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Monthly Archives: April 2020

Read more about the article James Fletcher, “the miner’s advocate”

James Fletcher, “the miner’s advocate”

JAMES Fletcher’s name has become synonymous with the foundation of The Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate. The Scottish-born former miner, mining union leader, mine manager, mine owner and Member for Newcastle may not literally have founded the newspaper, but he was its proprietor during some of its crucial early years and he used the paper to powerfully influence the progress of the coal industry. Fletcher migrated from Scotland in 1852 at the age of 18 and, after an unsuccessful attempt to make his fortune in the gold rush, came to Newcastle to work coal, finding…

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Read more about the article Stop it or you’ll go blind!
Fear of masturbation was encouraged by this illustration from the book, Rescued at Last

Stop it or you’ll go blind!

I feel terribly sorry for the young men of my great grandfather’s generation: told to keep their hands above their waists on pain of a thousand terrible tortures. Not only were many young men of that era warned that “self-abuse” was immoral and likely to consign them to hellfire after death, they were also assured that the practice would stunt them physically in so many ways that blindness was probably the least of it. And to make matters worse, the people giving this wrong advice were mostly making money from the confused and worried men they…

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Read more about the article Passchendaele: a name written in blood

Passchendaele: a name written in blood

If getting killed by the thousands is glorious, it was glorious in the Ypres battle. My battalion came out 200 strong out of a thousand. It breaks my heart when I think of it.Private Bob Gibson, Knorrit Flat By 1917, as fighting wore on in Europe, the British high command was practically in disrepute among sizeable portions of the Allied armies. Commander in Chief Douglas Haig didn’t go anywhere near the Ypres battlefields in late 1917 and criticised the troops for not being able to make and hold territorial gains. Men saw that they were repeatedly…

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