Today, The Grandma has been reading about This wastheir finest hour speech delivered by WinstonChurchill on a day like today in 1940.
This was their finest hourwas a speech delivered by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom on 18 June 1940, just over a month after he took over as Prime Minister at the head of an all-party coalition government.
It was the third of three speeches which he gave during the period of the Battle of France, after the Blood, toil, tears and sweat speech of 13 May and the We shall fight on the beaches speech of 4 June.
This was their finest hour was made after France had sought an armistice on the evening of 16 June.
In his speech, Churchill justified the low level of support it had been possible to give to France since the Dunkirk evacuation, and reported the successful evacuation of most of the supporting forces. He resisted pressure to purge the coalition of appeasers, or otherwise indulge in recrimination.
He reported messages of support from the Dominions and justified confidence in victory, even if it was not yet clear how that victory could be achieved.
Today, The Fosters and The Grandma have met, Winston Churchill, the British politician, statesman, army officer who has become one of the greatest figures in our recent history.
The family has been listening to some sad stories about Succession War, Spanish Civil War and WWII, and has discovered the great resilience of population under this kind of conflicts.
Before this, the family has been practising some English grammar with PresentContinuous, and TheGrandma has explained a popular Mallorcan legend named El Salt de la Bella Dona.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (30 November 1874-24 January 1965) was a British politician, statesman, army officer, and writer, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955.
As Prime Minister, Churchill led Britain to victory in the Second World War. Churchill represented five constituencies during his career as Member of Parliament (MP). Ideologically an economic liberal and British imperialist,
he began and ended his parliamentary career as a member of the
Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955, but for twenty years
from 1904 he was a prominent member of the Liberal Party.
Winston Churchill, in addition to his careers of soldier and politician, was a prolific writer under the pen name Winston S. Churchill.
After being commissioned into the 4th Queen's Own Hussars in 1895,
Churchill gained permission to observe the Cuban War of Independence,
and sent war reports to The Daily Graphic. He continued his war
journalism in British India, at the Siege of Malakand, then in the Sudan
during the Mahdist War and in southern Africa during the Second Boer
War.
Churchill's fictional output included one novel and a short story, but his main output comprised non-fiction. After he was elected as an MP, over 130 of his speeches or parliamentary answers were also published in pamphlets or booklets; many were subsequently published in collected editions.
Churchill received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.
In 1895 Winston Churchill
was commissioned cornet, second lieutenant, into the 4th Queen's Own
Hussars. His annual pay was £300, and he calculated he needed an
additional £500 to support a style of life equal to that of other
officers of the regiment. To earn the required funds, he gained his
colonel's agreement to observe the Cuban War of Independence; his
mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, used her influence to secure a contract
for her son to send war reports to The Daily Graphic.
He was
subsequently posted back to his regiment, then based in British India,
where he took part in, and reported on the Siege of Malakand; the
reports were published in The Pioneer and The Daily Telegraph. The reports formed the basis of his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which was published in 1898. To relax he also wrote his only novel, Savrola,
which was published in 1898. That same year he was transferred to the
Sudan to take part in the Mahdist War (1881–99), where he participated
in the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898. He published his
recollections in The River War (1899).
In 1899 Churchill resigned his commission and travelled to South Africa as the correspondent with The Morning Post,
on a salary of £250 a month plus all expenses, to report on the Second
Boer War. He was captured by the Boers in November that year, but
managed to escape. He remained in the country and continued to send in
his reports to the newspaper. He subsequently publishedhis despatches in two works,
London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton's March, both 1900.
He returned to Britain in 1900 and was elected as the Member of
parliament for the Oldham constituency at that year's general election.
As a serving MP he began publishing pamphlets containing his speeches or answers to key parliamentary questions. Beginning with Mr Winston Churchill on the Education Bill
(1902), over 135 such tracts were published over his career. Many of
these were subsequently compiled into collections, several of which were
edited by his son, Randolph and others of which were edited by Charles
Eade, the editor of the Sunday Dispatch.
In addition to his parliamentary duties, Churchill wrote a two-volume biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, published in 1906, in which he presented his father as a tory with increasingly radical sympathies, according to the historian Paul Addison.
In the 1923 general election Churchill lost his parliamentary seat and moved to the south of France where he wrote The World Crisis,
a six-volume history of the First World War, published between 1923 and
1931. The book was well-received, although the former Prime Minister
Arthur Balfour dismissed the work as Winston's brilliant autobiography, disguised as world history.
At the 1924 general election Churchill returned to the Commons. In 1930 he wrote his first autobiography, My Early Life, after which he began his researches for Marlborough: His Life and Times
(1933–38), a four-volume biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, 1st
Duke of Marlborough. Before the final volume was published, Churchillwrote a series of biographical profiles for newspapers, which were later collected together and published as GreatContemporaries (1937).
In May 1940, eight months after the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill became Prime Minister.
He wrote no histories during his tenure, although several collections
of his speeches were published. At the end of the war he was voted out
of office at the 1945 election; he returned to writing and, with a
research team headed by the historian William Deakin, produced a
six-volume history, The Second World War (1948–53). The books became a best-seller in both the UK and US.
Churchill
served as Prime Minister for a second time between October 1951 and
April 1955 before resigning the premiership; he continued to serve as an
MP until 1964. His final major work was the four-volume work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58).
Today, The Weasleys & The Grandma have just arrived to London to stay some weeks in the English capital. They are staying at Cumberland Hotel, an important place for recent British history that joins London with Sant Boi and Barcelona, and England with Catalonia.
Keep calm and carry on, Weasleys!
Great Cumberland Place is a street in the City of Westminster, part of Greater London, England. There is also a hotel bearing the same name on the street.
The street runs from Oxford Street at Marble Arch to George Street at Bryanston Square.
It contains the Western Marble Arch Synagogue, near which stands a statue of Raoul Wallenberg.
Great Cumberland Place is home to The Cumberland Hotel.
The street was the home of Thomas Pinckney while he was the United States ambassador to the Court of St James's.
Sir James Mackintosh lived in Great Cumberland Street, which was later re-numbered as part of Great Cumberland Place.
The residents listed in 1833 were: "Hans Busk, Esq.; Sir Clifford Constable; Sir Frederick Hamilton; Lady C. Underwood; Sir G. Ivison Tapps; Baron Bülow (the Prussian Minister); General Sir R. M'Farlane; Leonard Currie, Esq.; Sir S. B. Fludyer, Bart.; Lady Trollope; Earl of Leitrim; Sir Alexander Johnston; and the Hon. and Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Norwich", and in Great Cumberland Street "Lord Saltoun; Mrs. Portman; John Wells, Esq.; Colonel Sherwood; Captain Richard Manby; John Lodge, Esq.; Major Murray; Robert Cutlar Fergusson, Esq.; John N. McLeod, Esq.; and Lord Bagot".
The explorers James Theodore Bent and Mabel Bent lived first at Number 43 and then Number 13 Great Cumberland Place from the early 1880s until Mabel Bent's death in 1929.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 1874-24 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955.
Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. Ideologically an economic liberal and imperialist, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.
Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire to the wealthy Spencer aristocratic family. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British India, the Anglo-Sudan War, and the Second Boer War, later gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns. Elected a Conservative MP in 1900, he defected to the Liberals in 1904. In H. H. Asquith's Liberal government, Churchill served as President of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary, championing prison reform and workers' social security.
As First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, he oversaw the Gallipoli Campaign but, after it proved a disaster, he was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He resigned in November 1915 and joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front for six months.
In 1917, he returned to government under David Lloyd George and served successively as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, and Secretary of State for the Colonies, overseeing the Anglo-Irish Treaty and British foreign policy in the Middle East. After two years out of Parliament, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government, returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-war parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure and depressing the UK economy.
Out of government during his so-called wilderness years in the 1930s, Churchill took the lead in calling for British rearmament to counter the growing threat of militarism in Nazi Germany.
At the outbreak of the Second World War he was re-appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. In May 1940, he became Prime Minister, succeeding Neville Chamberlain.
Churchill formed a national government and oversaw British involvement in the Allied war effort against the Axis powers, resulting in victory in 1945. After the Conservatives' defeat in the 1945 general election, he became Leader of the Opposition. Amid the developing Cold War with the Soviet Union, he publicly warned of an iron curtain of Soviet influence in Europe and promoted European unity. Between his terms as Prime Minister, he wrote several books recounting his experience during the war. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
He lost the 1950 election, but was returned to office in 1951. His second term was preoccupied with foreign affairs, especially Anglo-American relations and preservation of what remained of the British Empire with India now no longer part of it. Domestically, his government emphasised housebuilding and completed the development of a nuclear weapon (begun by his predecessor).
In declining health, Churchill resigned as Prime Minister in 1955, remaining an MP until 1964. Upon his death in 1965, he was given a state funeral.
Widely considered one of the 20th century's most significant figures, Churchill remains popular in the Anglosphere, where he is seen as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role in defending Europe's liberal democracy against the spread of fascism; historians often rank Churchill as the greatest prime minister. His second term received more mixed responses, and he is criticized for some wartime events and also for his imperialist views.
I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us; but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it, like the brave men of Barcelona, and will be able to stand up to it, and carry on in spite of it, at least as well as any other people in the world.
Today, The Grandma has flown from Barcelona to Strasbourg to visit some authorities in the Council of Europe.
The Council of Europe is an international organisation whose stated aim is to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe and The Grandma is very worried about the repression that the Catalan population is suffering. Catalan people are European citizens and they must have their rights protected and guaranteed by institutions like this.
Self-determination is a right, not a crime and The Grandma wants to know which are the position and the opinion of the Council of Europe about Catalan issue. She has chosen a special date to her visit because the Council of Europe was founded following a speech by Winston Churchill at the University of Zurich on a day like today in 1946.
Before visiting the Council of Europe, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.
The Council of Europe, Conseil de l'Europe in French or Europarat in German, is an international organisation whose stated aim is to uphold human rights, democracy and the rule of law in Europe.
Founded in 1949, it has 47 member states, covers approximately 820 million people and operates with an annual budget of approximately 500 million euros.
The organisation is distinct from the 28-nation European Union (EU), although it is sometimes confused with it, partly because the EU has adopted the original European Flag which was created by the Council of Europe in 1955, as well as the European Anthem. No country has ever joined the EU without first belonging to the Council of Europe. The Council of Europe is an official United Nations Observer.
Unlike the EU, the Council of Europe cannot make binding laws, but it does have the power to enforce select international agreements reached by European states on various topics. The best known body of the Council of Europe is the European Court of Human Rights, which enforces the European Conventionon Human Rights.
The Council's two
statutory bodies are the Committee of Ministers, comprising the foreign
ministers of each member state, and the Parliamentary Assembly,composed
of members of the national parliaments of each member state.
The Grandma visits the Council of Europe
The Commissioner for Human Rights is an independent institution within the Council of Europe,mandated to promote awareness of and respect for human rights in the member states.
The Secretary General heads the secretariat of the organisation. Other major CoE bodies include the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and the European Audiovisual Observatory.
The headquarters of the Council of Europe are in Strasbourg, France.English and French are its two official languages. The Committee of Ministers, the Parliamentary Assembly and the Congress also use German, Italian, and Russian for some of their work.
In a speech in 1929,
French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand floated the idea of an
organisation which would gather European nations together in a federal
union to resolve common problems. But it was Britain's wartime leader
Sir Winston Churchill who first publicly suggested the creation of a
Council of Europe in a BBC radio broadcast on 21 March 1943, while the
second world war was still raging. In his own words, he tried to peer
through the mists of the future to the end of the war, once victory had
been achieved, and think about how to re-build and maintain peace on a
shattered continent. Given that Europe had been at the origin of two
world wars, the creation of such a body would be, he suggested, a
stupendous business. He returned to the idea during a well-known speech
at the University of Zurich on 19 September 1946, throwing the full
weight of his considerable post-war prestige behind it.
The future structure of the Council of Europe was discussed at a specific congress of several hundred leading politicians, government representatives and civil society in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1948.
There were two schools
of thought competing: some favoured a classical international
organisation with representatives of governments, while others preferred
a political forum with parliamentarians. Both approaches were finally
combined through the creation of a Committee of Ministers (in which
governments were represented) and a Consultative Assembly (in which
parliaments were represented), the two main bodies mentioned in the
Statute of the Council of Europe. This dual intergovernmental and
inter-parliamentary structure was later copied for the European
Communities, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Organization for
Security and Co-operation in Europe.
The Council of Europe
was founded on 5 May 1949 by the Treaty of London. The Statute was
signed in London on that day by ten states: Belgium, Denmark, France,
Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the
United Kingdom, though Turkey and Greece joined three months later.
On
10 August 1949, 100 members of the Council's Consultative Assembly,
parliamentarians drawn from the twelve member nations, met in Strasbourg
for its first plenary session, held over 18 sittings and lasting nearly
a month. They debated how to reconcile and reconstruct a continent
still reeling from war, yet already facing a new East-West divide,
launched the concept of a trans-national court to protect the basic
human rights of every European citizen, and took the first steps towards
what would in time become the European Union.
In August 1949,
Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium was elected as the first president of the
Assembly, steering its early work. However in December 1951, after
nearly three years in the role, Spaak resigned in disappointment after
the Assembly rejected proposals for a European political authority.
The Grandma leaves the Council of Europe
Convinced the Council of Europe was never going to be strong enough to achieve his long-term goal of European unification, he soon tried again in a different format, becoming one of the founders of the European Union.
The Council of Europe'smostfamous achievement is the European Convention on Human Rights, which was adopted in 1950 following a report by the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, and followed on from the UnitedNations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
The Convention created the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The Court supervises compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights and thus functions as the highest European court. It is to this court that Europeans can bring cases if they believe that a member country has violated their fundamental rights and freedoms.
The seat of the Council
of Europe is in Strasbourg, France. First meetings were held in
Strasbourg's University Palace in 1949, but the Council of Europe soon
moved into its own buildings. The Council of Europe's eight main
buildings are situated in the Quartier européen, an area in the
northeast of Strasbourg spread over the three districts of Le Wacken, La
Robertsau and Quartier de l'Orangerie, where are also located the four
buildings of the seat of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the Arte
headquarters and the seat of the International Institute of Human
Rights.
The Council of Europe was founded on 5 May 1949 by Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Greece joined three months later, and Iceland, Turkey and West Germany the next year. It now has 47 member states, with Montenegro being the latest to join.
Article 4 of the Council of Europe Statute specifies that membership is open to any European State. This has been interpreted liberally from the beginning, when Turkey was admitted, to include transcontinental states, such as Georgia and Azerbaijan, and states that are geographically Asian but socio-politically European, such as Armenia and Cyprus.
Nearly all European states have acceded to the Council of Europe, with the exceptions of Belarus -human rights concerns including active use of the death penalty-, Kazakhstan -human rights concerns-, and the Vatican City (a theocracy), as well as some of the territories with limited recognition.
Besides the status as a full member, the Council of Europe has established other instruments for cooperation and participation of non-member states: observer, applicant, special guest, and partner for democracy.
Sir Winston Churchill is one of the most important figures of the last century. His biography is full of important events because he had to take some important decitions that changed the BritishHistory. He's a controversial figure but, without any kind of doubt, someone who must be studied and read, if you want to understant our recent history.
It's very difficult to create a short biography about Churchill because his life is full of important dates and events but today, TheGrandma wants to remember her as a writer because, on a day like today in 1953, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Before talking about Winston Churchill, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 38).
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (30 November 1874-24 January 1965) was a British politician, statesman, army officer, and writer, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955.
As Prime Minister, Churchill led Britain to victory in the Second World War. Churchill represented five constituencies during his career as Member of Parliament (MP). Ideologically an economic liberal and British imperialist, he began and ended his parliamentary career as a member of the Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955, but for twenty years from 1904 he was a prominent member of the Liberal Party.
Winston Churchill, in addition to his careers of soldier and politician, was a prolific writer under the pen name Winston S. Churchill. After being commissioned into the 4th Queen's Own Hussars in 1895, Churchill gained permission to observe the Cuban War of Independence, and sent war reports to The Daily Graphic. He continued his war journalism in British India, at the Siege of Malakand, then in the Sudan during the Mahdist War and in southern Africa during the Second Boer War.
Sir Winston Churchill
Churchill's fictional output included one novel and a short story, but his main output comprised non-fiction. After he was elected as an MP, over 130 of his speeches or parliamentary answers were also published in pamphlets or booklets; many were subsequently published in collected editions.
Churchill received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.
In 1895 Winston Churchill was commissioned cornet, second lieutenant, into the 4th Queen's Own Hussars. His annual pay was £300, and he calculated he needed an additional £500 to support a style of life equal to that of other officers of the regiment. To earn the required funds, he gained his colonel's agreement to observe the Cuban War of Independence; his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, used her influence to secure a contract for her son to send war reports to The Daily Graphic.
He was subsequently posted back to his regiment, then based in British India, where he took part in, and reported on the Siege of Malakand; the reports were published in The Pioneer and The Daily Telegraph. The reports formed the basis of his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which was published in 1898. To relax he also wrote his only novel, Savrola, which was published in 1898. That same year he was transferred to the Sudan to take part in the Mahdist War (1881–99), where he participated in the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898. He published his recollections in The River War (1899).
In 1899 Churchill resigned his commission and travelled to South Africa as the correspondent with The Morning Post, on a salary of £250 a month plus all expenses, to report on the Second Boer War. He was captured by the Boers in November that year, but managed to escape. He remained in the country and continued to send in his reports to the newspaper. He subsequently publishedhis despatches in two works, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton's March, both 1900. He returned to Britain in 1900 and was elected as the Member of parliament for the Oldham constituency at that year's general election.
As a serving MP he began publishing pamphlets containing his speeches or answers to key parliamentary questions. Beginning with Mr Winston Churchill on the Education Bill (1902), over 135 such tracts were published over his career. Many of these were subsequently compiled into collections, several of which were edited by his son, Randolph and others of which were edited by Charles Eade, the editor of the Sunday Dispatch.
Sir Winston Churchill's Nobel Prize
In addition to his parliamentary duties, Churchill wrote a two-volume biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, published in 1906, in which he presented his father as a tory with increasingly radical sympathies, according to the historian Paul Addison.
In the 1923 general election Churchill lost his parliamentary seat and moved to the south of France where he wrote The World Crisis, a six-volume history of the First World War, published between 1923 and 1931. The book was well-received, although the former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour dismissed the work as Winston's brilliant autobiography, disguised as world history.
At the 1924 general election Churchill returned to the Commons. In 1930 he wrote his first autobiography, My Early Life, after which he began his researches for Marlborough: His Life and Times (1933–38), a four-volume biography of his ancestor, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Before the final volume was published, Churchillwrote a series of biographical profiles for newspapers, which were later collected together and published as Great Contemporaries (1937).
In May 1940, eight months after the outbreak of the Second World War, Churchill became Prime Minister.
He wrote no histories during his tenure, although several collections
of his speeches were published. At the end of the war he was voted out
of office at the 1945 election; he returned to writing and, with a
research team headed by the historian William Deakin, produced a
six-volume history, The Second World War (1948–53). The books became a best-seller in both the UK and US.
Churchill served as Prime Minister for a second time between October 1951 and April 1955 before resigning the premiership; he continued to serve as an MP until 1964. His final major work was the four-volume work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58).
In 1953 Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literaturefor his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values. Churchill was almost always well paid as an author and, for most of his life, writing was his main source of income. He produced a huge portfolio of written work; the journalist and historian Paul Johnson estimates that Churchill wrote an estimated eight to ten million words in more than forty books, thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, and at least two film scripts. John Gunther in 1939 estimated that he earned $100,000 a year ($1.39 million nowadays) from writing and lecturing, but that of this he spends plenty.
In 1899 Churchill became aware of the American novelist of the same name. He wrote to his American contemporary and offered to sign his own works Winston Spencer Churchill, adding the first half of his full surname, Spencer-Churchill, which he did not otherwise use. In practice the middle name was turned into an initial, and his pen name subsequently appeared as Winston S. Churchill. The two men met in Boston the following year.
There are around 135 published booklets of Churchill's individual speeches, including Mr Winston Churchill on the Education Bill (1902), The Fiscal Puzzle: Both Sides Explained by Leading Men (1903), Why I am a Free Trader (1905) and Prisons and Prisoners (1910).
The BBC broadcasts its first television news bulletin in July, 5 1954. The BBC is a symbol of good journalism but it's also an excellent tool to learn English.
The Grandma starts today a new online course to learn English using 2.0 tools. Her last families got A2 and B1 Cambridge Exams. The Grandma has decided to start reviewing B1 level in an attempt to help A2 relatives to improve their English to reach B1 level, and B1 relatives to consolidate their level to continue studying to reach the next B2 level.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London and it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees.
BBC Outside Broadcast Equipment, 1951
The BBC is established under a Royal Charter and operates under its Agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households, companies, and organisations using any type of equipment to receive or record live television broadcasts and iPlayer catch-up.
The fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament, and used to fund the BBC's radio, TV, and online services covering the nations and regions of the UK. Since 1 April 2014, it has also funded the BBC World Service, launched in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service, which broadcasts in 28 languages and provides comprehensive TV, radio, and online services in Arabic and Persian.
Around a quarter of BBC revenues come from its commercial arm BBC Studios Ltd, formerly BBC Worldwide, which sells BBC programmes and services internationally and also distributes the BBC's international 24-hour English-language news services BBC World News, and from BBC.com, provided by BBC Global News Ltd.
BBC Mobile Unit
From its inception, through the Second World War, where its broadcasts helped to unite the nation, to the 21st century, the BBC has played a prominent role in British culture. It has also been known as The Beeb, and Auntie.
Britain's first live public broadcast from the Marconi factory in Chelmsford took place in June 1920. It was sponsored by the Daily Mail's Lord Northcliffe and featured the famous Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba. The Melba broadcast caught the people's imagination and marked a turning point in the British public's attitude to radio.
However, this public enthusiasm was not shared in official circles where such broadcasts were held to interfere with important military and civil communications. By late 1920, pressure from these quarters and uneasiness among the staff of the licensing authority, the General Post Office (GPO), was sufficient to lead to a ban on further Chelmsford broadcasts.
But by 1922, the GPO
had received nearly 100 broadcast licence requests and moved to rescind
its ban in the wake of a petition by 63 wireless societies with over
3,000 members.
George Orwell
The GPO proposed that it would issue a single broadcasting licence to a company jointly owned by a consortium of leading wireless receiver manufactures, to be known as the British Broadcasting Company Ltd. John Reith, a Scottish Calvinist, was appointed its General Manager in December 1922 a few weeks after the company made its first official broadcast. The company was to be financed by a royalty on the sale of BBC wireless receiving sets from approved manufacturers. To this day, the BBC aims to follow the Reithian directive to inform, educate and entertain.
The British Broadcasting Corporation came into existence on 1 January 1927,
and Reith, newly knighted, was appointed its first Director General. To
represent its purpose and stated values, the new corporation adopted
the coat of arms, including the motto Nation shall speak peace unto Nation.
Television broadcasting was suspended from 1 September 1939 to 7 June 1946, during the Second World War, and it was left to BBC Radio broadcasters such as Reginald Foort to keep the nation's spirits up.
Charles de Gaulle in BBC editorial
The BBC moved much of its radio operations out of London, initially to Bristol, and then to Bedford. Concerts were broadcast from the Corn Exchange; the Trinity Chapel in St Paul's Church, Bedford was the studio for the daily service from 1941 to 1945, and, in the darkest days of the war in 1941, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York came to St Paul's to broadcast to the UK and all parts of the world on the National Day of Prayer. BBC employees during the war included George Orwell who spent two years with the broadcaster.
During his role as Prime Minister during the Second World War, Winston Churchill would deliver 33 major wartime speeches by radio, all of which were carried by the BBC within the UK.
On 18 June 1940, French general Charles de Gaulle, in exile in London as the leader of the Free French, made a speech, broadcast by the BBC, urging the French people not to capitulate to the Nazis.
There was a widely reported urban myth that, upon resumption of the BBC television service after the war, announcer Leslie Mitchell started by saying, As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted...
In fact, the first person to appear when transmission resumed was Jasmine Bligh and the words said were Good afternoon, everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh...?
Jasmine Bligh
The European Broadcasting Union was formed on 12 February 1950, in Torquay with the BBC among the 23 founding broadcasting organisations.
Competition to the BBC was introduced in 1955, with the commercial and independently operated television network of ITV. However, the BBC monopoly on radio services would persist until 8 October 1973 when under the control of the newly renamed Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the UK's first Independent local radio station, LBC came on-air in the London area.
As a result of the Pilkington Committee report of 1962, in which the BBC was praised for the quality and range of its output, and ITV was very heavily criticised for not providing enough quality programming, the decision was taken to award the BBC a second television channel, BBC2.
In 2002, several television and radio channels were reorganised. In 2008, another channel was launched, BBC Alba, a Scottish Gaelic service. Unlike the other departments of the BBC, the BBC World Service was funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British government department responsible for promoting the interests of the United Kingdom abroad.
Today, The Jones have revised some Social English and some grammar with the Future Continuous.
After remembering some past experiences in Hogwarts and in Urquhart Castle, the family has welcome Eli Jones again. Scottish Navy found her in the Loch Ness shore waiting for being rescued. It was a terrible experience that Eli wants to erase as soon as possible.
The family has started to read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, a masterclass of the literature that talks about people who don't accept being old and try to avoid that is not possible to stop.
After reading the first chapter, The Jones have practised how to sum up all the chapter with only one sentence keeping the syntactic order. The Grandma has explained a long story that connects different European wars since the 18 century, different places but one thing in common: the resistance and resilience of the population and its effort to survive building refugees and opening new paths of exile. The Grandma has also talked about one of the most important and clever characters of the last century: Winston Churchill.
It has been a sad story, full of dignity and courage but terror and death. Some people say that History repeats again and again but History is only the reflex of human behaviour and humans don't learn from the past and do the same mistakes again and again.
This afternoon, the family has decided to visit Champs Elysées, one of the most important and beautiful places in Paris and also, one of the most historical places witness of the parades that celebrated the Allied victory in the WWI in 1919, and the parades of Free French and American forces after the liberation of the city, respectively, the French 2nd Armoured Division on 26 August 1944, and the U.S. 28th Infantry Division on 29 August 1944 during the WWII.
The Avenue des Champs-Élysées is an avenue in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, 1.9 kilometres long and 70 metreswide, running between the Place de la Concorde and the Place Charles de Gaulle, where the Arc de Triomphe is located. It is known for its theatres, cafés, and luxury shops, for the annual Bastille Day military parade, and as the finish of the Tour de France cycle race. The name is French for the Elysian Fields, the paradise for dead heroes in Greek mythology.
The lower part of the Champs-Élysées, from the Place de la Concorde to the Rond-Point, runs through the Jardin des Champs-Élysées, a park which contains the Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, the Théâtre Marigny, and several restaurants, gardens and monuments.
The Jones at Le Jardin des Tuileries
The Élysée Palace, the official residence of the Presidents of France, borders the park, but is not on the Avenue itself. The Champs-Élysées ends at the Arc de Triomphe, built to honour the victories of NapoleonBonaparte.
Until the reign of Louis XIV, the land where the Champs-Élysées runs today was largely occupied by fields and kitchen gardens. The Champs-Élysées and its gardens were originally laid out in 1667 by André Le Nôtre as an extension of the Tuileries Garden, the gardens of the Tuileries Palace, which had been built in 1564, and which Le Nôtre had rebuilt in his own formal style for Louis XIV in 1664.
Le Nôtre planned a wide promenade between the palace and the modern Rond Point, lined with two rows of elm trees on either side, and flowerbeds in the symmetrical style of the French formal garden. The new boulevard was called the Grand Cours, or Grand Promenade. It did not take the name of Champs-Élysées until 1709.
For other
hand, they’ve done some exercises about Social
English and have talked about the historical figure of Winston Churchilland the role of civil population during the wars.
Tomorrow, they’re
practising Present Continuous and
they’re starting to create their cooperative.
They’re all
in Barcelona now and they must start
to prepare their travel to Brazil.
Courage is what it takes to stand up
and speak;
courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
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