His astronomer, John Flamsteed, also complained that the ravens got in the way of his studies of the night sky from his observatory in the White Tower. But the king was subsequently warned, possibly by a witch, that the Kingdom and the Tower itself would fall if the ravens left (According to folklore, the spirit of King Arthur lives on in the ravens, so harming one would bring bad luck). So to be on the safe side, Charles opted to move the Observatory to Greenwich and keep the ravens at Tower, and the legend warning of the destruction of the empire endures to this day.

During World War 2, most of the ravens were killed in bombing raids or died of shock as a result. The legend of their importance to the realm was so powerful, and the opportunity for a much-needed morale boost so great, that when the tower reopened to the public on January 1st 1946, at the heart of the ruined City of London, somehow ravens had been obtained and were back in place.

There are currently seven ravens at the Tower — the required six, plus one spare. Their names are Jubilee, Harris, Gripp, Rocky, Erin, Poppy and Merlina. This count doesn't include a breeding pair (Huginn and Muninn) who last year produced four new chicks, appropriately hatching on St George's day. It was the first time in 30 years that raven chicks had been born at the Tower. One of the chicks was chosen to remain, and has been named George as a result.

The Ravenmaster Yeoman Warder (currently Chris Skaife), occasionally trims some of the ravens' primary and secondary flight feathers to encourage them to stay at the Tower. All the Tower ravens are able to fly but, with careful feather management, plenty of food and a comfortable new enclosure, they are happy to call the Tower their home. The ravens are fed twice a day on a special diet of mice, chicks, rats and assorted raw meats. As a special treat, they are given biscuits soaked in blood.

However, some ravens have gone AWOL in the past and others have even been sacked. Raven Muninn flew off to Greenwich and was eventually returned a week later by a vigilant member of the public. Raven George (a different one) fell out of favour for eating television aerials and was banished to live in Wales, and Raven Grog was last seen outside an East End pub.

Ravens are intelligent birds and each of those residing at the Tower has its own character. They can mimic sounds, play games and solve problems. Corvids, the group of birds that includes ravens, jays and crows, have unusually large brains compared with many other birds. Birds need to be light for flight, but a raven’s brain accounts for almost 2% of its body mass, a value similar to humans. Corvids often live in intimate social groups of related and unrelated individuals. They spend a lot of time under their parents’ wings, and researchers believe that this ongoing tutelage by patient parents may explain how corvids have developed such intelligence. They are capable of using tools, recognising human faces, and even understanding physics, and some researchers believe corvids may even rival apes for intelligence.

Ravens can also live to a very ripe age. The oldest raven to live at the Tower was called Jim Crow, and died in 1928 at the age of 44.

But now there's a new threat to the ravens, and if you believe the legend, a threat to the Tower and the realm......
The long months of lockdown have changed the behaviour of the existing ravens, with some becoming more wary of people, not having seen many other than the Yeoman Warders for an unusually long time. Ravenmaster Chris Skaife even goes so far as to say the birds are 'bored and lonely'....."The Tower is only the Tower when the people are here", says Skaife, who had to give the birds teddies, footballs and squeaky dog toys to keep them entertained during the lockdown.

Two of the ravens - Merlina and Jubilee — have already begun venturing beyond the castle precincts to forage for food. The two birds, now earning the nicknames 'Bonnie and Clyde' have wandered as far as the visitors’ exit and have also been tapping on the windows of the wardens’ homes to beg for food, so accustomed are they to polishing off scraps from tourists' lunches.

Mr Skaife said: “Never in a raven’s history have we seen fewer people in the Tower of London'. Not least for this reason have the guardians of London's most famous landmark been appealing to visitors to return to the Tower.

The practice emerged as early as 1822 with Britain's exit from the post-1815 Concert of Europe and continued until the final reversal of the policy, with the 1904 Entente Cordiale with France.

A Canadian politician, George Eulas Foster, came up with the term, when approving of Britain's minimal involvement in Europe's business by saying, "In these somewhat troublesome days when the great Mother Empire stands splendidly isolated in Europe."

The policy was summarised by historian Harold Temperley thus:
'Non-intervention; no European police system; every nation for itself, and God for us all; balance of power; respect for facts, not for abstract theories; respect for treaty rights, but caution in extending them ... England not Europe... Europe's domain extends to the shores of the Atlantic, England's begins there.'

Remind you of anything? What's that you say..?....Brexit??!

Oh for those heady, carefree days of 2019! If only leaving the EU was all we had to worry about. Now simply leaving the house seems an action fraught with danger.

The recent decision to distance Britain from Europe (the 2016 Brexit referendum) was based, for some people, on concerns that our infrastructure, the National Health Service in particular, couldn’t cope under the pressure of uncontrolled immigration.

But existing research tells us that international migration is good for the NHS. This is for several reasons. First, migrants are an essential part of the health care workforce. They are the doctors, nurses, porters, and cleaners. The proportion of migrants working in the NHS varies across staff groups and different regions. In June 2019, 13.3% of NHS staff in hospitals and community services in England reported a non-British nationality. Among doctors, the proportion is 28.4%. And many doctors have trained abroad.

Second, migrants are not just health care workers, they are also taxpayers. This means that migrants contribute to the costs of public services, including the NHS, like everyone else.

And third, although research on how and when migrants use NHS services is limited, data suggests migrants tend to use fewer services than UK-born residents.
Source: Health.org.uk

Our own Prime Minister was brought back to health by two immigrant nurses: Jenny from New Zealand and Luis from Portugal. During his Easter address after being discharged from ICU at St Thomas' Hospital in London, he thanked and name-checked both of them.

Our current isolation hasn't come about as a result of a popular vote, but because of something tiny, powerful, and completely unbound by international borders.

Of course, we're never completely alone if we have modern technology.

I have had many Zoom meetings with people I'm not usually in regular touch with. Family on the other side of the world, long lost friends in the same country. Isolation makes us look inwards, and then forces us to look outwards. We wonder how everyone else is coping and we question our own ability to cope. Is my alcohol consumption becoming a beast that will devour me? Is my teenage daughter becoming a beast that will devour me?

We feel an intense need to show we care. We sew scrubs to protect nurses and doctors, we applaud the same people from our doorsteps every week to show solidarity. We watch as a centenarian soldier, with slow determination, raises almost as much money for the NHS as was promised on the side of a bus. These are the things we need in order to still feel part of the human race.

I am of an age where several close friends are celebrating milestone birthdays this year. We need the physical presence of people in order to celebrate properly, but people come up with ingenious ways to make the birthday girl/boy feel special. A friend in California arranged for a number of friends to sing a 'drive-by' Happy Birthday to her husband, while a group of students in a Manchester house-share transformed each of its 8 rooms into individually-themed pubs so that one of their number could celebrate her 21st with a good old-fashioned pub crawl.

Funerals are at the other end of the scale of human emotion, and in these challenging times must be exponentially more difficult, both to organise and to endure. While they too are a celebration in a way (of a life cherished and the memories it created), saying goodbye without the physical comfort of a hug from a friend or family member must be agonising. I have friends who are going through this too. We don't have sufficient words to comfort them. All we can do is watch helplessly and wait for it to be over.

What all this social distancing and isolation definitely teaches us, is that we need each other....the various communities we live, work, trade, enjoy life and endure hardship with, are part of us.

We at Potted History Tours look forward to welcoming our visitors out of isolation and back to these shores, however long that may take. In the words of Vera Lynn, "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when....but I know we'll meet again some sunny day".

Until then, stay splendid.....and stay connected.

There are startling connections between that pandemic and our current one, not least the following:
- US President Donald Trump's own grandfather died in the 1918 influenza pandemic
- David Lloyd George, the then British Prime Minister, narrowly escaped death. He was 55 at the time, and the same age as Boris Johnson is now. The PM remains in intensive care, fighting a new virus a century later.

In 1918, as the first world war was drawing to a close, a new and indiscriminate enemy swept across the world, felling soldiers and civilians alike.

The 'Spanish influenza' was so named because the first cases were reported there. This wasn't because Spain was the undisputed origin of the infection. During World War 1, newspapers were censored in countries involved in the fighting (Germany, the USA, Britain and France all had media blackouts on news that might lower morale). Spain was neutral during the Great War, and its news correspondents were free to report on the outbreak. One of the first to fall ill was the Spanish King, Alfonso XIII. *

Another early sufferer was the British prime minister, David Lloyd George.

On 11 September 1918, Lloyd George arrived in Manchester to be presented with the keys to the city, amidst euphoria at news of recent Allied victories that pointed towards an imminent end to the war. Female munitions workers and soldiers home on furlough (that word again) turned out to cheer him, but later that evening, he developed a sore throat and fever and collapsed.

The Prime Minister spent the next 10 days confined to a sickbed in Manchester town hall, too ill to move and with a respirator to aid his breathing. Newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian, played down the severity of his condition for fear that the Germans may use it as propaganda. But, according to his valet, it had been “touch and go”.

Lloyd George, then aged 55, and the same age as the current PM Boris Johnson survived, but others were not so lucky. In an era before antibiotics and vaccines, the disease claimed the lives of between 200 and 250 thousand Britons. Cruelly for a nation that had seen its young male population decimated by German guns, the majority were adults aged 20 to 40. The mortality was the inverse of most flu seasons, when deaths fall most heavily on the elderly and the under-fives.

Frederick Trump, the current US President's grandfather succumbed to the disease on 30th May 1918. His battle was brief, ending by most accounts within 48 hours of falling ill. His death came early in the 'curve,' at a time before anyone realised that they were in the midst of a pandemic. New York was already a densely populated city, a centre of shipping and a hub for soldiers departing for and returning from the fighting in Europe. This made the city an ideal environment for the spread of the flu, but many doctors dismissed the early cases, often thinking that they were routine ailments. It was an era when deadly disease was a more common part of life. Frederick Trump’s death was typical of that pandemic, which hit people of all ages as well as people like him, seemingly in their prime, healthy middle years. **

Among other notable historical figures who caught the disease but recovered were the US president Woodrow Wilson and the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Groucho Marx caught the flu in New York and Mahatma Gandhi in Ahmedabad. The future Mustafa Kemal Atatürk went down with it in Vienna. Haile Selassie fell ill in Addis Ababa. TS Eliot got the flu in London – he wrote The Waste Land as he recovered. Other victims who recovered included Franklin Roosevelt, Lillian Gish, Franz Kafka, DH Lawrence, Béla Bartók, Walt Disney, Ezra Pound and the aviator Amelia Earhart. In Colorado, Katherine Anne Porter’s black hair fell out as a result of flu. When it grew back her hair was white, and she went on to write a memoir, 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' about the pandemic.

As for those who died of the disease, they included the painter Egon Schiele and his wife, the Parisian poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and Yakov Sverdlov, one of Lenin’s right-hand men.

Lawrence of Arabia’s father also succumbed, as did Arthur Conan Doyle’s son. A famous British casualty was the diplomat Mark Sykes. In 2008, Sykes’s coffin, lead-lined because of the virulence of the disease, was disinterred from his grave in Yorkshire. The purpose was to enable researchers to take samples from his remains of the H1N1 virus strain that caused the Spanish flu.

Such samples, now under high-security lock and key in Atlanta, have been examined for clues as to why this strain was so potent and how a future pandemic might be contained.

* The naming has caused offence in Spain from that day to this – and has belatedly led to greater care in the naming of subsequent strains and outbreaks that cross borders. For this was a disease that ignored human frontiers. It killed from Alaska to Zanzibar. Unfortunately, such care was not exercised by the US President referring to the current Coronavirus as the 'Chinese Virus'. China experts argue that labelling the virus this way will only increase tensions between the two countries and encourage xenophobia. Asian-Americans have reported incidents of racial slurs and physical abuse over the perception that China caused COVID-19.

** It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with the 1918 influenza virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be between 50 and 100 million worldwide.

He composed it last week when UK schools were closed indefinitely in and attempt to slow the spread of the Coronavirus. His words make a lot of sense, and it seems some of us need a good telling off and a few minutes standing in the corner to think about what we've done.
I have asked for permission to share this :

We have been very fortunate over the last 75 years to live through a period where daily life for most of us has been reasonably predictable, consistent and reassuringly comfortable. We are now living through times which challenge that status quo. If the chatter on some social media platforms is anything to go by, some people are very frightened.

When faced with difficult times, there are two sources of reassurance I turn to; the first is history.

We hear a lot about the “blitz spirit” and the heroic wartime generation. We hear less about the panic, profiteering and hoarding that took place on the outbreak of war in 1939. Throughout the war, measures such as rationing had to be put into place to regulate behaviour and ensure people had their fair share.

Amidst the heroism and sacrifice, there was a good deal of moaning, whinging and outright anger. However, despite supply ships being sunk and bombs falling, people had enough to eat and they worked together over six years to help our allies bring victory. I think this puts a temporary shortage (caused by the panic of a few) of toilet rolls and penne quills into perspective. Nobody is sinking ships full of toilet paper and other essential supplies. We have a supply infrastructure vastly more sophisticated than 75 years ago. We will be okay.

My second source of inspiration is, of course, Bear Grylls. He says that when faced with difficult times it is easy to become overwhelmed. It is difficult to do the right thing when dwelling on fear and uncertainty and seeing issues as insurmountable. Bear says that any big problem should be seen as a set of challenges. Problems will arise and we need to focus on making decisions and solving them, one at a time. Bear generally solves them by scaling a ravine or squeezing drinking water from animal dung.

We need to learn from Bear. During this situation we will just be facing a series of challenges. Let us just solve the problems that arise day to day, one at a time, and know that getting through this period of uncertainty and back to normality is only a matter of time. And nobody will have to drink dung-water.

At the very least, if you have printed this letter out it will make an excellent substitute for toilet paper after you have read it.

Oh, and keep washing your hands.

In fact, the rocks under your feet as you walk around the Ashdown Forest on your Potted History tour are the very reason the landscape around you looks the way it does, and they have their own story to tell.

The sandstones, shales and mudstones hearabouts comprise part of the Ashdown Formation, in turn a part of the Wealden Group of the Early Cretaceous. They range in age from about 140 to 130 million years old, and are broadly similar to related rocks which outcrop along the coastlines near Hastings and the Isle Of Wight. The rocks commonly exhibit structures such as cross bedding, and pebble bands, and often form cyclothems, or repeated sequences of coarser then finer grained sediments. These features, along with their mineral content, indicate that the deposits were laid down in river deltas and shallow lakes, and that the Weald was once located just south of a high landmass around the modern River Thames, and to the north of an open sea somewhere around Central France. The level of this sea fluctuated regularly, possibly as a result of minor climate changes, thereby causing the cyclic deposition.

While on the subject of climate, the area would have been warmer and generally wetter that it is today, and although fossils are scarce, remains of ferns and tree ferns have been found in East Sussex. Oh yes, and Iguanodon footprints and bones. Fancy meeting a dinosaur in the forest!

As the panoramic views indicate, the sandstone has found its way well above sea level since the Early Cretaceous. This is due to the Alpine Orogeny (before you get any funny ideas, an orogeny is merely the geologist's term for a period of mountain formation), which got underway about 65 million years ago, and is still going, to a lesser extent. Imagine a large layered cake - sponge - jam - sponge - jam, and imagine slowly but surely pushing together on opposite edges. The layers ruck up, or fold. This is exactly what has happened to the rock strata in this area, albeit as a fairly modest side-show to the larger mountain building event that created the Alps, powered by the African tectonic plate converging on it's Eurasian counterpart. The folding here has formed an extensive gently domed rock structure ranging from the Weald to Artois, known as the Wealden Anticline.

Over millions of years the inner parts of this dome have eroded, exposing ever older rocks, with younger formations like the chalk framing the picture. And aside from dictating that the Ashdown soil is acidic, the sandstones here shape many of the older buildings. They also contributed economically to the long defunct smelting industry, once a major factor in forest clearing to form the heathland, as there are local pockets of low grade iron ore to be found through the region.

So, despite not being quite so visible in outcrop as their contemporaries in Tunbridge Wells, the Ashdown sandstones have quietly formed a very special landscape, which is easily recognised and loved by fans of A A Milne's characters.