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My paternal great-grandfather was a bastard. You don’t need to excuse my language, because it is a technical fact. My father is called Walter and his grandfather was also named Walter. But he was born out of wedlock in 1856, to Alice Crooks in Horsley Woodhouse, Derbyshire. Alice was about 19 years old when she gave birth. The registry of Walter’s baptism - well over a year later, on February 7th 1858 - simply names Alice as his mother. There is no father’s name. Alice was a

With the advent of Brexit, the freedom of movement within Europe came to an end: une fin; ein Ende; una fina etc. I’m not sure that I wrote a blog about applying for our French visas last year. We needed a visa because, as non-EU citizens, we can only spend 90 out of a rolling 180 days in the Schengen zone (named after the small wine-making town in Luxembourg where the initial agreement was signed). There are a few countries in Europe not in Schengen – e.g., Eire, Cyprus, Mo

Many crusaders travelled by ship without a compass I was very lost. I was on the top of a hill somewhere in Dartmoor and the fog had come down. I had an OS map and a compass, and all I had been doing for an hour or so was walking in a straight line up the moor. So why could I not just turn around and follow my reciprocal path? Well, the other piece of information you need is that I was carrying a load of plastic bags and a very large and heavy piece of metal – an augur. It wa

As we have seen in my previous two blogs, you simply can’t fully enjoy sailing around the Eastern Mediterranean without an understanding of the effects of several hundreds of years of Ottoman influence and rule. As Missy Bear will be there from Season 2, we will try and discover who they were. From the 9th century, nomadic, pony-riding ‘Turkmen’ from the Eurasian steppes started drifting westwards in waves. These Turks formed the Seljuk empire. They came into conflict with th

Hizir Reis did not have a red beard, unlike his elder brother, Oruc Barbarossa (real name Hizir Reis) was born in the 1470s on the Aegean Island of Lesbos*, then already under Ottoman rule, to an Ottoman father and orthodox Greek mother. Hizir and his elder brother, Oruc, were pirates. Oruc had a red beard. Their main target became the property of the newly formed Spanish state, which was busy expelling Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula during the ‘ Reconquista ’ of Ferdinan