Lesser known facts about Sunderland and its people



Is that true? She's been very vague about her personal life apart from that her real father was Irish and she was conceived in Lincolnshire while her mother's husband was away in the army during WWII.
Most references say she was actually born in Sunderland but I'm sure I heard her say that her adoptive parents had to travel south to go through the adoption.
Hang on I’ll give her a call
 
Class story that is. I didn't know about that. I know it said the street he lived at was knocked down but there should be a blue plaque near where he lived to commemorate this.
 
Great lady.

Read this, it’s a great book
 
Here’s a curious link that I read about last year: near the end of the Boxer Rebellion of 1860, British troops under Lord Elgin burnt down the Chinese Summer Palace - a complex of buildings and palaces about five times the size of the Forbidden City, whose loss is still a huge issue in China.
BBC article

This was in direct retaliation for the Chinese torture and murder of a 20-strong negotiation party - containing the renowned Times foreign correspondent Thomas William Bowlby…who grew up in Sunderland and was educated at the Grange School.
Wikipedia biography

Think the boxer rebellion was about 1900. If I remember my Flashman books, this was the Franco - British expedition during the Opium wars. Didn’t know Bowlby was a Mackem though.
 
During the war the 18 US shipyards built 2,700 merchant Liberty Ships to help keep the U.K. supplied. That’s an average of three ships every two days. The ships were based on a design by J.L. Thompson and Sons shipbuilders on the Wear.

The Venerable Bede helped popularise the concept of dating things forward from the birth of Christ (A.D.) and introduced the concept of dating things backwards before the birth of Christ (B.C.).

Charles W. Alcock helped instigate, and played in the first international football matches, instigated the first international cricket matches, and devised the F.A. Cup along with some other stuff.
 

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