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1000 results for “R_by_Ryo”
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FTX Co-Founder Indicted by Federal Grand Jury in Manhattan, Bahamian Magistrate Denies SBF’s Bail
https://news.bitcoin.com/ftx-co-founder-indicted-by-federal-grand-jury-in-manhattan-bahamian-magistrate-denies-sbfs-bail/
#SDNYattorneyDamianWilliams #campaignfinanceoffenses #SDNYprosecutor'soffice #FBINewYorkFieldOffice #FTXSamBankman-Fried #Bahamianmagistrate #MichaelJ.Driscoll #165yearsinprison #8FinancialCrimes #federalgrandjury #SamBankman-Fried #AlamedaResearch #MoneyLaundering #Fraud -
Chile: Water contamination by pesticides, the impact of agro-export expansion. https://viacampesina.org/en/chile-water-contamination-by-pesticides-the-impact-of-agro-export-expansion/ #Agroecology,BiodiversityandPeasants'Seeds #CampaignagainstAgrotoxics #SouthAmerica #ANAMURI
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#BookTour: Winter’s Season, by R.J. Koreto @partnersincr1me #WintersSeason #RJKoreto #thriller #historical #political #romance #crime #HistriaBooks #excerpt #giveaway #PICT
WINTER'S SEASON by R.J. Koreto January 26 - February 20, 2026 Virtual Book Tour Synopsis: In 1817 London, Before the Police, There Was Captain Winter. London, 1817. A city teeming with life, yet lacking a professional police force. When a wealthy young woman is brutally murdered in an alley…
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"—and I don't care if you're pissed, you can't throw food at the Dragon Warlord,"
— the dragon republic by r. f. kuang
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This week on Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein we look at "Lovecraft's Daughter" (1983) by R. Alain Everts, and reflect on what was known - and not known - about HPL's stepdaughter and their relationship.
https://deepcuts.blog/2026/05/02/lovecrafts-daughter-1983-by-r-alain-everts/
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This week on Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein we look at Winifred Virginia Jackson—Lovecraft's Lost Romance (1976) by R. Alain Everts & George T. Wetzel and reflect on the problems of research and depending too heavily on unreliable sources.
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'Twas the night before Xmas, and on Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein we seek to answer that thorny question: What does the Reanimator have to do with the holiday? Find out in "The Horror in the Stable" (2017) by R. C. Mulhare
https://deepcuts.blog/2025/12/24/the-horror-in-the-stable-2017-by-r-c-mulhare/
#Cthulhumythos #Reanimator #weirdlit #weirdfiction #Xmas #Christmas #review #horror #horrorlit #Lovecraft #lovecraftian
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The Burning of the “Brilliant”: the thread about the loss of a Leith steam packet and the death of Captain Wade
The PS Brilliant was one of the earliest steamships in Scotland, built by James Lang in Dumbarton for the Leith & Aberdeen Steam Yacht Company (of Leith) way back in 1821 – just nine years after the pioneering Comet introduced this type of vessel to the world. Her owners were based at 22 Bernard Street in Leith, the commercial quarter of that town and where many a shipping and merchant company based itself.
Post Office directory for Edinburgh and Leith, 1825-26, show appendix entry for the Leith & Aberdeen Steam Yacht CompanyApart from the addition of the steam plant and paddle wheels, the Brilliant wasn’t really that different in form or construction from a sailing coaster and in common with early steamers was also rigged as a sailing vessel, for times when either there were favourable winds (to increase the speed or make her more economical) or when the mechanical propulsion broke down. She was fairly small; displacing 159 tons, being 120 feet (36.6m) long, 20.5 feet (6.2m) wide 8in the beam, with an 8 foot (2.4m) draught below the waterline and had a crew of 10
Plans of the Brilliant, shown as an example of a steam packet in “A Treatise on Marine Architecture” by Peter Hedderwick, 1830. Photograph from the fold-out plates sold at auction in November 2025The little ship proved successful and reliable vessel in service and plied the east and north coast of Scotland over the years following her launch, originally between Leith and Aberdeen and soon adding intermediate stops in Fife or Dundee along the way. Summer saw her sailings extended to Inverness and even Wick. She was joined in service by sister ships the Sovereign and Velocity. An advert in the 1839-40 Edinburgh and Leith Post Office directory shows that the company’s ships sailed from Leith to Aberdeen every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with reverse journeys departing on Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, with a 14s fare for cabin passage or 7s for steerage. Her master was Cawfield Wade.
Coastal steam packets proved themselves in service – they could move against the wind as well as with it – and could therefore keep a faster, more reliable timetable. Before there were long distance railways in the country, they were the fastest way for people and trade to move (so long as you wanted to keep to the coasts). The industry saw a flurry of speculative investment followed by the realities of business, which resulted in a consolidation of the various companies. In 1826 Brilliant‘s owners merged the rival Aberdeen & Leith Shipping Company to form the Aberdeen & Leith Steam Packet Company and a little over ten years later in 1837 it merged with others to become the Aberdeen, Leith, Clyde & Tay Shipping Company, usually shortened to just the Leith & Clyde Co. Under this ownership we can find Brilliant in the fateful year 1839 in Lloyd’s Register.
Lloyd’s entry for 1839 for the Brilliant. The figures record where she was built, dates of previous repairs and re-engining, her insurance condition, registered dimensions, master (Campbell at this time), ownership, and her usual route of Aberdeen and Leith.Brilliant’s usual southern terminus was of course the Port of Leith. In the engraving below after a painting by W. H. Bartlett we see a paddle steamships arriving at the quayside – note the boarding gangway hung off the back of the paddle box – and we can allow ourselves to imagine that this might be the Brilliant (although the position of the funnel and single mast says otherwise…)
Engraving after an 1828 original by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd by T. Higham, “Leith Harbour from the Pier” showing a steamer arriving at the quayside. Credit: Edinburgh & Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City LibrariesBecause of the poor state of the Port of Leith in the 1820s and 30s the ship often sailed instead from the Trinity Chain Pier, which had been built as a speculative scheme to provide a steamship pier less affected by the tides of the Forth. She could quite possibly be one of the small steam ships seen in the picture below.
“Newhaven Harbour and the Chain Pier, looking east” coloured print of an engraving by R. Brandard after W. H. Bartlett, originally published c. 1840.By 1839 Brilliant was sailing thrice a week from her home port of Aberdeen, to Leith, under Captain Cawfield Wade. The journey took about twelve hours, although she had managed it with the wind at her back in only ten and three quarters, and called at intermediate piers along the Fife and Angus coast. The schedule was well maintained, intermediate stops took only 5-10 minutes and were conducted offshore: passengers who wished to join or leave the steamer were rowed out to meet her from those ports. Once a week in the summer she would make a run from Aberdeen to Inverness and back again.
Of Captain Wade we know relatively little as his death predates statutory registers and surviving census records. In 1835 he was the master of the Aberdeen & London Shipping Co.’s smack Aberdeen Packet, sailing between those ports. He had then been a mate (officer) in steamships on the Aberdeen and Leith route before being promoted to master of the Brilliant, which seems to have been his first command in that company. He married Lilias Reid in Aberdeen in 1837, a farmer’s daughter from Alford, and we know he had a brother William, also “a mariner in Aberdeen“. I can find neither of these men in Scottish parish birth registers however Wade is an uncommon name in these parts at the time. The Caledonian Mercury would however later describe him as a son of Stonehaven.
On the afternoon of 11th December 1839, Captain Wade took the Brilliant out of Leith and headed north on what should have been just another one of her thrice-weekly scheduled runs. In the picture below we can see a steam packet departing Leith in choppy seas.
Leith Pier and Harbour, 1843 engraving by R. Wallis. Credit: Edinburgh & Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City LibrariesThe little ship headed into a choppy Firth of Forth and began her scheduled calls along the Fife coast, but weather conditions were worsening.
“Rain Clouds over the Forth”, John Houston, c. 1984 .Fife Cultural Trust for Fife Council.Up in Aberdeen Captain Morrison, the Aberdeen harbour master and pilot, was awoken from his bed by a terrible storm. It was this maelstrom into which the Brilliant would sail early that morning.
Unidentified steamer in a storm, © Aberdeen Maritime MuseumStruggling through heavy weather and violent seas and almost within sight of Aberdeen, disaster struck. At around six O’ clock in the morning when she was off the welcome site of Girdle Ness Lighthouse the deck was suddenly swamped by an unexpected wave. Cawfield Wade, at his station on the quarterdeck, could do nothing to stop himself being swept overboard and disappeared into the sea, never to be seen again. But the troubles were not over yet – the approaches to Aberdeen harbour had a fearsome reputation in Victorian times, one which was well earned. Brilliant was now wallowing through the storm towards it without her master and was about to become the first steam-powered victim of this entrance.
Brilliant’s sister ship, Sovereign, entering Aberdeen Harbour in inclement seas. Credit: Aberdeen Maritime MuseumThe sea was rushing on from the beam (her sides) as the little steamer approached the harbour entrance. Passing through a feature known as The Bar her helmsman was not able to keep her clear of the churning water around the head of the pier and she was driven side-on into the harbour wall, just below the Fittie (Footdee) lighthouse.
Fittie Light House at the end of the north breakwater, entrance to Aberdeen Harbour. OS Town Plan 1866. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe Brilliant was mortally wounded and this was quickly apparent to all onboard. The call to abandon ship was given but in his haste to get to safety the ship’s engineer failed to draw the fires from her boilers, which quickly began to run dry. Overheating due to a lack of water they soon set the wooden vessel ablaze. The artist J. Faddie captured the remarkable scene that night for us.
Brilliant ablaze off the Fittie Light. Note the assembled crowds being held back by soldiers on the pier and salvage attempts being made. Credit: Aberdeen Maritime MuseumMiraculously, all on board – except the tragic Captain Wade – were saved. Salvage parties were even organised to return to the burning ship and recover most of her cargo: the bow of the ship was stuck fast on pier allowing them to work in (relative) safety while the stern burnt out. We can see them on deck in the painting above. The mainmast was deliberately cut down about ten O’ clock in the morning, to stop it collapising on the workers, and an hour later the funnel and mizzen (after) mast did collapse.By sunset on the twelfth of December the ship had burned down to her waterline and the pounding of the seas was beginning to make short work of scattering her remains across the seabed and shoreline.
The body of Cawfield Wade would never be found. His will shows he left an estate of £50 (about £5,000 today), about a year’s pay for someone in his position and to his wife Lilias he left their household goods worth around £40. To his brother William he left his “suit of coloured clothes“, his best jacket and his watch (although it’s likely he may have taken these with him to his watery grave). To a man described as brother-in-law he left his “suit of black clothes“: his Sunday and mourning attire. These bequests were made with the unusual condition forbidding his “nearest in kin from troubling or molesting” his widow. Lilias lived out a long life as the “Widow of the Late Captain Wade“, running various lodging houses in Aberdeen. She died at the age of 87 in Old Machar parish in Aberdeen, her last address a respectable granite house in Margaret Street. This way of supporting herself would have been one of the few options open to her beyond remarrying.
The house were Lilias Wade died.William Wade is never heard of again, although a woman Martha Wade and a child, William Wade, are in the 1841 Aberdeen census; they may have been a wife and child or sister and nephew. That William Wade junior would become a seaman and get a master’s ticket in later life.
The entry to the harbour would prove to be treacherous for the Aberdeen steamers. Nine years later in 1848, Brilliant‘s sister – the Velocity – would be wrecked in almost exactly the same spot and circumstances, driven onto the Fittie wall by heavy seas. Again all aboard were saved but the ship and all cargo were demolished within an hour and scattered along the Torryside. In 1853, the Duke of Sutherland – at the end of a long journey from London – was wrecked in the harbour entrance with sixteen lives lost.
The Wreck of the “Duke of Sutherland” on the Torry Shore, 1853In 1863 the Prince Consort would also come a cropper. She broke her back but miraculously was salvaged, repaired and returned to service only to be finally wrecked nearby on the Hasman Rocks, a few miles south of Girdle Ness, four years later. Fortuitously there was no loss of life in either accident.
The (first) wreck of the Prince Consort on Aberdeen’s north harbour breakwater in 1863. Sir George Reid. Creidt: Aberdeen Maritime MuseumThe Aberdeen, Leith, Clyde & Tay Shipping Co. would go on to prosper, becoming the North of Scotland, Orkney & Shetland Steam Navigation Company, more commonly known as just the North Company, which connected the ports of Orkney, Shetland and the north of Scotland with Leith.
North Company share certificate from 1882Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
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If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
Forgotten Fatalities: the thread about the Granton railway disaster of 1860
Recent threads about the Scotland Street Tunnel and the Granton Breakwater inevitably involved me touching on the history of the railway that ran between these two places and brought to my attention a striking image of a forlorn-looking steam engine lying on its side on the Wardie foreshore. How this locomotive came to be here isn’t “in the books“, so of course I had to find out more.
The remains of the old railway embankment and sea wall at Lower Granton Road, where a bridge gave access beneath the tracks to Wardie Bay. CC-by-SA 3.0 Guinnog via WikimediaThe answer to this anomaly was that it was the result of an accident which took place on the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee Railway‘s (EP&D) short section of track on the southern side of the Firth of Forth between Trinity Station and Granton Harbour. This event on the evening of Sunday 8th August 1860 would claim the lives of four people, injure six more and cruelly impact upon one family in particular.
The EP&D ran from its start at Canal Street Station (beneath and at right angles to what we now call Edinburgh Waverley), by gravity down the steep incline of the Scotland Street tunnel to a station of that name at its foot. Here, steam engines were attached to trains to haul them the few miles to Granton, via Trinity, or North Leith, via Bonnington. At Granton passengers could continue their journey onward across the Firth of Forth to Burntisland, by connecting paddle steamer. North of the Forth the railway carried on north to Perth and to Dundee (via a further steamer from the harbour at Tayport), explaining the full name of the company.
Route map of the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee Railway, south of the Forth, 1860.On Sundays there were usually there were only two passenger trains a day each way to Granton. On the day of the accident the 4:30PM from Edinburgh ran the three mile trip hauled by engine No. 32. At the terminus the driver detached his engine and shunted the carriages back into the platform to where it would later form the 8:10PM return journey. This pattern only took place on the Sabbath; Monday to Saturday there were sixteen trains each way and a much quicker turnaround was required, undertaken in a rather frightening manner known as “fly shunting” whereby the carriages were “slipped” (detached) while the train was in motion and a well-timed throw of the points directed the engine one way and the freely coasting train the other into the platform. The guard at the rear in the brakevan was responsible for bringing the train to a controlled halt by which time the engine was already in the process of re-positioning itself so it could re-attach at the front of the train and haul it back the way it had come.
Granton Harbour and Pier, c. 1880, from Grant’s Old & New Edinburgh. The trains in the foreground are running on the railway embankment, Granton Middle Pier, where the station buildings are, lies beyond, with the steamers tied up alongside. Note the signalman standing behind the coal wagons with a flag raised.There was nowhere at Granton for engines to wait for any period of time and so on No. 32 now returned the way it had come to while away the next few hours in the engine shed at Scotland Street. As it departed it began to pick up speed and ascend the gradient up to the embankment along the foreshore and parallel to Lower Granton Road. It crossed the bridge over the footpath access to Wardie Bay and passed over first one and then a second set of points as it rounded a gentle bend in the route. This is where disaster struck: as it approached a second, smaller, bridge (which carried it over the Wardie Burn, marked nowadays by a break in the seawall) the left-hand leading wheel of the engine jumped the rails and the locomotive derailed.
The break in the sea wall at Lower Granton Road marks the spot where a bridge once carried the railway across the Wardie Burn. The embankment here was more substantial in the past. Photo © SelfIt continued to plough along the trackbed, derailed, for some 30 yards, ripping up tracks and sleepers and partially demolished the bridge. In doing so it was eventually tipped over the side when it hit the stone parapet. It fell a height of 9 feet down the embankment and then slithered 20 yards down the foreshore, coming to rest on its right hand side (not the left, as shown in the engraving, which may have either been reversed or show it during recovery).
Ordnance Survey 1849 Town Plan showing the route of the engine and its course during the accident. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThere were six people on the footplate when the crash happened of whom four were killed instantly; driver David Mathieson, his 9 year old son William Mackenzie Mathieson (out for an exciting Sunday trip), his brother-in-law and neighbour John Mackenzie and Andrew Morgan, a railway signalman hitching a lift back to Scotland Street. The fireman, James Bowling, had a lucky but painful escape, jumping from the tender as it left the tracks. He broke an arm and dislocated a shoulder amongst other injuries, but lived to tell the tale. A railway porter who was also cadging a lift, George Dall, found himself swimming in the waters of Wardie Bay from where he was pulled, miraculously unhurt.
“The Recent Railway Accident at Granton Near Edinburgh, The Engine on the Beach”. London Illustrated NewsBlacksmith Thomas Gillies, his wife and two children had been sitting on the sea wall below the embankment, enjoying their day of rest, when the engine came crashing down from above, passing inches away from where they sat. All were badly scalded by escaping steam but survived. A horse cab was summoned to take the injured away to the Royal Infirmary. Sheriff Gordon, Procurator Fiscal Paterson and Chief Constable List were on the spot within the hour. They appointed engineers Mr Hawkins and Mr Jardine to investigate, while the officials of the railway company appointed their own civil engineer, Mr Lorimer, to also make enquiries. The Board of Trade appointed Captain (R.E.) Henry Whatley Tyler, to write a formal report.
None of the investigating engineers found any fault in the permanent way, engine No. 32 or with the manner in which it was driven by Mathieson. Tyler noted that although there were minor defects along the way none “ would have caused a steady engine thus to leave the line“. The type of engine – built locally in Leith by R. & W. Hawthorn – had been used without problem for 15 years and the only derailment it had suffered had been caused by a fractured rail. He did however note that the engine was particularly light at 11½ tons, that it had poor weight distribution and that there was a very short wheelbase of just 6 feet. This made it liable to oscillate at higher speeds and Tyler’s educated guess was that the engine had been travelling fast enough (“but not imprudently so“) to set up such an oscillating motion. Without the weight of a following train to restrain such gymnastics it was able to jump enough to leave the rails at a position where the gauge between the tracks was slightly too wide.
A North British Railway (successor to the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee) 0-4-0 tender locomotive, No. 811, similar in overall size, configuration and styling to No. 32 which crashed at Granton.Margaret Stewart Mackenzie, the driver’s wife, lost not only her husband but also her brother and eldest son that day. She was left a widow with three children to support; a 7 year old girl and boys aged 3 and 1 years. She was also four months pregnant and would give birth to a daughter, Sarah Clapperton Mathieson, that December. The members of the Mathieson and Mackenzie family – who all lived next door to each other on Duncan (now Dundonald) Street – were also interred alongside eachother at the Old Calton Burying Ground.
Old Calton Burying Ground, register for the burials of John Mckenzie, David Mathieson and William Mckenzie MathiesonGiven the loss of her husband and brother the Mathieson widow and children found themselves without any financial support and a public subscription was set up under the coordination of the Lothian Road United Presbyterian Church for their benefit. In September the Scotsman reported that “a woman who assumes different names and represents herself to the the wife of an elder of Lothian Road U.P. Church” was wanted by the police for fraudulently soliciting for donations to the fund. The 1881 census shows that Margaret Mathieson stayed on at 10 Duncan Street and was living there with her 80 year old mother (Margaret Mackenzie), two sons (David, 24, a clerk and John ,21, a piano tuner) and her daughter (Sarah, 20, a dressmaker). She was working as a laundress. Sarah Clapperton Mathieson married 4 years later to Robert Fotheringham and they moved nearby to Airlie Place and then Deanpark Street, with at least 6 children born. Margaret would join them next door at Airlie Place, where she died in 1911 aged 81, after 51 years a widow.
Marion Mathieson was about 64 years old when her son David died and lost her son and a grandson that day. The Caledonian Mercury reported the agonising news that this was her fourth son to die; one was knocked down in the street near the family home, another fell from Salisbury Crags and a third had drowned off Aberdeen where he was serving an apprenticeship. She was by this time a widow, living in a cottage in the village of Corstorphine where she would die in 1871.
Of the other victim, Signalman Morgan, he was buried at Warriston Cemetery. A correspondent called Fair Play wrote to the Scotsman soon after to ask for subscriptions for the case of “Mrs Morgan, a highly respectable widow“, the mother of the deceased signalman. He had been “her only hope of subsistence since he was 12 years of age” and that the “good feeling of the public” had overlooked her plight.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
@AngelaScholder So, Karen, just so you understand the consequences of your actions:
Because you reported this post (https://mastodon.energy/@AngelaScholder/116397038832441549) by @joynewacc for an erroneously autocompleted hashtag (#doctor -> #doctorWho), a mastodon.social moderator *deleted her post*.
Yes, read that again: the post of a Palestinian, suffering through genocide in Gaza and trying to share her experience – someone who is, moreover, a founding team member of Gaza Verified (https://gaza-verified.org/team/) – was *deleted* for a stupid hashtag that some white Karen in the West got distressed about.
This is so fucking wrong in so many ways that I don’t know where to begin.
I want to know:
1. Is it mastodon.social policy to just go ahead and delete the posts of its members or was this a moderator acting out of spite against a Palestinian? (Or is everyone on mastodon.social at risk of having their posts deleted if moderators don’t agree with the hashtags they use?)
2. If this is not mastodon.social policy, I’d like to know what action will be taken regarding this moderation action and the moderator responsible and what will change internally to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again.
Israel is already doing their best to erase Palestinians. The least we can do is to not help them by literally deleting the posts of Palestinians on the fediverse. Thank goodness hashtags weren’t a thing in the days of Anne Frank because clearly some of you would have burned her diary had she used the wrong one by mistake.
3. Can we all, please, have some fucking basic decency and maintain perspective when dealing with people suffering through genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid? It’s a pretty low bar for humanity.
And, whatever you do, do not be this Karen.
Check your bloody privilege.
And fuck your hashtag.
We’re talking about human lives here.
CC @staff
#Gaza #Palestine #mastodon #fediverse #moderation #mastodonSocial #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism
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Generálny riaditeľ PPA Marek Čepko si podľa Mesterovej slov mal mimo štandardných procesov dosadiť za šéfa kontroly v PPA človeka, s ktorého nomináciou má EK problém.
Tón: : mierne negatívny
#slovakia #gdelt #sr #list #ek
https://www.teraz.sk/ekonomika/ps-agrominister-r-takac-by-mal-pre-p/958500-clanok.html
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Generálny riaditeľ PPA Marek Čepko si podľa Mesterovej slov mal mimo štandardných procesov dosadiť za šéfa kontroly v PPA človeka, s ktorého nomináciou má EK problém.
Tón: : mierne negatívny
#slovakia #gdelt #sr #list #ek
https://www.teraz.sk/ekonomika/ps-agrominister-r-takac-by-mal-pre-p/958500-clanok.html
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Germany and the #RadicalRight H. Betz and F. Habersack. “Regional Nativism in East Germany. The Case of the AfD”. In: The People and the Nation. Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe. Ed. by R. Heinisch, E. Massetti and O. Mazzoleni. London: Routledge, 2019, pp.
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Germany and the #RadicalRight H. Betz and F. Habersack. “Regional Nativism in East Germany. The Case of the AfD”. In: The People and the Nation. Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe. Ed. by R. Heinisch, E. Massetti and O. Mazzoleni. London: Routledge, 2019, pp.
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Germany and the #RadicalRight H. Betz and F. Habersack. “Regional Nativism in East Germany. The Case of the AfD”. In: The People and the Nation. Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe. Ed. by R. Heinisch, E. Massetti and O. Mazzoleni. London: Routledge, 2019, pp.
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a5R brings the A5 pentagonal geospatial index to R.
Equal-area pentagonal cells across 31 resolutions, encoded as 64-bit integers, with millimetre-level precision at the finest scale 🗺️
R package by Hugh Graham; a5 by Felix Palmer
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🇹🇭"Sud Soi Team incls affected #community members & #NGOs to help #officials inspect factories.. Rarely does a month pass w/o reports of #illegal #waste shipments, #local communities complaining abt #pollution, or fires caused by #recycling factories, which r owned by primarily #Chinese #investors. #Ministry of #Industry has been known as a #mouthpiece of #industrialists & investors.. has emboldened investors to cut costs at te expense of the #environment & #publichealth"🧐
https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/3051215/bribery-claim-needs-proof -
#Australia faces #academiccrisis
"entrenchment of corp culture tt's prioritised #profit, enriched #university executives & pte consultants, & left academics marginalised, demoralised & burnt out. “Univ administrations r dominated by bizpeople who gen'ly hv little experience … r contemptuous of #teachingstaff .. They've undermined security of employment, eroded pay & working cond'ns, & imposed ever-increasing #teaching & admin workloads … made #academiclife #untenable" 1/2
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/australia-faces-academic-crisis-as-profit-driven-policies-erode-university-standards/ar-AA1qAW1R -
Top Ten Tuesday: Spring 2026 To-Read List
The prompt for today was my spring 2026 to-read list. This was pretty easy for me because of my goals. I have a bunch of already known book club books which I have included. I added a few books from series I want to continue soon.
This is a part of Top Ten Tuesday which is currently being run by That Artsy Reader Girl.
- The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
- Perfect Victims by Mohammed El-Kurd
- Bury the Sea by Mona Tewari
- Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia
- The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia
- This Queer Arab Family: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers edited by Elias Jahshan
- The Legacy by R.A Salvatore
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
- The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
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There were two versions of Apple's "Star Wars" game for the Apple II. The first version was written by R.J. (Bob) Bishop in 1977. The second version, from 1978, was by Dana Redington. Note that "ammo" has been replaced by "energy," among various other changes. No word on whether Greedo shot first in the later version.
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Philadelphia’s Italian Market: The Ultimate Guide
The market on 9th Street (one of the oldest and largest open-air markets in the country) does it all — butcher shops, cheese shops, Mexican taquerias, souvlaki joints and more. Sign up for The Feed. The latest on the city’s restaurants scene. Photo by R. Kennedy for V…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Italiancafefood #cafefood #Italia #Italian #italiano #italy
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2626503/philadelphias-italian-market-the-ultimate-guide/ -
Bellevue: the thread about the finest and least wanted house in the New Town
I got a nice message today (September 12th) from WordPress (the foundations upon which the walls and roof of this website sits) to tell me that it had just passed 100,000 views. If I had known this particular milestone was approaching, I might have tried to be more organised and have a thread ready that was somehow relevant. But I didn’t, and so I don’t. Sorry. You’ll just have to settle for one on Bellevue House, which I happened to be looking at today.
Bellevue House, by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, coloured version of the engraving from “Modern Athens”, 1829“Bellevue House? Where’s that?” I hear you ask. Well, it isn’t anywhere, not any more – it was demolished 180-odd years ago. But when it was somewhere, it sat in the centre of Drummond Place in the so-called Second New Town; a fine building, but one that sat awkwardly, offset and facing the “wrong” way to be a monumental centrepiece to the square.
Drummond Place, shown on Kirkwood’s 1819 town plan, which cleverly included the building façades. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe square itself was named for George Drummond – the Lord Provost of Edinburgh – who held that post a record 6 times between 1725 and 1764, and one of the driving forces behind the First New Town of Edinburgh and other great civic improvements such as the North Bridge and Royal Exchange.
Lord Provost George Drummond. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandDrummond’s own house and estate – Drummond Lodge – occupied this part of the park and farmlands north of the City – bounded by Broughton village to the east, the Canonmills Haugh to the north and Gabriel’s Road to the east.
1759 survey of Edinburgh by Fergus and Robertson showing Drummond Lodge, just west of Broughton village © SelfDrummond died in 1766, his house and estate eventually being sold to Major General John Scott of Balcomie and Scotstarvit (in Fife), also known as Pawky Scott (“Sly Scott”) – a soldier, politician and gambler. The latter occupation was something he was rather good at and he allegedly won Dundas House (36 St. Andrew Square, now the Royal Bank of Scotland) off of Sir Lawrence Dundas in a wager. Dundas was unwilling to part with his brand new town house, so instead agreed to build a bigger and better one for Scott on the site of Drummond Lodge.
Royal Bank of Scotland, 26 St. Andrew Square, built as Dundas House for Sir Lawrence Dundas. CC-by-SA 3.0 ThunderwingThe new neoclassical mansion was built to designs by Robert Adam and had an extra bay on either side compared to Dundas House. The rear (north-facing) elevation had a projecting, rounded bay that contained a huge oval drawing room – a form unusual for Adam’s work.
Robert Adam’s final 1774 design for Bellevue House, front elevation. © Sir John Soane’s Museum, LondonScott named his new house Bellevue , after the palatial chateau of that name built by Louis XV for Madam Pompadour in 1750 – but he died in 1775 shortly before it was completed. The builder was George Brown, who also built George Square in the Southside. His widow and 3 daughters lived there, with the title passing to his eldest, Henrietta. She married William Henry Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 4th Duke of Portland – the Marquess of Tichfield – in 1795, who sold it and the grounds to the City for £11,375 4s 0d in 1800. There was a £1,050 annual feu duty. They had the option to buy the superiority within 7 years for a further £20,200.
Bellevue House looking northeast towards Leith in 1796, note that at this time the building is two storeys plus basement. Engraving by R. Scott after Alexander Carse, facsimile copy from the “Edinburgh Magazine; or Literary Miscellany”, vol 13-14.The city didn’t really want the house, it wanted its vast parkland. “The whole place waved with wood and was diversified by undulations of the surface and adorned by seats and bowers and summer-houses, nothing in the town could be more delightful“. And it wanted to rip that up and develop it – by October that year they were soliciting plans to develop it into a new New Town. This was for the planned northern expansion of the New Town – the so-called 2nd New Town – and once again, this pre-existing boundary determines some of those street features that still exist today, 220 years later
Outline of Bellevue lands traced onto Google Earth aerial imagery. The houses stood in the gardens in the centre of what is now Drummond Place. The adjacent land holdings have been namedThe elegant curve of Royal Crescent? It wasn’t intentionally like that, they just made good use of the working with the existing boundary between Bellevue and the Canonmills Haugh. The Haugh was owned by the trustees of Heriot’s Hospital, and they weren’t interested in the New Town scheme here. There was also a significant height difference between the two holdings here, so it was a natural boundary.
Royal Crescent, following the boundary between Bellevue and the Canonmills Haugh (which was the property of Heriot’s Hospital)Bellevue Crescent? Well now you know where it gets its name from, you also know where it gets its shape from! The boundary here was between Bellevue and more land owned by Heriot’s Hospital. The old road to Canonmills that divided the two had a bit of a wiggle in it here, and it was expanded upon with the slender garden crescent with a monumental church at its centre.
Bellevue Crescent expands on the boundary between Bellevue and the land to the east owned by Heriot’s HospitalHeriot’s also stood in the way of the development at “Old Broughton”, as did the other landowner, Mr Murray. And so here there’s an awkward and jarring series of roads and walls and lanes – the boundaries of the medieval village – that not even later attempts at regular, grid-aligned streets could make order out of.
The awkward boundaries within “old Broughton” also define where the Second New Town at first ended. The land in Broughton was owned by Heriot’s Hospital and a Mr. MurrayAnd even the grand showpiece crescent of Abercrombie Place works it’s way around a pre-existing boundary – the garden was not part of the development land at this time, and it’s not quite symetrical at its eastern end, the old boundary roadway of Gabriel’s Road (marked in white) messes things up a bit. The original street plan had Nelson Street come straight through from Dummond Place, emerging awkwardly about 2/3 of the way along Abercrombie Place, but it was soon centred into the crescent to give a more balanced prospect.
Kirkwood’s town plan, 1817, overlaid with Gabriel’s Road (white) and the Bellevue boundary (yellow). Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandSo you have to admit, William Sibbald and Robert Reid – who laid out this phase of the New Town – did a pretty impressive job of working around some wonky boundaries while keeping things ordered and regular and elegant. Their three crescents, to the north, the east and the south, were practical ways to use the land, but were the first such curved streets in Edinburgh and became very fashionable addresses. They also managed to centre the whole eastern section of the plan on Bellevue House within the new Drummond Place. The City didn’t have a use for the house itself and had been unable to lease it for residential use and so instead it was leased to the Board of Customs in 1802. The City wanted them out of the Royal Exchange (the City Chambers) to make more room for itself. The Caledonian Mercury called this arrangement “very honourable to the Government and beneficial to the City“, the “style of exterior grandeur” corresponded appropriately to the importance of the public establishment within. It would be 1805 before the Customs moved in, by which time the planned streets around it were only just beginning to emerge from the ground, so at this time the house continued to stand prominently in open land.
Bellevue House, sitting in its grounds, from Views in Edinburgh and its Vicinity by James & Henry Storer, 1820. Note the royal coat of arms on the portico above the front door.Coincidentally, Lawrence Dundas – who had “lost” his house to Scott in that bet that would result in him paying to have Bellevue built – had died in 1781 and his house had been sold to the government who installed the Board of Excise there. The Boards of Customs and of Excise were separate institutions at this time, but Bellevue House occasionally gets labelled as the “Excise House“, when it was the “Custom House“; the former was on St. Andrew Square. The Customs couldn’t quite fit into the building initially, and so had an extra storey added by the Town Council before taking up occupation. They also required that the surrounding 1 acre of land be fenced of, which formed the nucleus of the later Drummond Place Garden. The Excise found at this time that many of the taxes they collected were being abolished and were downsizing as a result. They vacated Dundas House in 1825, (which was sold to the Royal Bank) and moved in with the Customs at Bellevue. But not even the joint establishments of the Customs and the Excise could keep the building filled – many of their functions finding themselves sent south to London, and the building soon began to empty. By the late 1830s, 17 of its rooms lay vacant.
The Town Council had hoped to buy Dundas House for itself, as a mansion for the Lord Provost but had been outbid by the Bank. They now found the government willing to sell their lease on Bellevue House back to them for £5,000, so they were keen not to lose out again. It was 1844 and the Lord Provost Adam Black had also heard rumblings that the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway, planning to commence tunnelling its way under the New Town from Scotland Street to Canal Street station, might move to buy the house and the square of Drummond Place for itself and erect workshops or a station. He “considered it a matter dangerous to the city that this property should come into the hands of any railway company” who might cause “considerable danger of nuisance… in that part of the town, which it was of importance should be kept in as beautiful a state as possible“. Lord Provost Black had a particular concern in his matter; he resided in a house on Drummond Place!
Scotland Street Tunnel, northern portal. CC-by-SA 2.0, Jim Barton via GeographOn this subject, the Lord Provost was right – partially. The Railway did want to buy Bellevue House, but for no other reason than to demolish it. It was directly on top of the line of their tunnel and they did not wish the expense and difficulty of going around it, or trying to reinforce the foundations. And so in December 1845, the City struck a bargain with the Railway and the Board of Customs. The City bought the house for £5,000, with the Customs moving to smaller premises on Picardy Place. They in turn, after negotiations on the terms had completed, sold the house to the Railway for £3,200, who would then pay to demolish it. It was estimated that £1,200 of its materials would be of use in constructing its stations and buildings. Everybody won: the Railway saved much more in simplifying the construction of the tunnel than it had spent on the house. The City prevented the Railway building on the land, and the proprietors of Drummond Place got rid of an awkward building that spoiled the symmetry of their square and were able to buy the site and incorporate it into their private pleasure garden for the sum of £1,200.
The line of the Scotland Street tunnel, passing directly under the site of Bellevue House. Google Earth aerial imagery.By February 1846, the Edinburgh Evening Post reported “in a few days it will be levelled with the ground” and that its removal would be “a great improvement to Drummond Place, besides opening up the vistas from Duke (Dublin) Street northward and London street eastward“. And just like that, one of the biggest, but least wanted, houses in the New Town was gone and Drummond Place got its private garden in the centre and they all lived happily after. (Until, that is, someone dared to paint their door pink. And then green. And then off-pink.)
Now and Then (1829) comparison in Drummond Place, showing Bellevue House as the Custom House, 1829 engraving by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd. © Edinburgh City LibrariesNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
Automatic For The People
Now, Andy did you hear about this one? Automatic For The People ~ born October 6, 1992. It's #96 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Listen to Automatic For The People by R.E.M. on Amazon Music ... #rem #automaticforthepeople #90srock #90smusic #alternativerock #altrock #baroquepop #billberry #michaelstipe #mikemills #peterbuck
https://robinbannks.wordpress.com/2024/10/06/now-andy-did-you-hear-about-this-one-automatic/
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RE: https://mstdn.social/@scottmiller42/116501715905656441
Remember the dotcom boom pricing model? Sell it at a loss, expand the user base, for years with expectation that economy of scale will lead to profit.
The fact that they are converting to a usage-based pricing model so quickly tells you they are losing their ass on this!!!
Also, for those prior dotcoms, the costs didn't grow so fast by usage (heavily driven by R&D and marketing). #GenAI #LLMs have a voracious appetite for silicon, electricity, and cash!
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So he paid a LOT per minute and WAS a single term president, Lost In Civil Court, and was held liable as a loser, in Civil Court. Ok.
So to keep it MSM and ADvertising-like-light on the number 1-3 CSAM Oligarchy 'SocialMedia' aka #FreeWebHosringCulture areas of #Meta & #Xitter ....
1....976-LOST-NFLA*²
¹* $2.6m a min, which sounds really⁴ LoserLike even by (R) standards. 💸💸💸💸💸💸
²* Obvs. Sociopath 'S'+ #TFG doesn't 'feel guilty', #DSM5 manual
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The Finnish Connection: the thread about William Crichton and the Trinity Chain Pier
The Old Chain Pier, on the sea wall at Trinity in the north of Edinburgh, is a nice little pub for a drink or some lunch with an uninterrupted view across the Firth of Forth to Fife. It takes its name from the Trinity Chain Pier, a rather fragile-looking structure opened nearby on August 14th 1821 to serve the east coast steamers. The pier is long gone, commemorated by the pub, but surprisingly you can fine many direct links to it in Finland of all places!
“Pier of Suspension. Erected at Trinity, near Newhaven, and within Three Short Miles of Edinburgh”. 1825 print by Charles Hulmandel. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.The pier was first proposed in 1820 by George Crichton, an entrepreneurial Leith businessman. George, the son of was the son of Alexander Crichton of Woodhouselee and Newington, came from money and had spent some time in the Royal Navy, rising to be a Lieutenant. But it was on land where he made his own fortune as a shipowner. He introduced one of the first steamships to Leith, the imaginatively named Tug of 1817, which plied the Forth coast. The Port of Leith at that time was not in a good state of upkeep and access was strictly tidal. His company, the London, Leith, Edinburgh and Glasgow Shipping Company – was granted permission to build his rival pier. They in turn transferred their interest to a new company backed by Crichton – the Trinity Pier Company – who would build, own and operated it.
Coloured lithograph by Jobbins & Chiffins, 1836, showing steamers at the Chain Pier from the sea, looking south towards Trinity. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.The final design of this “pier of suspension” was by Captain Samuel Brown RN and it was situated west of the old harbour of Newhaven. Its three spans projected 627 feet out into the sea and rose ten feet above high water, it was intended that it would be accessible to steamers at all states of the tide and would not have to compete with the Newhaven fishing fleet for space.
Close up of the end of the pier from the 1825 print by Charles Hulmandel, showing a small steamer berthed. There were stairs down to water level to allow embarkation. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.At the head of the pier was a small waiting room for steamer passengers and visitors could pay 1d at a toll booth to promenade along the slender deck. The pier however never really caught on with the steamer trade; a proper deep-water harbour at Granton would open in 1837, in 1850 the North British Railway bridged the Forth from there using Thomas Bouch’s “floating railway” system, and improvements to the docks at the Port of Leith all conspired to make it surplus to requirements.
Comparison of the 1849 OS Town Plan and the 1893 25 inch map of Edinburgh showing the Chain Pier. The original toll house has been replaced by a public house in the later view, and a tramway and waiting room to serve the steamers have gone, with new bathing shelters added instead. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandNot long after the pier was opened, a public house opened opposite called The Chain Pier Inn. This was sold in 1865 so that the portion of Trinity Crescent called Albert Terrace could be extended to the east and the pub transferred across the road, replacing the former pier toll house. It is this building, much modified over the years, that forms the core of the present-day Old Chain Pier.
Around 1910, already the Chain Pier Inn is the Old Chain Pier Bar. It features an ornamental cupola from its days as the ticket office for the pier. Old postcard.The last regular steamer from Trinity, the Helen McGregor, sailed its final season in 1850, leaving Largo on the east Fife coast at 6:45AM each morning with intermediate stops at Leven, Dysart and Kirkcaldy before arriving at the pier to meet the 9AM train from Edinburgh and make the return journey. Further departures were made to Fife at 1PM and 5PM.
“Newhaven Harbour and the Chain Pier, looking east” coloured print of an engraving by R. Brandard after W. H. Bartlett, originally published c. 1840.After that year, when the railway service was inaugurated from Granton to Burntisland, the steamer trade reduced to little more than the occasional summer visitor and the pier found itself without a purpose. In 1859 ownership was sold to the Colonial Life Assurance Company. In order to try and make some money out of the scheme, it was promoted as a swimming station, with changing huts erected at the end and served by special early morning bathers’ trains and later cable-hauled tramcars.
Bathing huts at the end of the chain pier in the 1890s. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.Advertising bill for the Chain Pier. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.In March 1898 the Chain Pier Inn burned down, the result of an overheated hearth stove, and a much more permanent disaster occured later in the year the pier was largely swept away in a great storm that culminated on the night of October 18th 1898. Sections of the sea wall at Newhaven and the sea wall and railway embankment at Wardie Bay were also swept away by the power of the waves.
After the storm in 1898. The remains of the pier would be demolished. From Old Leith by Guthrie Hutton.During the height of the storm, which lasted for thirty-six hours, the Norwegian sailing ship Kawe was wrecked ashore at Annfield, between Newhaven and Leith Docks, and the Swedish barque Bertha was wrecked between Cramond and Granton. Numerous other vessels were damaged, driven ashore or wrecked all along the Forth coast.
Evening News artist’s impression of the stranding of the Kawe at Annfield. Printed 19th October 1898The pub would be rebuilt – and survives to this day – but the pier was not and the remains were demolished. Within the pub you can find the older masonry walls of the original structure and other relics from the pier.
Relics from the Old Chain Pier within the pub of that name. © SelfGeorge Crichton however prospered, even if his pier did not; he was one of the Leith Docks Commissioners, a Commissioner of Police, councillor of the Royal Landing Club, a reformist and vocal defender of Leith’s political independence from Edinburgh. He died in September 1841, leaving behind the not insubstantial fortune of £8,167 (after his creditors were settled) – about £901k in today’s money.
In 1827, George Crichton’s third son – William – was born in the family home at John’s Place in South Leith. His mother was Margaret Gifford Allan, known as Gifford. William followed in his older brothers’ footsteps and went into a career in engineering. At the age of fourteen his father died and he finished school. His brother Alexander got him a position at Scott & Company of Greenock, one of Scotland’s most prestigious shipbuilders. After that his other brother Edward got him into the Shotts Iron Company, the name in iron founding in 19th century Scotland. He completed this practical education at Robert Napier & Sons in Govan, one of the names in the country for marine engine building. When he left in 1848 he was aged just 21 but already had a most impressive CV for an aspiring young engineer.
William Crichton in later lifeWilliam now went to sea to get practical experience, and served as engineer on one of the ships of his father’s old company – the London, Leith, Edinburgh & Glasgow Shipping Co. – where he still had relations on the board of directors. After a season on the Royal Victoria he spent a winter working on his draughtsmanship and design studies, before sailing the next season with the Napier-engined Isabella Napier of the Continental Steam Navigation Co. between Leith, London and Hamburg.
Post Office Directory advert showing the “Royal Victoria”William’s big break came unexpectedly in 1850 when a letter arrived from his fellow Scotsman, David Cowie of Cowie & Eriksson – marine engineers in Turku, the Grand Duchy of Finland (then a part of the Russian Empire). Cowie invited William to join his company on a three year contract as a supervisor. William jumped at the chance, Russia was then the place to be for an aspiring naval engineer to make his name and make money; the waning Imperial power was playing catchup with France and Britain and desperately trying to buy in the foreign expertise to expand and modernise its navy.
David CowieRussia held a further attaction for the aspiring William as he had connections in high places in the country. His uncle, Sir Alexander Crichton, was physician to the Czar and his cousin, Sir Archibald Crichton, was also in the service to the Czar’s family. His first job in Finland was to supervise the construction and installation of the steam engines of the new frigate Rurik then being built by Cowie & Errikson for the Russian Navy.
Launch of the “Rurik” in 1851Crichton however soon fell ill and needed to be nursed back to health by Cowie’s wife. It was during this time he met her brother, Samuel Owen (junior), whose father Samuel Senior had helped industrialise Sweden and through whom Eriksson and Cowie had come to work together and form their partnership. In turn through Samuel Junior he met Annie Elizabeth Owen and the two would be wed in 1854. They would ultimately have twelve children together but before he could marry, William had to finish his work on the Rurik, which dd not complete until 1853. This brought his contract with Cowie & Eriksson to a close and so William took up a new opportunity in Helsinki through the Owens with Fiskars (the company known for orange-handled scissors and who may have made your garden shears).
But before he could get started, the matter of the War in Crimea got in the way and he was arrested in St. Petersburg as a possible enemy agent. Fortunately he was able to drop the name of Sir Alexander Crichton to the chief of police and instead of being sent to Moscow, he was released into his uncle’s care. Put above suspicion through his connections, he instead was given a place with Izhorskiye Zavody, a state-owned engineering works in Kolpino, St. Petersburg. Here he was able to repay Samuel Owen Junior by getting him a place there too.
Soviet postage stamp celebrating 250 years of the Izhorskiye ZavodyWilliam set about his new job with enthusiasm and after the Crimean War was over travelled frequently back to England to appraise himself of the latest designs and technology, bringing them back to Russia to improve his own company’s engines. For his efforts in modernising their naval engineering the appreciative Russians presented him with a St Stanislaus Ribbon with a golden medal in 1860.
St. Stanislaus ribbon and silver medal, collection of the SmithsonianIn 1862, William was called back to Turku in Finland by a letter from one Erik Julin who had bought Eriksson’s shares of his old employer Cowie & Eriksson. Julin informed him that Cowie was ready to sell his share too and wanted William to consider buying it and entering into partnership with him, acting as the lead engineer. William agreed and bought Cowie’s share for 32,810 Silver Roubles. The new company became William Crichton & Co and it wasted no time in expanding from engineering into shipbuilding.
Erik Julin, Crichton’s partner in Crichton & Co.With solid finances, Julin’s business sense and William’s engineering prowess and Imperial connections the company prospered. By the 1870s their Turku yard employed 400 and was building small screw tugs, coastal vessels and auxiliary engines. The company expanded by taking control of the Turku Old Shipyard and modernising it to allow production of steel vessels. With greater liabilities at stake it was converted into a limited organisation, with tho-thirds of the shares owned by Crichton and one third by Julin.
Letterhead of William Crichton & Co,The company went from strength to strength and became the largest employer in Turku. To ensure Imperial orders it maintained a dedicated “commercial counsellor” in St. Petersburg, to handle the delicate negotiations and backhanders required to get state work. Crichton continued to modernise and enlarge the works until his death in 1889 aged 62. None of his many children wanted to take on the operation, so his shares were sold off to his deputy, John Eager and to Russian banks and nobility. The company continued to prosper and increasingly started to build small warships for the Russian navy. In 1898 it built twenty-six Sokol torpedo boats and took over a yard in Okhta, St. Petersburg. This investment would ultimately be their undoing as it incurred significant debts and its poor performance resulted in large penalty contract clauses.
Sokol torpedo boat of the Imperial Russian NavyIn 1906, tensions between Moscow and the Finnish Grand Duchy saw the Russian Navy cancel all contracts with Finnish yards. This hit Crichtons hard and they incurred further losses from which they never recovered. By 1913 they declared bankruptcy with enormous debts. But that was not the end for the Leith name of Crichton in Finnish shipbuilding – two of the company’s biggest creditors (and shareholders) were the Dahlström brothers, and they restarted the yard in Turku under the name Aktiebolaget (AB) Crichton in 1914.
AB Crichton letterheadThis new company got by on orders from the new Finnish state – including a pair of gunboats Karjala and Turunmaa which would go on to serve in Finland’s wars with the Soviet Union in the 1940s and into the 1950s. But the post-WW1, post-revolution, post-independence and post-civil war recession hit AB Crichton very hard and it built its last ship in 1924. But once again the name it was saved; a merger with its neighbour and rival AB Vulcan formed Crichton-Vulcan Oy. Thus it was that a company with a half-Scottish name and heritage would become Finland’s largest shipyard and was awarded orders in 1927 for two new 3,900 tonne coastal defence armoured ships for the Finnish navy, Ilmarinen and Väinämöinen, the pride of the fleet
Väinämöinen in 1938, pride of the Finish NavyBoth of these ships served in the 1940s wars with the Soviet Union, Ilmarinen hit mines in September 1941 and sank with the loss of 271 men from a crew of 401. The survivors were sardonically termed “Ilmarisen uimaseura” (Ilmarinen‘s Swimming Club). Väinämöinen was a persistent thorn in the enemy side who expended great efforts to sink her. They succeeded in doing so in July 1944 only to find out that thanks to herculean camouflage efforts on the part of the Finns, they had actually sank the German anti-aircraft ship Niobe instead.
And this is why, to this day, there is a street in Turku on the waterfront called Crichtoninkatu or Crichtongatan (please feel free to send me a better picture if you find yourself on that street any time soon!)
Crichtoninkatu in TurkuNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
$179 billion for #Military projects, but $1 billion to keep Americans safe, informed and educated (via #PublicBroadcasting) is too much?!! They only want soldiers to fix the machines when they break down! They don't care about science, culture, building community, etc.
#Hypersonics, #AI, #droneSwarms: Pentagon pours $179 billion into R&D
by Kyle Gunn
Wed, July 16, 2025https://www.yahoo.com/news/hypersonics-ai-drone-swarms-pentagon-205135850.html
#CultureOfWar #TrumpSucks #CPBCuts #NativePublicMedia #PublicMedia #CommunityRadio #MilitaryBudget #MoreSesameStreetLessWar #EmergencyCommunications #CorporationForPublicBroadcasting
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2/2
"As a #doctor, I find it increasingly troubling from an #ethical standpoint to practise in a system where #clinical decisions r constrained by #corporate #arrangements. As a #consumer, I feel #betrayed – paying more ea year for less flexibility, less #transparency & less #peaceofmind. These changes undermine #trust in te #healthcare #system & create #inequality in #access. I urge te #authorities to scrutinise these practices more closely" #Singapore #governance
🧐#IncomeInsurance much needed! -
Here are interesting passages from the 1970s text "Class and State in the Proletarian Dictatorship" by R.C.
"""
With the aid of universal suffrage, the bourgeoisie spread the ideological fiction of the egalitarian principle of the participation of all classes ("the people") in the development of the state. Thus it managed to hide the true nature of the state in the eyes of the exploited classes while at the same time crushing the first autonomous movements of the working class. In contrast, the proletariat will proudly proclaim the class purpose of the state. This state will not be a parliamentary arena which will allow the political activity of every party to take place in 'complete freedom.' It will not sanction a compromise between them. It will be the expression of a relation of force and will openly proclaim itself to be so. No class other than the proletariat will be allowed to carry arms; no council of strata not living by their own work will be tolerated. ... The lawful edicts of the semi-state will place all exploiting strata outside the law and they will be considered hostages of war.
"""Also:
"""
The Commune-state is not communism, but the dictatorship of a class that is not yet working under conditions of freedom, nor in conditions of its own choosing. The dictatorship relies on the arming of the proletariat, and not on any institution produced by democratic consultation among the whole of the population. The proletarian revolution has substituted a system of soviets for a decrepit parliamentarism; the proletarians have expelled at bayonet point the learned assemblies constituted through democratic means. Bourgeois legality has been pulverised under the weight of the proletariat.
"""#marxism #socialism #communism #CommunistLeft #LeftCommunism
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Beware the #Dullahan, Ireland's Headless Horseman! Riding a menacing Midnight #Stallion it lashes travelers with a whip of human spine and paralyzes them with fear. Only gold can ward off this grim harbinger of death. 🐴💀 #Irishlore #HeadlessHorseman #SleepyHollow
art by r/SMITEGODCONCEPTS