With All Those Big, Cumbersome Skirts How DID Victorian Women Potty?...

 ...You gotta wonder... 👀👀👀

"Anna Karenina," --- the movie, starring Kiera Knightly & Jude Law...

Hmmm... I've never seen a waltz danced like this, quite unique, sensual and artistic...

I've seen Kiera Knightly as Lara in "Doctor Zhivago, and now as Anna in "Anna Karenina," --- and she always seems to me as if she's playing Elizabeth Swan. Jude law as Vronsky?... I like him as an actor, but his very English accent here is distracting me. This is supposed to be Russia.

I haven't read Leo Tolstoy's 800 page epic romance, "Anna Karenina," which I hear also has eight parts and a dozen main characters. Of course, it's set in Victorian times, but in Russia, where. like in most countries women didn't have many rights, if any, and arranged marriages were the way people lived, especially in the upper classes. Girls would. with very few exceptions, obediently marry whoever their families chose for them. Love matches were rare, and so people, being what they are, --- affairs, such as Anna's with Vronsky might not be that uncommon, no matter how scandalous it was to high society. However, Vronsky and Anna flaunted their affair brazenly and didn't care who knew about it. 

This is how I imagine Anna looking, --- Michelle Dockery, much better, --- lovely, sophisticated, sensual, passionate.

And, much better as Vronsky, --- Santiago Cabrera.

An animated version of the plot, above.

The critics agreed, above, --- beautiful production. little to no substance in the acting, little to no chemistry between Kiera Knightly and Jude Law. One critic said he fell asleep during the movie. They all agreed that they didn't care what happened to Anna and Vronsky. 

I watched the 2015 mini-series with Vittoria Puccini and Santiago Cabrera in the lead roles and thought it was well done.

BRIEF CASE #1: Captivating, Sinister, Beautiful Maria Tarnowska, --- Affairs, Kink, Divorce, Shooting, Poisoning, Jealousy......

...And only 8 years punishment for murder...

🌸🌹🌸💔💥💋💪👀💙

...There is a small commercial at the start of the video but bear with it. (Love his wonky voice!)

Some History Of Gay Rights & Wrongs In The UK And Molly Houses...

💕LIVE AND LET LIVE...💕

18th century...

• 1711 – Anne, Queen of Great Britain ended a long-lasting intimate friendship with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. The "Queen's Favourite" hoped to wield power equal to that of a government minister. When their relationship soured, she blackmailed Anne with letters revealing their intimacy, and accused her of perverting the course of national affairs by keeping lesbian favourites. Anne and Sarah had invented pet names for themselves during their youths which they continued to use after Anne became queen: Mrs Freeman (Sarah) and Mrs Morley (Anne). Effectively a business manager, Sarah had control over the queen's position, from her finances to people admitted to the royal presence.
• 1722 – John Quincy writes about lesbianism in his second edition of the Lexicon Physico Medicum. Acc
• 1724 – Margaret Clap, better known as Mother Clap, ran a coffee house from 1724 to 1726 in Holborn, London. The coffee house served as a Molly House for the underground gay community. Her house was popular, being well known within the gay community. She cared for her customers, and catered especially to the gay men who frequented it. She was known to have provided "beds in every room of the house" and commonly had "thirty or forty of such Kind of Chaps every Night, but more especially on Sunday Nights".

18th century illustration of a "Molly" (contemporary term for an effeminate homosexual)

• 1726 – Three men (Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin, and Thomas Wright) were hanged at Tyburn for sodomy following a raid of Margaret Clap's Molly House.
• 1727 – Charles Hitchen, a London Under City Marshal, was convicted of attempted sodomy at a Molly House. Hitchen had abused his position of power to extort bribes from brothels and pickpockets to prevent arrest, and he particularly leaned on the thieves to make them fence their goods through him. Hitchen had frequently picked up soldiers for sex, but had eluded prosecution by the Society for the Reformation of Manners.
• 1728 –18th century London Molly House, Julius Caesar Taylor's, Tottenham Court Road, Jenny Greensleeves' Molly House, Durham Yard, off The Strand, The Golden Ball, Bond's Stables, off Chancery Lane, Royal Oak Molly House, Giltspur Street, Smithfield and Three Tobacco Rolls Covent Garden were operating in London.
• 1730 – The term "lesbian" to describe same sex relationships between women comes into use around the 1730s.
• 1735 – Conyers Place wrote "Reason Insufficient Guide to Conduct Mankind in Religion".
• 1736 – Love letters from Lord John Hervey to Stephen Fox PC, a British peer and Member of Parliament, show that they had been living in a homosexual relationship for a period of ten years, from 1726 to 1736.
• 1749 – Thomas Cannon wrote "Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplified".
• 1772 – The first public debate about homosexuality began during the trial of Captain Robert Jones who was convicted of the capital offence of sodomizing a thirteen-year-old boy. The debate during the case and with the background of the 1772 Macaroni prosecutions considered Christian intolerance of homosexuality and the human rights of men who were homosexual. Jones was acquitted and received a pardon on condition that he leave the country. He ended up living in grandeur with his footman at Lyon, in the South of France.
• 1773 – Charles Crawford wrote "A Dissertation on the Phaedon of Plato".
• 1776 –18th century London gay bar, Harlequin (Nag's Head Court, Covent Garden) was operating.
• 1778 - Eleanor Butler & Sarah Ponsonby, known as The Ladies of Llangollen, were two upper-class Irish women whose relationship scandalized and fascinated their contemporaries during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The pair moved to a Gothic house in Llangollen, North Wales, in 1780 after leaving Ireland to escape the social pressures of conventional marriages. Over the years, numerous distinguished visitors called upon them. Guests included Shelley, Byron, Wellington and Wordsworth, who wrote a sonnet about them.
• 1785 – Jeremy Bentham becomes one of the first people to argue for the decriminalization of homosexuality in England, which was punishable by hanging. The essay Offences Against One's Self, written about 1785, argued for the liberalization of laws prohibiting homosexual sex. He argued that homosexual acts did not weaken men, nor threaten population or marriage. The essay was never published in his lifetime.
• 1797 – The Encyclopedia Britannica published a brief mention of homosexuality in the article about Greece.

19th century...

William Blake's Lot and His Daughters, Huntington Library, c. 1800

• 1800 – William Blake paints "Lot and His Daughters". The Book of Genesis in chapters 11–14 and 18–19 describes Lot and his family, living through the fire and brimstone sent against Sodom and Gomorrah apparently for either rape, transgression of the laws of hospitality, or homosexuality. "Lot and His Daughters" however portrays the part of the story that involves incest, not homosexuality: the story in Genesis describes how the daughters of Lot, along the road as they fled from Sodom and Gomorrah, got their father drunk so that after he fell asleep they could have sex with him and in this way get children from him.
• 1806 – Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister starts writing love letters to and from Eliza Raine. Lister actively participated in and wrote about her lesbian relationships in an encrypted diary. Although she did not use the word lesbian, at age thirty, she wrote, "I love and only love the fairer sex and thus, beloved by them in turn my heart revolts from any other love but theirs.
• 1810 – The nineteenth century began with a wave of prosecutions against homosexual men. On 14 January, a farmer in West Yorkshire wrote in his diary that capital punishment seemed an unacceptably cruel response to a sexual behavior that nature or God had ordained in an individual. (The diary entry was discovered in 2020.) On 8 July, the Bow Street Runners raided The White Swan, a tumbledown pub of Tudor origin near Drury Lane. Twenty-seven men were arrested on suspicion of sodomy and attempted sodomy.
• 1811 – The Scottish court case Woods and Pirie vs Dame Cumming Gordon showed two teachers are accused of having a lesbian relationship by a pupil, claiming they had indecent sexual relationships. However, one judge found that sex between women was "equally imaginary with witchcraft, sorcery or carnal copulation with the devil", illustrating notions at the time that tied sexuality with masculinity.
• 1812 – James Miranda Barry graduated from the Medical School of Edinburgh University as a doctor. Barry went on to serve as an army surgeon working overseas. Barry lived as a man but was found to be female-bodied upon his death in 1865.
• 1828 – The Buggery Act 1533 was repealed and replaced by the Offences against the Person Act 1828. Buggery remained punishable by death.
• 1833 – 24-year old actor Eliza Edwards is found dead. The corpse was taken to Guys Hospital for an autopsy, where it is discovered that they were 'a perfect man'.
• 1835 – The last two men to be executed in Britain for buggery, James Pratt and John Smith, were arrested on 29 August in London after being spied upon while having sex in a private room; they were hanged on 27 November.
• 1838 – Harry Stokes was a master bricklayer, beerhouse manager and special constable in Manchester. He was assigned a female gender at birth but lived as a man. Harry had two long-term relationships with women, both of which lasted over 20 years. In 1838 and 1859 his gender variance became the subject of local and national newspaper articles in which he was described as a 'man-woman' and a 'female husband'.
• 1852 – John Martin paints The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorah. Sodom was (supposedly) destroyed for the sin of sodomy, although a strong case has been made that violence against persons and transgression of the laws of hospitality, including a demand that he hand over his houseguests (who happened to be angels) to the ruffian citizens of the town, were more important at the time of the composition of the story in Genesis, chapter 19.
• 1861 – The death penalty for buggery was abolished when the Offences Against the Person Act 1828 was replaced with the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. A total of 8921 men had been prosecuted since 1806 for sodomy with 404 sentenced to death and 56 executed. Homosexuality remained illegal until 1967 in England and Wales and 1980 in Scotland.
• 1866 – Marriage was defined as being between a man and a woman (preventing future same-sex marriages). In the case of Hyde v. Hyde and Woodmansee (a case of polygamy), Lord Penzance's judgment began "Marriage as understood in Christendom is the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others."
• 1871 – Ernest 'Stella' Boulton and Frederick 'Fanny' Park, two Victorian transvestites and suspected homosexuals, appeared as defendants in the celebrated Boulton and Park trial in London, charged "with conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence". The indictment was against Lord Arthur Clinton, Ernest Boulton, Frederic Park, Louis Hurt, John Fiske, Martin Cumming, William Sommerville and C. H. Thompson. The prosecution was unable to prove either that they had committed any homosexual offence or that men wearing women's clothing was an offence in English law. Lord Arthur Clinton killed himself before his trial.

Fanny and Stella (Park & Boulton) on stage

• 1872 – Sheridan Le Fanu publishes the novella Carmilla, which depicts the tale of a lesbian vampire luring young women for her mother to sacrifice.
• 1883 – John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton, CB FBA was born. Openly homosexual, Keynes a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments. He diarized his homosexual encounters and records that he had 65 encounters in 1909, 26 in 1910, 39 in 1911.
• 1885 – The British Parliament enacted Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, section 11 of which, known as the Labouchere Amendment, prohibited gross indecency between males. It thus became possible to prosecute homosexuals for engaging in sexual acts where it could not be proven.
• 1885 – A collection of the poems of Sappho were translated and published in English by Henry Thornton Wharton as Sappho: Memoir, Text, and Selected Renderings. Wharton maintained a homosexual interpretation of "Ode to Aphrodite".
• 1889 – The Cleveland Street scandal occurred, when a homosexual male brothel in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia, London, was raided by police after they discovered telegraph boys had been working there as rent boys. A number of aristocratic clients were discovered, including Lord Arthur Somerset, equerry to the Prince of Wales. The Prince of Wales's son Prince Albert Victor and Lord Euston were also implicated.
• Scotland became the last jurisdiction in Europe to abolish the death penalty for same-sex sexual intercourse, which reduced the penalty to life imprisonment in a ^{penitentiary.} 
• 1895 – Oscar Wilde, tried for gross indecency over a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, was sentenced to two years in prison with hard labor.
• The gay English poet A. E. Housman writes a poem about the trial of Oscar Wilde. Due to its content, it was not published until after Housman's death.
• Winston Churchill was accused of having committed "acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type" while a cadet at Sandhurst. Churchill sued the accuser for defamation and was awarded £400 in damages. Throughout his life, Churchill showed little interest in women other than his wife, enjoyed the company of homosexuals, and was deeply attached to male friends and his long-standing secretary Edward Marsh.
• 1897 – George Cecil Ives organizes the first homosexual rights group in England, the Order of Chaeronea. Dr Helen Boyle and her partner, Mabel Jones, set up the first women-run general practice in Brighton, including offering free therapy for poor women. Helen Boyle also founded the National Council for Mental Hygiene (which subsequently became MIND) in 1922. Havelock Ellis publishes Sexual Inversion, the first volume in an intended series called Studies in the Psychology of Sex. He argues that homosexuality is not a disease but natural, occurring throughout human and animal history, and should be accepted, not treated. The book was banned in England for being obscene; the subsequent volumes in the series published in the US and not sold in England until 1936.
• 1898 – George Bedborough is convicted of obscenity, for selling a copy of Havelock Ellis's book Studies in the Psychology of Sex Vol. 2, on the topic of homosexuality.

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Smallpox In Victorian Times...

Thanks to vaccinations, by the mid 1800s it was losing it's grip...

Early Control Efforts

Smallpox was a terrible disease. On average, 3 out of every 10 people who got it died. People who survived usually had scars, which were sometimes severe.

One of the first methods for controlling smallpox was variolation, a process named after the virus that causes smallpox (variola virus). During variolation, people who had never had smallpox were exposed to material from smallpox sores (pustules) by scratching the material into their arm or inhaling it through the nose. After variolation, people usually developed the symptoms associated with smallpox, such as fever and a rash. However, fewer people died from variolation than if they had acquired smallpox naturally.

The basis for vaccination began in 1796 when the English doctor Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had gotten cowpox were protected from smallpox. Jenner also knew about variolation and guessed that exposure to cowpox could be used to protect against smallpox. To test his theory, Dr. Jenner took material from a cowpox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes’ hand and inoculated it into the arm of James Phipps, the 9-year-old son of Jenner’s gardener. Months later, Jenner exposed Phipps several times to variola virus, but Phipps never developed smallpox. More experiments followed, and, in 1801, Jenner published his treatise “On the Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation.” In this work, he summarized his discoveries and expressed hope that “the annihilation of the smallpox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice.”

Vaccination became widely accepted and gradually replaced the practice of variolation. At some point in the 1800s, the virus used to make the smallpox vaccine changed from cowpox to vaccinia virus.

Traces of smallpox pustules found on the head of the 3000-year-old mummy of the Pharaoh Ramses V. Photo courtesy of World Health Organization (WHO)

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Edward Jenner (1749–1823). Photo courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.

Global Smallpox Eradication Program

In 1959, the World Health Organization (WHO) started a plan to rid the world of smallpox. Unfortunately, this global eradication campaign suffered from a lack of funds, personnel, and commitment from countries, and a shortage of vaccine donations. Despite their best efforts, smallpox was still widespread in 1966, causing regular outbreaks across South America, Africa, and Asia.

The Intensified Eradication Program began in 1967 with a promise of renewed efforts. Laboratories in many countries where smallpox occurred regularly were able to produce more, higher-quality freeze-dried vaccine. Other factors that played an important role in the success of the intensified efforts included the development of the bifurcated needle, the establishment of a case surveillance system, and mass vaccination campaigns.

By the time the Intensified Eradication Program began in 1967, smallpox was already eliminated in North America (1952) and Europe (1953). Cases were still occurring in South America, Asia, and Africa (smallpox was never widespread in Australia). The Program made steady progress toward ridding the world of this disease, and by 1971 smallpox was eradicated from South America, followed by Asia (1975), and finally Africa (1977).

Last Cases of Smallpox

In late 1975, three-year-old Rahima Banu from Bangladesh was the last person in the world to have naturally acquired variola major. She was also the last person in Asia to have active smallpox. She was isolated at home with house guards posted 24 hours a day until she was no longer infectious. A house-to-house vaccination campaign within a 1.5-mile radius of her home began immediately. A member of the Smallpox Eradication Program team visited every house, public meeting area, school, and healer within 5 miles to ensure the illness did not spread. They also offered a reward to anyone who reported a smallpox case.

Ali Maow Maalin was the last person to have naturally acquired smallpox caused by variola minor. Maalin was a hospital cook in Merca, Somalia. On October 12, 1977, he rode with two smallpox patients in a vehicle from the hospital to the local smallpox office. On October 22, he developed a fever. At first healthcare workers diagnosed him with malaria, and then chickenpox. The smallpox eradication staff then correctly diagnosed him with smallpox on October 30. Maalin was isolated and made a full recovery. Maalin died of malaria on July 22, 2013, while working in the polio eradication campaign.

Janet Parker was the last person to die of smallpox. In 1978, Parker was a medical photographer at England’s Birmingham University Medical School. She worked one floor above the Medical Microbiology Department where staff and students conducted smallpox research. She became ill on August 11 and developed a rash on August 15 but was not diagnosed with smallpox until 9 days later. She died on September 11, 1978. Her mother, who was providing care for her, developed smallpox on September 7, despite having been vaccinated two weeks earlier. An investigation suggested that Janet Parker had been infected either via an airborne route through the medical school building’s duct system or by direct contact while visiting the microbiology corridor.

World Free of Smallpox

Almost two centuries after Jenner hoped that vaccination could annihilate smallpox, the 33rd World Health Assembly declared the world free of this disease on May 8, 1980. Many people consider smallpox eradication to be the biggest achievement in international public health.  --- From :CDC (Centers For Disease Control).

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Nuns In Victorian Times...

"The Nuns Of Perpetual Adoration"

Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,

These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray:
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day.

These heed not time; their nights and days they make
Into a long, returning rosary,
Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ's sake;
Meekness and vigilance and chastity.

A vowed patrol, in silent companies,
Life-long they keep before the living Christ.
In the dim church, their prayers and penances
Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.

Outside, the world is wild and passionate;
Man's weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate:
They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.

They saw the glory of the world displayed;
They saw the bitter of it, and the sweet;
They knew the roses of the world should fade,
And be trod under by the hurrying feet.

Therefore they rather put away desire,
And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary
And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire:
Because their comeliness was vanity.

And there they rest; they have serene insight
Of the illuminating dawn to be:
Mary's sweet Star dispels for them the night,
The proper darkness of humanity.

Calm, sad, secure; with faces worn and mild:
Surely their choice of vigil is the best?
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But there, beside the altar, there, is rest.

--- By Ernest Dowson.

...And, this, --- The Great Convent Scandal That Transfixed Victorian England...

One hundred and fifty years ago a legal case involving three nuns was front-page news in Britain and Ireland. The plaintiff was Susanna Mary Saurin, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, and she was suing her former superiors, Mary Starr and Mary Kennedy, for false imprisonment, libel, assault and conspiracy to force her out of the order. Or as the barrister representing Saurin put it, “wretched little bits of spite and hatred … heightened by all those small acts of torture with which women are so profoundly and so peculiarly acquainted”.

Saurin, also known as Sister Mary Scholastica, was not an obvious person to embarrass the Church; she was from an Irish Catholic family and two of her sisters were Carmelite nuns. One brother was a Jesuit and her uncle was a parish priest. Nor had Saurin been pressurised to become a nun. Her parents felt that two daughters in the convent was quite sufficient and consented with reluctance.

She was sent to a new convent in Yorkshire where Starr was the superior, with Kennedy as her deputy. Problems began after Starr asked Saurin what conversation she had had with the priest when she was in Confession, Saurin not unnaturally refused to say, and thereafter matters went from bad to worse.

Saurin claimed in the trial to have been subjected to numerous petty but vindictive actions by Starr and Kennedy. She claimed she was accused of disobedience for writing to her uncle, the priest, and she was not provided with letters sent by her family – either that or she was only allowed to have them for a short period before they were torn up.

She also said she was given humiliating physical work not allocated to others in the convent.

The situation had worsened when Starr contacted Robert Cornthwaite, the Bishop of Beverley (a Catholic diocese that existed between 1850 and 1878). Starr complained about Saurin and insisted that either Saurin should go or she would resign. Under the convent’s rules, the bishop had a duty to ensure the proper running of the convent and to resolve disputes.

Sadly he proved quite unfitted to the task. As letters in the trial were to prove, the bishop decided that he must support the convent Superior and assured Starr: “I will take care to have her [Saurin] removed.”

The bishop had then appointed a commission of inquiry into Saurin, later described in the trial as “a parody of justice”. A number of statements were made before the commission accusing Saurin of various failings, but the witnesses themselves were not produced. Saurin and her uncle, who represented her at the inquiry, were not shown the statements and she was not allowed to express any complaints about Starr or any other Sister. After the hearing, Bishop Cornthwaite ruled that Saurin should be discharged from her vows.

Following this decision Starr told Saurin to leave the convent. She refused, and from then on a campaign of petty cruelty was launched. Her religious habit was removed when she was asleep and a secular dress left in its place, which she initially refused to wear until forced to by the cold. She was not allowed a fire and was forbidden to go into the convent library or to have any books. A nun slept outside her room and she was accompanied wherever she went.

The ring she wore as a Bride of Christ was removed; the judge described this as “an act of unnecessary cruelty and harshness”.

After several months of this treatment Saurin became ill. Her family took her home, where she was regarded as an ex-nun thrown out of her order for unknown failings. In 1869, she sued Starr and Kennedy in part to clear her name.

In the trial, the defence denied that Saurin had been specifically picked on, and in any event argued that under the rules of the order Saurin had vowed obedience to her Superiors. The judge, however, ruled that this vow of obedience did not protect Starr if she was abusing her authority to target Saurin.

The jury found for Saurin on the counts of libel and conspiracy and awarded her £500 (£50,000 in today’s money).

The case itself was widely reported. Books were published about the “great convent scandal” and there was a scathing editorial in the Times. What happened to Saurin herself I have been unable to find out, but it unlikely she ever entered another convent.

The Bishop of Beverley was severely criticised by the trial judge for not carrying out his duty to investigate properly these “miserable squabbles of a convent” suitably and fairly. His failure is a warning and a lesson for today just as much as it was in 1869.

Neil Addison is a barrister

Making Breakfast The Victorian Way. & (OH, ---YUUUUUMMMMMM!!!) Bangers And Mashed..

Mashed potatoes are my favorite food. Here's how I make mine... I boil red potatoes till they're done and mash them by hand with a hand masher, leaving some lumps, which is how you can tell they're home-made. I add 2% milk and real butter. I sometimes add a little sour cream. I add season salt and black pepper. I usually serve them with beef or chicken gravy, and sometimes with a "lake" of melted butter in the middle of them when they're put in the serving bowl. For company, I sprinkle the top of the bowl of mashed potatoes with dried parsley flakes and bacon crumbles. 

Bangers are the quintessential British breakfast sausage, forever immortalized by being half of the classic 'Bangers & Mash" and they have become famous internationally as 'bangers'. Bangers are not just one kind of sausage, the term bangers can refer to any British sausage and you will a variety of British sausages in the English breakfast depending on what part of the country you are in.

Why Are They Called Bangers ?

British sausages being called bangers seems to be a historical legacy, a colloquial term left over from war time when sausages sometimes exploded in the pan when you cooked them. We started calling sausages bangers sometime during the first World War, it was a slang name for a sausage at the time.

British sausages are sometimes called bangers because back then, sausages had a habit of bursting open while cooking. This was partly due to the shrinkage of the tight skin (this is still quite a common occurrence depending on the sausage if you do not prick them before cooking) and partly because of the cheap sausage fillers that they were using at the time.

During both world wars there was less meat available, they filled their sausages more fat and cheap fillers that expanded rapidly under heat, causing the sausages to burst open violently in the pan. This is the reason why people called them bangers, it was a slang term that they used to refer to sausages, because bang is exactly what they would when you cooked them.

The History Of Bangers

Historically the term 'bangers' was in use as far back as 1919, but British sausages started to be more widely called bangers during World War Two, another time in British history when meat rations were scarce and sausages had to be made with cheaper fillers added to the sausage mix, making them more likely to explode when cooked, unless of course you pricked their skin beforehand. Even now, if you use enough fat in your sausage filler, your sausages may very well go bang when you cook them.

Strangely, nobody in Britain really calls them bangers unless they are being served with mash as part of the very popular bangers & mash dish and these days the term bangers appears to be confined to that dish, you simply would not ask for three bangers on your breakfast or a banger sandwich and British people do not really call them bangers. Nonetheless, the term bangers remains incredibly popular as a way to refer to a British sausage by foreigners.

If you want to learn how to make your own bangers, head on over to our recipes section and check out our bangers sausage recipe and try and make your own homemade version of British bangers.

If you are interested in history, heritage and recipes of the traditional English breakfast, check out our official English Breakfast Handbook, lovingly produced by the English Breakfast Society.

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The Victorian Breakfast...

Above, I think I recognize ham, maybe what might be prunes, tomato slices, two fried eggs, mushrooms, toast, beans and bangers.

Above, how to make what sounds delicious to me, ---cooked rice with minced cooked fish, fried in butter with scrambled eggs, salt, pepper and a little cream, garnished with boiled eggs and prawns (cooked shrimp).

The Radium Girls...

Radium, discovered in the late 19th century, killed radium pioneer Marie Curie. Then, years later, girls who worked in factories where they painted the dials of watches with a mixture of powdered radium and gum Arabic, also got sick and died. The radium poisoning even consisted of having your jaw fall away!

But, once radium was thought to be a harmless and beneficial health and beauty treatment.

Some radium girls loved the pale yellow-green glimmer of it so much they would paint their fingernails, teeth, lips and eyelids with the same stuff they used to paint the watch dials. They would go out at night glowing, with skin and even gowns illuminated with radium. 

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********************YIKES!!!...

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Luminescent paint

Radium watch hands under ultraviolet light

Radium was formerly used in self-luminous paints for watches, nuclear panels, aircraft switches, clocks, and instrument dials. A typical self-luminous watch that uses radium paint contains around 1 microgram of radium. In the mid-1920s, a lawsuit was filed against the United States Radium Corporation by five dying "Radium Girls" – dial painters who had painted radium-based luminous paint on the dials of watches and clocks. The dial painters were instructed to lick their brushes to give them a fine point, thereby ingesting radium. Their exposure to radium caused serious health effects which included sores, anemia, and bone cancer.

During the litigation, it was determined that the company's scientists and management had taken considerable precautions to protect themselves from the effects of radiation, but it did not seem to protect their employees. Additionally, for several years the companies had attempted to cover up the effects and avoid liability by insisting that the Radium Girls were instead suffering from syphilis. This complete disregard for employee welfare had a significant impact on the formulation of occupational disease labor law.

As a result of the lawsuit, the adverse effects of radioactivity became widely known, and radium-dial painters were instructed in proper safety precautions and provided with protective gear. In particular, dial painters no longer licked paint brushes to shape them (which caused some ingestion of radium salts). Radium was still used in dials as late as the 1960s, but there were no further injuries to dial painters. This highlighted that the harm to the Radium Girls could easily have been avoided.

From the 1960s the use of radium paint was discontinued. In many cases luminous dials were implemented with non-radioactive fluorescent materials excited by light; such devices glow in the dark after exposure to light, but the glow fades. Where long-lasting self-luminosity in darkness was required, safer radioactive promethium-147 (half-life 2.6 years) or tritium (half-life 12 years) paint was used; both continue to be used as of 2004. These had the added advantage of not degrading the phosphor over time, unlike radium. Tritium emits very low-energy beta radiation (even lower-energy than the beta radiation emitted by promethium^] which cannot penetrate the skin, rather than the penetrating gamma radiation of radium, and is regarded as safer.

Clocks, watches, and instruments dating from the first half of the 20th century, often in military applications, may have been painted with radioactive luminous paint. They are usually no longer luminous; however, this is not due to radioactive decay of the radium (which has a half-life of 1600 years) but to the fluorescence of the zinc sulfide fluorescent medium being worn out by the radiation from the radium. The appearance of an often thick layer of green or yellowish brown paint in devices from this period suggests a radioactive hazard. The radiation dose from an intact device is relatively low and usually not an acute risk; but the paint is dangerous if released and inhaled or ingested.