin. The palace contains chambers for the House of Commons, House of Lords, and the monarch, and has a floor area of 112,476 m2. Extensive repairs had to be made after the Second World War, including rebuilding the destroyed Commons chamber. Despite further conservation work having been carried out since, the palace is in urgent need of major repairs.

The site of the current palace and Houses of Parliament may have been used by Cnut during his reign from 1016 to 1035, and from c. 1045-c. 1050 Edward the Confessor built a palace and the first Westminster Abbey. The oldest surviving part of the palace is Westminster Hall, which dates from the reign of William II (r. 1087-1100).

The palace was the principal residence of the English monarchs in the late Medieval period. 

In 1512, during the early reign of Henry VIII, a fire destroyed the royal apartments of the palace.

In 1534 Henry moved to the neighbouring Palace of Whitehall, formerly York Place, which he had seized from Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Although Westminster remained a royal palace, from this point on its primary occupants were the two houses of Parliament and various courts of law.

The predecessor of Parliament, the Curia Regis, met in Westminster Hall when the king was in residence. The Model Parliament, considered the first Parliament of England, met at the palace in 1295; while medieval parliaments of England met in a variety of locations, the palace was frequently used and developed into the body's permanent home. The palace did not have purpose-built chambers for the House of Commons or the House of Lords instead using the available large gathering spaces built for the palace. In time, the Commons adapted St Stephen's Chapel for its use in the sixteenth century, and the Lords used the Painted Chamber and, from 1801, the White Chamber.

The palace underwent significant alterations from the 18th century onwards, as Parliament struggled to carry out its business in the limited available space. These included a new storage and committee rooms by John Vardy, completed in 1770; a new official residence for the Speaker of the House of Commons, completed in 1795; and significant alterations and a new building by James Wyatt, completed in 1801. The last alterations were undertaken by Sir John Soane between 1824 and 1827, and included new library facilities for both Houses of Parliament and new law courts for the Chancery and King's Bench.

The exterior of the Palace of Westminster -especially the Elizabeth Tower which houses the bell known as Big Ben, and its setting on the bank of the River Thames- is recognised worldwide, and is one of the most visited tourist attractions in London. Tsar Nicholas I called it a dream in stone.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) classifies the Palace of Westminster, along with neighbouring Westminster Abbey and St Margaret's, as a World Heritage Site. It is also a Grade I listed building.

More information: UK Parliament

 Britain is a parliamentary democracy.
Power rests in Parliament, in the House of Commons,
and the government -the executive-
has to seek the consent of MPs for its legislation.

Caroline Lucas

NANCY W. ASTOR, MEMBER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Nancy Astor, also known as Lady Astor, the American-born British politician who was the first woman seated as a Member of Parliament. She was a controversial figure, full of contradictions, especially with her anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism and anti-Communism ideas.

Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, Viscountess Astor, CH (19 May 1879-2 May 1964) was an American-born British politician who was the first woman seated as a Member of Parliament (MP), serving from 1919 to 1945.

Astor's first husband was American Robert Gould Shaw II; the couple separated after four years and divorced in 1903. She moved to England and married Waldorf Astor. After her husband succeeded to the peerage and entered the House of Lords, she entered politics as a member of the Conservative Party and won his former seat of Plymouth Sutton in 1919, becoming the first woman to sit as an MP in the House of Commons.

She served in Parliament until 1945, when she was persuaded to step down. Astor has been criticized for her antisemitism and sympathetic view of National Socialism.

More information: The History Press

Nancy Witcher Langhorne was born at the Langhorne House in Danville, Virginia. She was the eighth of eleven children born to railroad businessman Chiswell Dabney Langhorne and Nancy Witcher Keene.

Following the abolition of slavery, Chiswell struggled to make his operations profitable, and with the destruction of the war, the family lived in near-poverty for several years before Nancy was born. After her birth, her father gained a job as a tobacco auctioneer in Danville, the centre of bright leaf tobacco and a major marketing and processing centre.

In 1874, he won a construction contract with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, using former contacts from his service in the Civil War. By 1892, when Nancy was thirteen years old, her father had re-established his wealth and built a sizeable home. Chiswell Langhorne later moved his family to an estate, known as Mirador, in Albemarle County, Virginia.

Nancy Langhorne had four sisters and three brothers who survived childhood. All the sisters were known for their beauty; Nancy and her sister Irene both attended a finishing school in New York City.

There Nancy met her first husband, socialite Robert Gould Shaw II, a first cousin of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first unit in the Union Army to be composed of African Americans. They married in New York City on 27 October 1897, when she was 18.

The marriage was unhappy. Shaw's friends said Nancy became puritanical and rigid after marriage; her friends said that Shaw was an abusive alcoholic. During their four-year marriage, they had one son, Robert Gould Shaw III, called Bobbie. Nancy left Shaw numerous times during their marriage, the first during their honeymoon.

In 1903, Nancy's mother died; at that time, Nancy Shaw gained a divorce and moved back to Mirador to try to run her father's household, but was unsuccessful.

More information: Thought.Co

Nancy Shaw took a tour of England and fell in love with the country. Since she had been so happy there, her father suggested that she move to England. Seeing she was reluctant, her father said this was also her mother's wish; he proposed she takes her younger sister Phyllis. Nancy and Phyllis moved together to England in 1905. Their older sister Irene had married the artist Charles Dana Gibson and became a model for his Gibson Girls.

Several elements of Viscountess Astor's life influenced her first campaign, but she became a candidate after her husband succeeded to the peerage and House of Lords. He had enjoyed a promising political career for various years before World War I in the House of Commons; after his father's death, he succeeded to his father's peerage as the 2nd Viscount Astor. He automatically became a member of the House of Lords, and consequently had to forfeit his seat of Plymouth Sutton in the House of Commons. With this change, Lady Astor decided to contest the by-election for the vacant Parliamentary seat.

Astor had not been connected with the women's suffrage movement in the British Isles. The first woman elected to the British Parliament, Constance Markievicz, said Lady Astor was of the upper classes, out of touch.

Countess Markiewicz had been in Holloway prison for Sinn Féin activities during her election, and other suffragettes had been imprisoned for arson. However, as Astor was met as she arrived at Paddington station on the day after her election by a crowd of suffragettes, including unnamed women who had been imprisoned and on hunger strike, one said, This is the beginning of our era. I am glad to have suffered for this.

Astor was hampered in the popular campaign for her published and at times vocal teetotalism and her ignorance of current political issues.

Astor appealed to voters on the basis of her earlier work with the Canadian soldiers, allies of the British, charitable work during the war, her financial resources for the campaign and her ability to improvise. Her audiences appreciated her wit and ability to turn the tables on hecklers.

Once a man asked her what the Astors had done for him, and she responded with, Why, Charlie, you know, and later had a picture taken with him. This informal style baffled yet amused the British public. She rallied the supporters of the current government, moderated her Prohibition views, and used women's meetings to gain the support of female voters.

A by-election was held on 28 November 1919, and she took up her seat in the House on 1 December as a Unionist (also known as Tory) Member of Parliament.

Viscountess Astor was not the first woman elected to the Westminster Parliament. That was achieved by Constance Markievicz, who was the first woman MP elected to Westminster in 1918, but as she was an Irish Republican, she did not take her seat. As a result, Lady Astor is sometimes erroneously referred to as the first woman MP, or the first woman elected to the U.K. Parliament, rather than the first woman MP to take her seat in Parliament.

Astor was the first woman to be elected through what has been termed the halo effect of women taking over their husband's parliamentary seat, a process which accounted for the election of ten women MPs, nearly a third of the women elected to parliament, between the two world wars.

Astor's Parliamentary career was the most public phase of her life. She gained attention as a woman and as someone who did not follow the rules, often attributed to her American upbringing. On her first day in the House of Commons, she was called to order for chatting with a fellow House member, not realizing that she was the person who was causing the commotion. She learned to dress more sedately and avoided the bars and smoking rooms frequented by the men.

In May 1922, Astor was guest of honour at a Pan-American conference held by the U.S. League of Women Voters in Baltimore, Maryland.

Astor became the first President of the newly formed Electrical Association For Women in 1924.

She chaired the first ever International Conference of Women In Science, Industry and Commerce, a three-day event held in London in July 1925, organized by Caroline Haslett for the Women's Engineering Society in co-operation with other leading women's groups. Astor hosted a large gathering at her home in St James's to enable networking amongst the international delegates, and spoke strongly of her support of and the need for women to work in the fields of science, engineering and technology.

More information: The New York Times

She was concerned about the treatment of juvenile victims of crime: The work of new MPs, such as Nancy Astor, led to a Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences Against Young People, which reported in 1925.

Astor's friendship with George Bernard Shaw helped her through some of her problems, although his own nonconformity caused friction between them. They held opposing political views and had very different temperaments. However, his own tendency to make controversial statements or put her into awkward situations proved to be a drawback for her political career.

Lady Astor believed her party and her husband caused her retirement in 1945. As the Conservatives believed she had become a political liability in the final years of World War II, her husband said that if she stood for office again the family would not support her. She conceded but, according to contemporary reports, was both irritated and angry about her situation.

Lady Astor struggled in retirement, which put further strain on her marriage. In a speech commemorating her 25 years in parliament, she stated that her retirement was forced on her and that it should please the men of Britain. The couple began travelling separately and soon were living apart. Lord Astor also began moving towards left-wing politics in his last years, and that exacerbated their differences. However, the couple reconciled before his death on 30 September 1952.

Lady Astor's public image suffered, as her ethnic and religious views were increasingly out of touch with cultural changes in Britain.

She expressed a growing paranoia regarding ethnic minorities.

Lady Astor died in 1964 at her daughter Nancy Astor's home at Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire. She was cremated and her ashes interred at the Octagon Temple at Cliveden.

More information: English Heritage

Real education should educate us
out of self into something far finer;
into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.

Nancy Astor