King Edward VII - days of empire
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2006-06-20 17:57:57 - Graham EllisThings that are so much of my daily life are novel to others, and things that are so much part of their daily life are new and novel to me. After all, everyone's got a different life, different tastes and different experiences. Wouldn't it be fearsome if that wasn't the case ... everyone in the world would turn up at London's Paddington station to catch the 17:15 to Slough and there would be no driver.
But celebrating the difference, I can spread what I hear, and learn, and do to others who are interested. And I seem to be fortunate it being able to find my words to do so, especially on technical matters. Hundreds of people a day visit pages such as the one I wrote explaining the difference between a join and a left join in MySQL, or the longer article on uploading images with PHP and storing them in a MySQL database.
I was chatting with someone the other day and talking about a "Splash page" for the Well House Manor network ... and realised that's a term that needs explanation. And chatting with someone else, I realise just how much of an experience a first airline flight can be, especially if your background's such that you happen to have never been airborne until after you're retired.
King Edward the Seventh was King of England for 10 years from 1901. By all accounts, a "bit of a lad" in his youth he came to the throne much later in life after the incredibly long reign of his mother, Queen Victoria. Those were the days of "Empire", when England ruled the world, controlling many large and distant lands from these shores, often with an incredibly small number of local troops and officials. My picture shows the statue of King Edward VII seated on his horse on the dock front at Liverpool Pier - looking out over the Mersey, where so many of the ships left for the colonies.
Why my interest in King Edward? Because Well House Manor was built in 1906, and part of our centenary restoration is taking some of the elements back to original. We've been looking round the local antique shops - hoping to find a tasteful picture of the King, for example, and we're opening up some of the old fire places.
The Edwardian era was, perhaps, halcyon days. World wars, the depression, and the end of empire were still a way forward over the distant horizon, and contruction standards were solid to put it mildly. We're finding that Well House Manor is a fine building, all be it in need of some works where maintainance has been skimped in the past couple of decades.