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Charles Brandon was a magnate, courtier, and soldier, and a member of King Henry VIII's privy council.
He was the only surviving son of Sir William Brandon (d. 1485) and his wife, Elizabeth Bruyn (d. 1494) of South Ockendon.
By about 1503 Charles Brandon waited on King Henry VII at table and became well-known for his skill at jousting. He became close to the young Prince Henry (who succeeded Henry VII as King of England), and although he was some seven years older than Henry VIII, and eventually predeceased him, he remained his lifelong intimate.
At Brandon's uncle's death in January 1510 he became marshal of the king's bench and in November 1511 he added the parallel post of marshal of the king's household. In October 1512 he became master of the horse. He was knighted on 30 March 1512, elected a knight of the Garter on 23 April 1513, created Viscount Lisle on 15 May 1513. Then, on 1 February 1514 he was named Duke of Suffolk.
As Cardinal Wolsey fell from power in 1529, Suffolk was appointed president of the king's council. But as the new regime settled down from 1530, his attendance in council and parliament was erratic, his influence limited, and his position uncomfortable. He did, however, serve on the increasingly well-defined privy council. In the household reforms of 1539 he was appointed to the great mastership of the household, an upgraded version of the lord stewardship. He led both the party which met Anne of Cleves on her arrival in 1539 and the team which negotiated with her the terms of her divorce from the king in 1540.

He had a varied military career, including leading a successful assault in the siege of Tournai (1513). He was also instrumental in suppressing the Lincolnshire Revolt and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. The king commanded him to move his home to Lincolnshire, and Suffolk eventually became the greatest landowner in Lincolnshire, with a dense belt of estates spread across the centre of the county.
In the 1540s he took a major part in Henry's last wars against France and Scotland, while between campaigns he sat more regularly in the privy council, as a senior statesman and military expert. In October and November 1542 he guarded the northern English border while Norfolk and others invaded Scotland. From January 1543 to March 1544 he was the king's lieutenant in the north. Based mostly at Darlington, from there he supervised regional government and border warfare and planned for a major invasion which he never had the chance to command. Nevertheless, his work laid the basis for the capture of Edinburgh by Edward Seymour, in May 1544. By then Suffolk had been called away to France, where he led the siege of Boulogne with conspicuous bravery and skill, from July to November 1544 commanding the king's ward in the huge army which eventually captured the town.
Charles Brandon was married four times. Firstly to Dame Margaret Mortimer in 1507 and her niece Anne Brown in 1508 who died in 1510. He then married in secret (later in public) Henry VIII’s sister Mary (1496–1533) who had been recently widowed by the death of Louis XII of France. Mary died on 25 June 1533 and Suffolk married again in September 1533: his fourth wife was the fourteen-year-old Katherine Willoughby, originally intended as his son's bride. His son Henry, earl of Lincoln, died on 8 March 1534.
When Charles Brandon died of unknown causes at Guildford, on 22 August 1545, the king decreed that he should be buried at St George's Chapel, Windsor. Charles Brandon left two sons, Henry Brandon (1535–1551) and Charles Brandon (1537/8–1551), successively second and third dukes of Suffolk.

Adrian Boeyens was born on March 2, 1459, in Utrecht. He was the only Dutch pope there has been, elected in 1522. He was the last non-Italian pope until the election of John Paul II in 1978. He lost his pious father, Florentius Dedel, at an early age, and was kept at school by the fortitude of his widowed mother Geertruid, first at home and then at Zwolle with the Brothers of the Common Life.
He then studied at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain). After a thorough course in philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence he was created Doctor of Divinity in 1491. His two chief works were Quaestiones quodlibeticae (1521), and his Commentarius in Lib. IV Sententiarum Petri Lombardi (1512), which was published without his knowledge from notes of students, and saw many editions. The great Humanist Erasmus was one of his pupils. As dean of the collegiate church of St. Peter in Louvain, and vice-chancellor of the university, he laboured to advance the arts and sciences and live a life of singular piety and severe asceticism.
In 1506 the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I appointed Adrian tutor of his grandson Charles (the future Charles V), who afterwards entrusted him to perform many of the highest offices. Transferred from the academic shades into public life, the humble professor rose to eminence. Within a decade he became Bishop of Tortosa (1516), Grand Inquisitor of Aragon (1517) and Castile (1518), Cardinal of the Roman Church in 1517, and finally Regent of Spain.
He was elected pope on January 9, 1522, succeeding Pope Leo X and was crowned at Rome on August 31. Adrian came to the papacy in the midst of one of its greatest crises, threatened not only by Lutheranism to the north but also by the advance of the Ottoman Turks to the east. He had a difficult job before him – to clean up abuses, reform the corrupt court, calm the princes who demanded war, stem the rising tide of revolt in Germany and to defend Christendom from the Turks. He took up the tasks with great earnestness, starting with reforming the Curia, but could accomplish little in the face of opposition by the Italian cardinals, the German Protestants, and the Turkish armies. Through the reckless extravagances of his predecessor, the papal finances were in a sad state. Adrian's efforts to retrench expenses only gained for him from his needy courtiers the epithet of miser. Vested rights were quoted against his attempts to reform the curia. His nuncio to Germany, Chierigati, received but scant courtesy. His urgent appeals to the princes of Christendom to hasten to the defence of Rhodes from the Turks failed and on 24 October 1522 the city was taken.
His unrelaxing activity and Rome's unhealthy climate combined to shatter his health. He died on September 14, 1523 in Rome. He bequeathed property in the Low Countries for the foundation of a college at the University of Leuven that became known as Pope's College.

Paul Colinvaux was an ecologist, zoologist and professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He was among the last generation of "explorer" scientists, exploring the Alaskan and Siberian Arctic, the Galapagos Islands, and the Amazonian jungle on a mission to discover the history of the climate.
Colinvaux was born on September 22, 1930 in St. Albans, England. He grew up in London during the Battle of Britain, studying, even as a boy, the ecology of plant regrowth in the craters left by German bombs. He attended University College School in London, where his activities included rowing in the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta.
After graduating from UCS, Colinvaux served in the British Army of the Rhine in occupied Germany as a Second Lieutenant, Royal Artillery, 42nd Regiment. After leaving the army, Colinvaux studied at Jesus College, Cambridge completing his BA in 1956 and his MA in 1960.
After graduating, he emigrated to New Brunswick, Canada, where he was employed by a government soil survey and where he met his wife, Llewellya Hillis. Hillis and Colinvaux emigrated to the United States where Colinvaux earned his Ph.D. as a paleoecologist in 1962 from Duke University.
Colinvaux extracted fossilized pollen from the bottom of ancient lakes as a tool to investigate climate conditions at the end of the last glacial maximum. The pollen buried in the mud could then be dated and used to identify pre-historic climate conditions. In a pre-Google Earth era, without benefit of GPS technology, Colinvaux explored in the old ways, quizzing tribal fishermen and local traders, interviewing bush pilots, and poring over aerial maps to identify sectors of jungle to search for tiny, unmapped lakes undisturbed by streams or human activity. His research was instrumental in laying the foundation for modern thinking and research on Amazonian species diversity. In 1966, he discovered a new species of flower in the Galapagos, which was subsequently named for him (Passiflora colinvauxii), as was the Galapagos diatom, Amphora paulii.
After completing post-doctoral studies at Yale University, Colinvaux and Hillis both took up appointments in the Department of Botany & Zoology at Ohio State University in 1964. He became Professor Emeritus in zoology there from 1964 until 1991. In 1971 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His skill as an orator was renowned. During his years at Ohio State University, Colinvaux won every teaching prize that could then be awarded for undergraduate teaching and he was the recipient of the Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar Award in 1985. During the Vietnam-era student uprising and occupation of Ohio State in May 1970, Colinvaux addressed, impromptu, a throng of demonstrating students, using the power of his voice and words to disperse the crowd. In 1991 Colinvaux and Hillis left Ohio State University to take positions with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. They then moved to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where they were affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory.
Colinvaux was the author of several books. His most famous 1979 book 'Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare' uses the second law of thermodynamics to argue that big meat-eating animals are rare because the available energy in each step in the food chain is degraded. In 1973 he authored the first undergraduate textbook in Ecology, which was used, in various editions, to educate generations of students He is also the author of 'The Fates of Nations: A Biological Theory of History' (1980) and a scientific memoir 'Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice Age Equator' (2008).
In 2013, he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Quaternary Association. He died on February 28, 2016 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, leaving two children (Catherine and Roger) and four grandchildren.

Peter Haggett is a British geographer and academic, holding geographical research and teaching posts at universities around the world for sixty years. He is currently Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow in Urban and Regional Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.
Peter Haggett was born in Pawlett, Somerset on 24th January 1933 and he was educated at Dr Morgan's Grammar School in Bridgwater. He read geography at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, graduating with a double-first in 1954. He started teaching at University College London (1955-57) and then at Cambridge University where he was University Demonstrator in Geography (1957-62); University Lecturer in Geography (1962-66); Director of Studies for Magdalene, Pembroke, and Trinity College (1957-66) and a tutor and Fellow at Fitzwilliam College (1963-66). He then took up a teaching position at the University of Bristol in 1966 and has remained based there for the rest of his career.
A gold medallist of both the Royal Geographical Society and the American Geographical Society, he has also been awarded the Anders Retzius medal (Sweden), the Vautrid Lud prize (France) and the Lauréat d’Honneur (International Geographical Union). He holds seven honorary degrees in Law and in Science from universities on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1994 he became an honorary Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and in 1993 he was awarded the CBE for services to geography.
Peter Haggett has researched and written on three main scientific areas. First, on the nature of geography as a discipline and its contribution to human understanding of the earth. Secondly, on quantitative methods in human geography and locational analysis. The third area has been on applying geographical ideas, especially diffusion waves, to understanding the changing geography of infectious diseases. This has been the focus of his sustained research over the last quarter-century.
He has served as a visiting scientist at both the Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, and the World Health Organisation, Geneva. He has written and edited over 20 books, covering all three of his areas of expertise. With three Cambridge colleagues, he has also established two journals reviewing developments in the field: Progress in physical geography and Progress in human geography.
In addition to his geographic interests, Professor Haggett has acted as Vice Chancellor of Bristol University. He also served as Vice President of the British Academy and as a member of the National Radiological Protection Board. For seven years he chaired the Wellcome Trust’s History of Medicine panel. He was one of the two geographers amongst the founding members of the European Academy, and he is currently the only European geographer to hold honorary foreign membership of both the American Academy of Arts and Science and the US National Academy of Sciences.
Now retired, but continuing his research actively, he lives in a small Somerset village with his wife, Brenda. They have four children and six grand-children in Australia and England.

George Gordon Coulton was was a British historian, known for numerous works on medieval history. He was born in King's Lynn on 15th October 1858 and attended Lynn Grammar School and then Felsted School. In 1877 he won a scholarship to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, but a severe case of blood poisoning meant he was awarded an aegrotat degree.
After leaving Cambridge, Coulton was briefly a master at a school in Malvern before being ordained deacon in 1883. By 1885 his beliefs led him to forsake his entry into the priesthood and he instead turned to teaching, holding a number of posts in various public schools.
In 1896 his employment at a coaching establishment in Eastbourne allowed him time to develop his medieval studies, and he became an expert on the primary sources of the period. From 1900 Coulton began to publish works on the medieval period, probably the most important being two anthologies of medieval sources: 'A Medieval Garner' (1910) and 'Social Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation' (1918).
In 1911 Coulton returned to Cambridge to become Birkbeck Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History at Trinity College, and in 1919 he was elected to a lectureship in the English faculty and to a Fellowship at St John's College. He retired from his faculty position in 1934, and devoted himself to research and writing. He published a number of important works during this period, among them 'The Medieval Village' (1925), 'Art and the Reformation' (1928), 'Inquisition and Liberty' (1938), 'Medieval Panorama' (1938), and 'Five Centuries of Religion', published in four volumes between 1923 and 1950, the last appearing posthumously. He spent the majority of the war years (1940-1944) in Canada, as a guest lecturer at the University of Toronto. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1929.
Coulton was something of a controversialist and much of his work was directed at Roman Catholic historians, whom he accused of having a flagrant disregard for historical accuracy. As an historian, Coulton was most noted for his attention to primary sources, particularly those illuminating religious, social and economic topics. For Coulton, historical truth, which he placed in those sources, accurately cited, was the cornerstone of historical study. Something of a modernist, he considered it his duty as an historian to confront those who proffered what he believed to be a less than accurate view of the past.
Coulton, though, is remembered for more than this confrontational reputation. His extensive scholarship, which extended much further than many historical works at the turn of the century, is rightly seen as important. He contributed to a widening of the range of medieval studies by his attention to social and economic issues. He was also a strong advocate for compulsory military service and an active member of the National Service League who wrote and spoke publicly on the subject. Coulton was keen to extend his learning to a much wider audience than just those in academic circles, being a fine public speaker and a clear and lucid writer.
In 1904 Coulton married Rose Dorothy Ilbert, and together they had two daughters. Coulton died on March 4th 1947.

Katherine of Aragon was Queen Consort of England from June 1509 until May 1533 as the first wife of King Henry VIII. She was previously Princess of Wales as the wife of Henry's elder brother, Arthur.
She was born Catalina in Alcalá de Henares, Spain on 16 December 1485. She was the youngest daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon (1452–1516) and Isabella of Castile (1451–1504).
Along with her older sisters, she received an education fitting for one who was intended for marriage with foreign rulers. In addition to her acquisition of the domestic arts, Catalina's skill in Latin, and knowledge of classical and vernacular literature, brought her the admiration of the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives and of Erasmus of Rotterdam.
The notion of a marriage between Catalina and the heir to the English throne Prince Arthur (born 19 September 1486), seems to have originated when the princess was only two. In 1487 ambassadors were sent to England to negotiate the marriage. The negotiations were protracted and complicated by events and alliances in Europe and also by the fact that both Arthur and Catalina were children. The marriage was formalised in a treaty agreed at Medina in 1489, where it was agreed that it should be deferred until the two children came of age. A proxy marriage ceremony took place in 1499 and it was then solemnized in London in 1501. Arthur died, still aged only fifteen, on 2 April 1502.
After Arthur’s death, Katherine was quickly betrothed to Arthur's younger brother Henry (later Henry VIII) and a formal treaty to this effect was concluded in June 1503, but again it was necessary for Henry to be of a suitable age before the marriage could take place so they were not married until 1509. The first years of her marriage saw Katherine's hold on her husband, and her political influence, at their height. She was frequently pregnant but suffered a long series of miscarriages and stillbirths. In 1511 she gave birth to Prince Henry (known as the 'New Year's Prince') but he only lived for a few weeks before dying of unknown causes. In February 1516 she did have a child who lived – the princess Mary - who later became Mary I (Mary Tudor).
Katherine had already been fluent in French and Latin when she arrived in England, and she now became proficient in English. She defended the interests of Queens' College, Cambridge, and interceded with Henry to protect Lady Margaret Beaufort's benefaction to St John's College. She provided exhibitions for poor scholars and supported lectureships at both Oxford and Cambridge. She may have been involved in trying to persuade Erasmus to prolong his stay in England beyond 1514, and was habitually praised by him; he dedicated his Christiani matrimonii institutio (1526) to her.
The first moves in the procedure to annul Katherine's marriage took place in 1527. The specific problem was not merely that Henry and Katherine were related in the first degree of affinity, but that sexual relations with a brother's wife were among those specifically forbidden in the Bible (Leviticus).
On 22 June Henry demanded formal separation. Katherine contended that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated, that her marriage to Henry was therefore valid in the sight of God and man, and, moreover, that Henry knew this. She stuck to this unalterably thereafter. The case went on for many years. Following the announcement in February 1531 that Henry was 'Supreme Head' of the English church 'as far as the law of Christ allowed', Pope Clement offered Henry a compromise to allow a trial to take place. The council saw Katherine in May 1531, but she refused any compromise and spiritedly defended both the papal supremacy and her marriage.
On 11 July 1531 Henry and Katherine saw each other for the last time. The queen and her daughter were also separated. Katherine was ordered to The More in Hertfordshire, and Mary remained at Windsor. Mother and daughter never met again.
In 1532 the death of Archbishop Warham opened the way to a settlement. On 8 May Thomas Cranmer, the new archbishop of Canterbury, summoned Katherine to his court at Dunstable but she refused to appear. On 23 May Cranmer pronounced her marriage null, finding that her marriage to Arthur had been consummated, and that no dispensation could remove an impediment resulting from divine law.
On 23 March 1534 Rome at last pronounced on Katherine's marriage, decisively in her favour, but too late to influence events in England. In May 1534 she was removed to a secure house at Kimbolton, in Huntingdonshire. She died there on 7 January 1536. Katherine was buried at Peterborough Abbey on 29 January 1536. No monument was ever erected.

Born on 12th November 1817 in Ashton under Lyne, Lancashire to William and Sarah Reyner. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and in 1835 he entered St. John’s College Cambridge. He was a 4th Wrangler in 1839 and became a Fellow of the College in 1840. He then held the position of Sadlerian Lecturer in Mathematics from 1847-57. He was Junior Dean of St. John’s from 1848-1851 and then Senior Bursar from 1857-1876.
Whilst he was Senior Bursar he was one of the people who oversaw the development of the Platt estates in Kentish Town into the general estates of the College. From 1862-1885 more than 700 house leases were granted on the estate, plus shops, a school and All Saints Church. The rents from these estates helped sustain the College through the agricultural depression.
He was also one of the team of people who agreed to the appointment of Gilbert Scott in 1862 to design and construct the new college chapel. The death of Henry Hoare in 1866 caused considerable problems for financing the chapel as Hoare had offered to pay for the chapel tower in installments over his lifetime and he died with only £2,000 paid of the £6,000 the tower was due to cost. Hoare’s son told the College that he would only pay for the tower if the College gave him the living of Staplehurst, where his family lived, to enable his brother to become rector there. The College refused, with the result that they themselves paid for the tower, keeping the Staplehurst living, which Reyner himself took up in 1876. The chapel was consecrated in 1869, coming in vastly over budget.
Reyner was criticised as Bursar by his successors as having allowed the College to engage in reckless expenditure and by inflating the College revenues by doing one-off things (such as the sale of timber from Brookfield Wood) that were not sustainable.
Reyner died in Staplehurst on 16th September 1892, having been the rector of Staplehurst parish for 16 years. He was buried in Staplehurst cemetery.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) is a professional body for architects and the advancement of architecture primarily in the United Kingdom. The early work of the RIBA focused on fees, practice standards and ethics for architects. The RIBA is still concerned with these areas, but its activities have widened to include training, architecture prizes, publishing and the promotion of excellence in architecture. It is also lobbies the British government on architectural issues. It does not receive any government funding but relies on its members, sponsors and on charitable trading operations to fund its work.
Originally named the Institute of British Architects in London, it was founded in 1834 by several prominent architects. The Royal Charter for the institute was granted in 1837 by the Privy Council during the reign of King William IV. After the grant of the royal charter the name was altered to Royal Institute of British Architects in London, eventually dropping the reference to London in 1892. The purpose of the Royal Institute was set out in the Royal Charter and stated as being ‘the general advancement of Architecture, and for promoting and facilitating the acquirement of the knowledge of the various arts and sciences connected therewith’.
In 1848, the Royal Gold Medal award was created. The original idea for the medal was that the medal would be a prize given for an architectural competition for the institute’s new headquarters. Though the office of Queen Victoria gave royal approval for the medal, only 11 entries were received for the competition, none of which were deemed good enough for the prize. After consultation with Prince Albert, it was decided to repurpose the medal and award it to distinguished architects for work of high merit, or for some distinguished person whose work has promoted the advancement of architecture.
In 1894, the first RIBA journal was published. It is widely regarded as the UK’s leading magazine on architecture and it is still available today in print and online.
In 1934 RIBA moved to its current purpose-built headquarters at Portland Place in central London.
In the 1960s the RIBA began to develop as a regional organisation and the Eastern Region office in Cambridge was the first to open in 1966.
In 1996, the RIBA instigated the Stirling Prize for outstanding architecture. Recognised as the most prestigious architecture award in Britain, the award has been televised since 2015.
In 2014, the RIBA opened its architectural gallery. The gallery is a public exhibition space featuring the best of British architecture. The gallery has a permanent exhibition created in conjunction with the Victoria & Albert Museum that tells the story of world architecture over 2,500 years.
The RIBA publishes its own books on architecture and buildings and it has its own bookshop. The RIBA is also a big supporter of quality training and offers a varied program of CPD courses for architects. Students studying architecture at degree level must complete courses that follow the RIBA levels 1 & 2 training and are provided at university by RIBA validated trainers.

George Gilbert Scott was a British architect in the Victorian era, famous for his revival of an English Gothic style and for his prodigious output and work ethic. By his death in 1878 he had been involved with over 879 architectural projects.
Scott was born on 13 July 1811 in Gawcott, Buckinghamshire. He was the third son of the Revd Thomas Scott (1780–1835) and Euphemia Lynch (1785–1853).
Scott was educated first at home and then, for a year, at Latimers, near Chesham, Buckinghamshire. Scott's father recognized in his son's love of sketching medieval churches a predilection for architecture and encouraged his son in that direction.
Scott finished an architectural pupillage with James Edmeston in 1831 and then worked for the contractors Grissell and Peto, gaining practical experience. In 1832 Scott entered the office of the architect Henry Roberts (1803–1876), who was then working on the Fishmongers' Hall by London Bridge.
The sudden death of his father at the beginning of 1835 prompted Scott to set up in practice on his own. He invited William Bonython Moffatt (1812–1887) whom he had met in Edmeston's office, to assist him and between them, they secured a considerable number of commissions in the local competitions for workhouses. Scott entered into a formal partnership with Moffatt in 1838, and the firm of Scott and Moffatt built a considerable number of workhouses and asylums. They also won competitions to design Reading gaol and the Infant Orphan Asylum at Wanstead, Essex.
In 1838 Scott married his cousin Caroline Oldrid (1811–1872), with whom he had five sons. Mrs Scott soon became anxious to end her husband's partnership with Moffatt who was irresponsible, extravagant and dangerously involved in railway speculation. The partnership was eventually terminated at the end of 1846.
Scott was heavily influenced by the Gothic revivalist ideals of Cambridge Camden Society in its journal, The Ecclesiologist, and by the architect A. W. N. Pugin. This was demonstrated in his design for the martyrs' memorial at Oxford and in that for the rebuilding of the church of St Giles's, Camberwell, London and of the St Nikolaikirche in Hamburg in 1845.
Other significant churches by Scott include: All Souls', Haley Hill, Halifax, which was built in 1856–9; All Saints', Sherbourne, Warwickshire (1859–64); All Saints', Ryde, Isle of Wight (1866–82); St Mary Abbots, Kensington, London (1868–79); and St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh, begun in 1874 and completed by his son J. O. Scott. Scott also worked in universities and was responsible for the chapels at Exeter College, Oxford (1854–60), King’s College, London (1861-2) and St John's College, Cambridge (1862–9).
Scott was appointed architect for the Foreign Office in November 1858 but Scott's new Gothic design was rejected. He was forced, after a long drawn out negotiations and disagreements to produce an Italian classical design with a picturesque front facing St James's Park. The new design was accepted by parliament in July 1861 and the work was completed in 1874.
Scott was able to use the horizontally composed secular Gothic manner he had originally proposed for the Foreign Office in his winning design of 1865–6 for the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station. Other important secular works carried out during the decade included the Albert Institute in Dundee, Leeds Infirmary, and new buildings for the University of Glasgow and the University of Bombay.
Scott was chosen to design the Albert monument in Hyde Park. By uniting sculpture and architecture and by combining marble, stone, bronze, enamel, and metal, Scott succeeded in realizing the widest ideals of the Gothic revival. Upon completion of the monument in 1872, Scott was knighted by Queen Victoria —styling himself Sir Gilbert Scott.
Much of Scott's practice consisted of the restoration of old churches, both medieval and of later date. Scott's first restoration was of Chesterfield church, which was soon followed by that of St Mary's, Stafford. Scott's first cathedral restoration was Ely, where he was appointed surveyor in 1847. Others soon followed, and eventually Scott was involved with almost every medieval cathedral in England and Wales, whether advising on restoration or designing new furnishings. In 1849 he succeeded Edward Blore as surveyor to Westminster Abbey. He published the results of his enthusiastic researches in 1861 in 'Gleanings from Westminster Abbey' which he edited.
Scott wrote a number of books including 'Plea for the Faithful Restoration of our Ancient Churches', published in 1850 and 'Personal and Professional Recollections' which was one of the first autobiographies of an architect to be published. In 1857 Scott published his 'Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present and Future', which argued that a Gothic Renaissance need could encompass modern improvements such as plate glass and cast iron.
In addition to his books, Scott wrote lengthy reports on the ancient cathedrals and churches he was invited to restore as well as numerous published letters, articles, and lectures. From 1857 until 1873 he gave lectures at the Royal Academy, where he was appointed professor of architecture in 1868. Scott was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1855 and Royal Academician in 1860.
Scott fell dangerously ill in 1870 with heart disease and bronchitis, and he increasingly relied on his second son, John Oldrid to complete his work. He was still capable of fine things in such works as the Hook Memorial Church at Leeds (1876–1880) and St Mary's Homes at Godstone, Surrey (1872). Scott served as president of the RIBA from 1873 until 1876; he had been awarded the institute's royal gold medal in 1859. Sir Gilbert Scott died of heart failure on 27 March 1878 at Courtfield House. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

William Selwyn was born on 19th February 1806. He was a Church of England clergyman, canon of Ely Cathedral, Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, and an amateur astronomer.
Selwyn was the eldest surviving son of William Selwyn and his wife Laetitia Kynaston.
He was educated at Eton College from 1823 and St John's College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1824. In 1826 he won all the Browne medals and he was also Craven scholar. He graduated in 1828 as sixth wrangler, and also senior classic and first chancellor's medallist. His subsequent degrees were MA in 1831, BD in 1850, and DD in 1864.
In March 1829 Selwyn was made a fellow of St John's, and in the same year gained the Norrisian prize. He was ordained deacon by the bishop of Ely in 1829 and priest by the bishop of Rochester in 1831. In 1831 he became the rector of Branstone, Leicestershire. He married Juliana Elizabeth Cooke in 1832.
In 1846 he became vicar of Melbourne, Cambridgeshire, in the chapter of Ely and he remained in that post until 1853. In 1833 he was made a canon residentiary of Ely, an office which he retained until his death. He was also elected to the Lady Margaret’s professorship of divinity at the University of Cambridge in 1855.
He insisted on setting apart out of his own income the yearly sum of £700 for the endowment of the Norrisian professorship and after that for furthering the study of theology in Cambridge.
In 1857 he was appointed Ramsden preacher and in 1859 was chaplain-in-ordinary to the queen. He served on the committee to revise the Authorized Version of the Old Testament. He was honorary joint curator of Lambeth Library from 1872, and president of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1867. Selwyn published letters, speeches, sermons, and works on Old Testament criticism.
One of Selwyn’s major concerns was the position of the cathedral in the church. He questioned the centralizing tendency of the ecclesiastical commission, and its emphasis upon the parish, publishing a pamphlet in 1840 entitled 'An Attempt to investigate the True Principles of Cathedral Reform'. He believed in the capability of the church to reform itself through its councils. In 1852 he was named a member of the cathedrals commission, and the report of 1854 was understood to be largely his work. He was also the moving cause of the rebuilding of his own college chapel at St. John’s, for which purpose funds had been accumulating under the bequest of a late master.
Selwyn was also a keen astronomer and whilst at Ely he established an observatory in an area of the cathedral precincts. In collaboration with John Persehouse Titterton, a local photographer, he prepared a series of photographs of the solar disc over an entire sunspot cycle from 1863 to 1874 using a six-inch achromatic lens. The prints were donated to the Royal Greenwich Observatory and Selwyn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1866. He was also an elected Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In Michaelmas term 1866, when riding along the Trumpington Road, he was thrown from his horse. He never wholly recovered from the effects of the fall and died at Vine Cottage, Cambridge, on 24 April 1875. He was buried at Ely cathedral and has a monument there.

William Allen Whitworth was a mathematician and Church of England clergyman. He was born in Runcorn on 1 February 1840. He was the eldest son in the family of four sons and two daughters of William Whitworth and his wife, Susanna Coyne.
He was educated at Sandicroft School, Northwich from 1851-57 and then at St John's College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1858. In 1862 he graduated BA as sixteenth wrangler, he obtained his MA in 1865, and he was fellow of St. John’s College from 1867 to 1884. He was successively chief mathematics master at Portarlington School and Rossall School and professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Liverpool.
Whilst he was an undergraduate he was principal editor, along with Charles Taylor and others, of the Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin Messenger of Mathematics, which was started at Cambridge in November 1861. Whitworth remained one of the editors until 1880, and was a frequent contributor. Whitworth's best-known mathematical work, Choice and Chance, an Elementary Treatise on Permutations, Combinations and Probability (1867), developed from lectures delivered to women at Queen's College, Liverpool, in 1866. A model of clear and simple exposition, it presented a very ample collection of problems on probability and kindred subjects.
Whitworth was ordained deacon in 1865 and priest in 1866, and won high repute in his clerical career. He was the curate at St Anne's, Birkenhead (1865), and of St Luke's, Liverpool (1866–70), and perpetual curate of Christ Church, Liverpool (1870–75). He was vicar of St John the Evangelist, Hammersmith (1875–86), and from November 1886 until his death, vicar of All Saints, Marylebone. He also held a college living from 1885 in the diocese of Bangor, and was in the 1891–2 commissary of the South African diocese of Bloemfontein. Whitworth was select preacher at Cambridge five times and the Hulsean lecturer there in 1903–4. He was made a prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral in 1900. On 10 June 1885 he married Sarah Louisa Elwes. The couple had four sons, all graduates of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Whitworth, though he had been brought up an evangelical, was influenced at Cambridge by the scholarship of J. B. Lightfoot and B. F. Westcott, and he later studied the German rationalizing school of theology. He was considered to be a good and original preacher. His sympathies lay mainly with the high-church party, and in 1875 he joined the English Church Union. His ecclesiastical publications included an almanac of dates of Easter (1882), a description of All Saints Church, Margaret Street (1891); Worship in the Christian Church (1899), and two posthumous volumes of sermons (1906, 1908).
Whitworth died on 12 March 1905 at Home Hospital, Fitzroy Square, London after a serious operation on 28 February. He was buried at on 16 March in ground belonging to St Alban the Martyr, Holborn. There is a slab to his memory in the floor of All Saints Church, Margaret Street.

George Fiddes Watt was a portrait painter and engraver. He was born in Aberdeen on 15 February 1873, the only son and the eldest of the five children of George Watt and his wife, Jean Frost. On leaving school at fourteen, he was apprenticed to a firm of lithographic printers in Aberdeen. During these next seven years he also attended evening classes at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen.
At the age of twenty-one Watt went to Edinburgh to study in the life class of the Royal Scottish Academy. For a time he struggled to make ends meet, but through exhibiting his paintings at the academy from 1897 he soon obtained small commissions, particularly for portraits of local dignitaries such as Provost Smith of Peterhead (1901) and Provost Wallace of Tain (1908). When commissions continued to come in steadily, he began renting a large studio at 178 Cromwell Road and exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.
In 1903 Watt married Jean Willox, art teacher at Peterhead Academy, and youngest daughter of William Willox of Park, a farmer in the Buchan area of Aberdeenshire. They had three sons and a daughter.
He first began to attract attention with a number of portraits of women, including one of his wife which was his first exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1906. A portrait of his mother painted in 1910 was later bought out of the Chantrey bequest for the Tate Gallery in 1930.
Watt's later reputation, however, rests on his portraits of men. He was interested in strong character, expressed with vigour and freedom of handling. His most vital works probably date from before the First World War and he is seen at his best, for example, in the series of senior legal figures at the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh: Lord Salvesen (1911), Lord Kingsburgh (1912), and Lord Dundas (1916).
Watt's work is regarded as being in the Scottish tradition stemming from Henry Raeburn, with its unaffected simplicity and robust directness of handling. He was much in demand in both Scotland and England for official portraits and painted, among others, Herbert Henry Asquith and Lord Loreburn (both 1912) for Balliol College, Oxford; Cosmo Gordon Lang (1914) for All Souls, Oxford; Arthur James Balfour (1919) for Eton College; Lord Ullswater (1922) for the House of Commons; Sir Joseph Thomson (1923) for Trinity College, Cambridge and Robert Forsyth Scott (1913) for St. John’s College, Cambridge.
After 1930 he ceased exhibiting at the Royal Academy and painted less and less as his eyesight had started to fail. He had been elected an associate (1910) and a full member (1924) of the Royal Scottish Academy and his last exhibit there was in 1941.
In 1940, when the bombing of London became severe, Watt retired to Cults, near Aberdeen. In 1955 the University of Aberdeen awarded him the honorary degree of LLD and late in life he was granted a civil-list pension. His wife died in 1956 and her death was a severe blow to him. In his later years, he became a well-known figure in Aberdeen, with his Vandyke beard, wearing a deer stalking cap, and carrying a long shepherd's crook. Fiddes Watt died at his home in Aberdeen, on 22 November 1960. His work is represented in most Scottish collections, including the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, which has four paintings. A bronze statue of Watt by Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones, made in 1942, is in Aberdeen.

The Tithe Commission was established in 1836 under the Tithe Commutation Act. It was set up in order to establish exactly what tithes were due in each area of the country and to whom, and to formalise the commutation of tithes from payment in kind to cash payments.
Tithes were payments made from early times for the support of the parish church and its clergy. Originally these payments were made in kind (crops, wool, milk, young stock, etc.) and usually represented a tenth (tithe) of the yearly production of cultivation or stock rearing. The tithes were often stored in a tithe barn attached to the parish.
The ownership of the tithe was a property right that could be bought and sold, leased or mortgaged, or assigned to others. This resulted in many of the rectorial tithes passing into lay hands - particularly after the dissolution of the monasteries. These tithes then became the personal property of the new owners.
From early times money payments had begun to be substituted for payments in kind. Fixed sums (moduses) were substituted for some categories of production, particularly for livestock and perishable produce; while adjustable payments known as compositions, which were sometimes assessed annually, were increasingly being substituted in local arrangements in latter years.
Tithe commutation was the process by which the payment in kind was substituted for a cash payment. By the time of the Tithe Commutation Act there was considerable discontent over payment of tithes. The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 was designed to ensure that commutation was achieved smoothly and quickly throughout the country. It required tithes in kind to be converted to more convenient monetary payments called tithe rentcharge. There had been an increasing demand for the Commutation of Tithe during the 18th century (some reformers campaigned for the abolition of tithe) and in 1836 the government of the day successfully steered the Tithe Commutation Bill through Parliament. The Act received the Royal Assent on 13 August 1836.
The Act substituted a variable monetary payment (referred to as the "corn rent") for any existing tithe in kind. This payment was originally calculated on the basis of seven-year average prices of wheat, barley, and oats, with each type of grain contributing an equal part to the total. Prices were determined nationally. Some land was free of tithe obligation, due to barrenness, custom, or prior arrangement.
The 1836 Act set up the Tithe Commission which was established to identify all affected properties and to resolve boundary issues arising from their survey. It was headed by three commissioners sitting in London who were William Balmire (chairman), Thomas Wentworth Buller and the Rev. Richard Jones. Valuation of current tithes could be negotiated by the parties; in the absence of an agreement, they were determined by the commission.
The first tasks of the Commissioners were to find out where commutation had already taken place, and also to establish the boundaries of every unit in which tithes were paid separately. This unit was mapped and named as a tithe district to distinguish it from a parish or township. Enquiries were directed to every parish or township listed in the census returns. The results of these enquiries are found in the Tithe Files at The National Archives. Tithe districts are usually parishes, but a minority are townships, and some are chapelries, hamlets, or extra-parochial places, many of which enjoyed separate status solely for tithe commutation purposes. Areas in which tithes had already been commuted were not mapped, so that coverage varied widely from county to county. The maps indicated parcels of land and buildings, assigning each a number. The initial intent was to produce maps of the highest possible quality, but the expense (incurred by the landowners) led to the provision that the accuracy of the maps would be testified by the seal of the commissioners, and only maps of suitable quality would be so sealed. In the end, about one-sixth of the maps had seals.
There were two distinct stages to the commutation process, first, the fixing of a global assessment for the tithe district and second, the apportioning of the tithe rent-charge on the individual properties.
The apportionment was recorded on a map and in a written schedule. These maps and schedules together constitute what is usually termed by historians ‘the parish tithe survey’. The essential purpose of a survey was to provide an accurate measurement of the acreage of each parcel of land, or tithe area, and record its observed state of cultivation. Associated with each map was an apportionment schedule, which listed each map item by number. For each entry the owner, tenant, area, name or description, state of cultivation, rent charge payable, and the tithe owner was listed. A preamble gave the name of the tithe owner, the circumstances under which tithes were owed, and whether the apportionment was agreed by the parties or was being imposed by the Crown. Assistant tithe commissioners travelled to all the non-commuted tithe districts to hold meetings with parishioners about valuations, and to settle the terms of the commutation of their tithes.
The surveying was carried out expeditiously, with the majority of the work performed by 1841, and largely completed by 1851. In some cases, amendments had to be filed when properties were divided or other circumstances intervened. The work was also complicated by numerous inconsistencies in how tithes were assessed. For example, timber might or might not include standing trees, branches, acorns, mast, and even charcoal. Variations as to the circumstances of tithe-paying were also considerable. The terms of the commutation were formalized in a document called a tithe agreement, if all parties concurred, or a tithe award, if the assistant commissioner had to arbitrate in a dispute. The agreement or award formed the basis of the tithe apportionment, which was the legal document setting out landowners’ individual liabilities. Each apportionment was accompanied by a map; both were signed by the Tithe Commissioners. Tithe rentcharge then became payable.
The Tithe Act provided for the making of an original and 2 copies of every confirmed instrument of apportionment; all were sealed and signed by the Commissioners. The originals were retained in the custody of the Commissioners and are now in a complete set in The National Archives. The other two copies were deposited one with the Diocesan Registrar and the other with the incumbent and churchwardens of the parish. Some of these copies remain in the parish churches but many are now deposited in the local record offices. Most record offices also have photocopies of the maps and schedules for their district.
This commutation process reduced problems by effectively folding tithes in with rents. Rent charges in lieu of abolished English tithes paid by landowners were converted by a public outlay of money under the Tithe Act 1936 into annuities paid to the state through the Tithe Redemption Commission. The Commission ceased to exist when such payments were transferred in 1960 to the Board of Inland Revenue, and those remaining were terminated by the Finance Act in 1977.

The Thames Conservancy was founded in 1857 by the passing of the Thames Conservancy Act. It was eventually responsible for the management of the whole of the River Thames from its source in Cricklade, Gloucestershire to the Thames Estuary where the river becomes tidal.
It originally comprised a board of 12 members: the Lord Mayor, two aldermen, four nominees of the common council, the Deputy Master of Trinity House, two nominees of the Lord Admiral, one nominee of the Privy Council and one by the Trinity House Deptford Strand.
The Corporation of London had administered the lower river from Staines to the estuary for 660 years, but in the 1850's, a financial crisis arose. Income fell as railways became established and took over the transport of many goods. The river was becoming heavily polluted from the increase in industry, and the wash from the modern steamboats was eroding the banks of the river. The corporation was failing to raise enough income to properly fund its responsibilities. In 1857 the Corporation of London handed over the management of the river from Staines to the estuary to the newly formed Thames Conservancy.
The Thames Commission was also in financial difficulties due to the competition of transport by rail. It was believed that under single management with the upper river maintained properly and with lower tolls overall the traffic would increase. Under an Act of 6 August 1866, the Thames Conservancy took over management of the river, resulting in responsibility for the whole of the river Thames from its source to the estuary at Yantlet Creek.
The Conservancy had far-reaching powers concerning the navigation of the river. It undertook dredging; built and maintained locks and weirs; was responsible for water supplies taken from the river; and licensed various activities undertaken on the river. The Thames Conservancy was largely responsible for many of the facets of the Thames that are still in place today - full-time lock keepers, river patrols, well-maintained locks, weirs, and cottages, dredged channels, stabilised banks and public moorings.
They were influential in passing the Thames Preservation Act in 1885 which was to enshrine the preservation of river for public recreation. It prohibited shooting on the river which had become a cause of concern. The act noted "It is lawful for all persons for pleasure or profit to travel or to loiter upon any and every part or the river". The river had become exceedingly popular for sport and leisure and events on the river were very well-attended with prominent examples being the Henley Regatta and the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race.
By the end of the 19th century the advance in the size of ships and the growth of the Port of London raised questions of management and a Royal Commission reported in 1900 recommending that a single body take responsibility for the Port. In 1908, the Port of London Act transferred responsibility for the Tideway including Richmond Lock to the Port of London Authority, which began its duties on 31 March 1909.
In the 1960s modernisation of the locks began under the Conservancy with the first hydraulic system introduced at Shiplake Lock in 1961.
On 1 April 1974, the Thames Conservancy was subsumed into the new Thames Water Authority, although much of the organisation remained intact as the authority's Thames Conservancy Division. However when Thames Water was privatised in 1990 the river management functions passed to the new National Rivers Authority and in 1996 to the Environment Agency.

St John's Hospital originated as a small building erected towards the end of the 12th century by Hugh Eldcorn, with the agreement of the town of Cambridge and on land probably donated by Henry Frost, burgess of Cambridge, as a shelter for the poor. It was granted an oratory and burial ground, as well as income from the church of Horningsea, by the Bishop of Ely, and the bishops of Ely were recognised as its patron. The right to appoint the Master of the Hospital was contentious. Various grants of rights and privileges, as well as small grants of land, in the first decade of the 13th century, indicate that it was formally established then. In 1228, Pope Gregory IX took it into papal protection. In 1250, Pope Innocent IV confirmed the rule drawn up for the brethren by the Bishop of Ely. In c 1266 it was damaged by fire and by rioters rebelling against the King. In 1280 the Bishop of Ely obtained letters patent establishing scholars in the Hospital alongside the brethren, with the scholars living according to the statutes of Merton College, Oxford. The arrangement was unsuccessful and the two communities separated in 1284, with the scholars leaving and being given a share of the Hospital's endowments. These included St Peter's Church (now Little St Mary's), which was a significant loss for the brethren, and hostels which formed the basis of Peterhouse College, founded in 1284. The Hospital continued to be supported by the townspeople and to acquire small amounts of land and property throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, ownership of which was transferred to St John's College when the Hospital was dissolved in 1511.

Sir Richard John Pearson Aikens was born on 28 August 1948. He is a retired British judge, who was a Lord Justice of Appeal from 2008 to 2015. He was educated at Norwich School from 1960 – 1967 and then at St. John's College Cambridge from1967 - 70 and 1971 – 2, graduating with an MA in History and Law.
He was called to the Bar by Middle Temple in 1973 and received the Harmsworth Scholarship in 1974. Aikens joined what is now Brick Court Chambers in 1974 and practised in commercial law, specialising in shipping, insurance and re-insurance, banking, international trade and arbitration. He was appointed QC in 1986 and his commercial practice thereafter widened to include telecommunications, oil and gas and professional negligence.
He was a Recorder of the Crown Court from 1993-1999 and, before his appointment to the High Court Queen’s bench in 1999, he was in demand as an arbitrator in shipping and insurance disputes. He was a judge of the Commercial and Admiralty Courts from 1999-2008 and was in charge of the Commercial Court in 2005-6. In November 2008 Aikens became a Lord Justice of Appeal and he was appointed to the Privy Council that same year. In the High Court and Court of Appeal he sat on a very wide range of cases. He conducted cases/arbitrations and advised in foreign jurisdictions, in particular Hong Kong, Singapore, Gibraltar, Bermuda, Australia, the USA, France and Switzerland. In the commercial sphere he gave judgments in all areas, including Republic of Ecuador v Occidental Exploration and Production Company, which was the first case in the English courts concerning Bilateral Investment Treaties and whether awards made under them were justiciable in court. He also gave judgments in many aspects of civil law, EU/competition law and public law (especially extradition). He conducted criminal trials and appeals in a wide variety of cases from murder to official secrets and fraud. He retired as a Lord Justice of Appeal on 2 November 2015. After retirement as a judge, Aikens rejoined Brick Court Chambers as a door tenant.
Aikens is one of the authors of "Bills of Landing", and has written many articles on legal topics, particularly on conflicts of laws. He is a contributing editor to Bullen & Leake & Jacobs “Predecents of Pleading”. He also contributed to “Tom Bingham and the Transformation of the Law: a liber amicorum” and “Reforming Marine and Commercial Insurance Law". He is the joint editor with Kenneth Richardson of “Law and Society: which is to be Master”.
Aikens lectured regularly (in English and French) and chaired conferences throughout his judicial career. Whilst at the bar he was a director and chairman of the Bar Mutual Indemnity Fund (the Bar’s professional negligence insurers), which he helped to found in 1985. In 2012-14 he was President of the British Insurance Law Association. He taught commercial law at King’s College, University of London from 2016 and is a Visiting Professor at both King's College and Queen Mary University of London.
Aikens was a Governor of Sedbergh School from 1988-1997. He was a director of English National Opera from 1995-2004. He is currently chairman of the Temple Music Foundation (since 2002), which promotes music in the Temple. He was also President of the British Insurance Law Association from 2012-14. He is married with 2 sons and 2 step daughters.

A family photography firm, founded in Glasgow by Thomas Annan (1829-1887) in 1855.
Originally from Dairsie in Fife and after an apprenticeship as a lithographic writer, Thomas Annan took up employment in 1849 with Joseph Swan, owner of a lithographic printworks in Glasgow. He then set up business with a trainee chemist called Berwich in 1855 as photographers with a colotype studio at 86 Woodlands Road. Berwick soon left to pursue a medical career and in 1857 he set up business on his own at 116 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow.
Originally specialists in architectural photography, a lot of his business at that time came from photographing country houses and mansions around Glasgow, and also from photographing paintings whilst at the houses. He also created carte-de-visite portraits and produced scenic and stereoscopic views, but he became best known for his artistic portraits and landscapes.
By 1859, Thomas Annan was based at 200 Hope Street and had a printworks in the town of Hamilton, east of Glasgow. During the 1860’s he began to specialise in creating photographic reproductions of paintings, the skill for which he would be most celebrated during his lifetime. His first notable commission in this area was in 1862 for the Glasgow Art Union. The next came in 1865, from David Octavius Hill, when Annan photographed his enormous painting of the founding of the Free Church. Annan produced thousands of prints of the painting using the new permanent carbon process developed by his mentor Joseph Swan, for which he purchased the patent rights for Scotland a year later. On Hill's death in 1870, Thomas inherited many early calotype negatives from the studio, from which he made and exhibited carbon prints.
At this time Thomas Annan lived next door to David Livingstone and took a well known portrait of him. He also took a series of images documenting the new Glasgow Water Work Scheme including a view of Queen Victoria at the Official opening. In 1868, Annan undertook what is now his most famous work. He was commissioned by the Glasgow City Improvement Trust to document the slum dwellings of Glasgow's East End prior to demolition. This is claimed to be one of the first times photography was used as documentary evidence. Annan used the most sensitive technique available, the wet collodion process, to cope with the lack of light in the narrow streets. It was an inconvenient process and photographs required immediate development and fixing, necessitating the use of a portable darkroom. Thus, three years were required to take 35 photographs. Two editions of 'The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow' were published in Annan's lifetime, in 1872 and 1877.
Thomas Annan's brother Robert joined the firm in 1869 to assist with administration, and in 1873, the studio moved to 153 Sauchiehall Street, where it also served as an art gallery. The Gallery side of the firm flourished in the late 1800s when a major new painting would be borrowed from an artist or collector, it then became a great social occasion to view this piece in a dimly lit room then purchase a photogravure print of it. During the 1880s, the firm established an autotype works in Lenzie and also an engraving works in South Lambeth, London. In 1881, the Annan firm employed eight men, seventeen women and four boys.
In 1887, at the age of 57, Thomas took his own life. Upon Thomas Annan’s death his elder son, John (1863-1947), took over the business which became 'Annan and Sons' in 1888. John specialised in architectural photography, and is thought to have been responsible for the firm's engineering photographs. Annan’s younger son James Craig (1864-1946) had set up a photo-engraving business with Donald Swan in London in 1885, but upon his father's death returned to Glasgow to become a partner in the family business.
Like his father, James created new prints from Adamson and Hill's original calotypes, this time employing the new technique of photogravure which he had learned alongside his father from its inventor Karl Klíc in Vienna. He printed etchings and engravings by Scottish artist Muirhead Bone among others, and photographed the leading figures in the Glasgow Style movement. James became friendly with the famous Glasgow Architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and took the definitive portrait of him with his distinctive "floppy bow tie" as well as many contemporary images of his works.
The Annans took numerous photographs of Glasgow streets and buildings; were official photographers to the Glasgow International Exhibitions of 1888, 1901, and 1911; and in 1889, were awarded a Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria as 'Photographers and Photographic Engravers to her Majesty in Glasgow'.
James began to do more personal work from around 1890. He was one of the first to use a hand-held camera and he would manipulate the plates before printing, achieving very different prints from the same plate. He travelled in Europe with Scottish artist David Young Cameron, an etcher, and their joint exhibition in 1892, where some works portrayed the same subject, invited comparisons between the two media.
In the early 1890s, James was admitted to Glasgow Art Club as a 'photographic artist' and to the Linked Ring Brotherhood, a society formed to promote photography as fine art.
From the mid-1890s, James became an influential, international figure with exhibitions and one-man shows across Europe and the USA, and his photography and writing was widely reproduced in journals. It was through his correspondence with James from 1895 onwards that the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz became interested in the early Scottish pioneers of photography, introducing them to the American public and photographers worldwide via his journal Camera Work. James convened the photographic committee for the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition, and two years later, buoyed by the financial success of the Exhibition, the firm commissioned Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh to design new premises at 518 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow.
The gallery side of the firm gradually evolved into selling paintings and etchings rather than photographic prints of them. Many famous artists exhibited in Annan's over the years including a show by L.S. Lowry in 1946. In 2006, Douglas Annan, the fifth generation of the family, left the business to concentrate on the photographic archive, and the Annan Gallery in 164 Woodlands Road now bears no family connection.

Douglas Noël Adams was born on 11 March 1952 in Cambridge. He was the son of Christopher Douglas Adams and his wife, Janet Dora Sydney, née Donovan. By the time Adams was five his parents were separated, and then divorced. Janet Adams and the children then moved to her parents' house in Brentwood, Essex. In 1960 Christopher Adams remarried Mary Judith Stewart, née Robertson who paid for Douglas and Susan Adams to be educated at private schools. In 1964 Adams's mother married Ron Thrift, a vet whose work took them to Dorset. Their children, Jane and James, were half-siblings to Douglas, whose teenage years were spent moving between different branches of his family.
Adams was educated at Middleton Hall from 1959, the preparatory school for Brentwood School. He became a boarder at Brentwood in September 1964. He was then awarded a place at St John's College, Cambridge, to read English, entering in 1971. At Cambridge Adams spent much of his time writing sketches for student revues with his friends Will Adams and Martin Smith. He eventually became one of the principal writers for Footlights, the university's theatrical club.
After graduating from St John's in 1974 with a 2:2, Adams lived in a series of London flats with friends from his time at Cambridge. He was determined to write sketches, but his attempts to get material commissioned for radio did not go well. The BBC took the occasional sketch, but Adams's fantastical style was unsuitable for the punchy, topical material then in demand. Adams gained exposure at the Edinburgh fringe festival in August 1976, when he wrote for and performed in a successful revue, 'The Unpleasantness at Brodie's Close', but by the end of the year his career had stalled. Intensely depressed, he retreated to his family in Dorset, making only occasional trips up to London.
On one of these visits to London, on 4 February 1977, Adams had lunch with Simon Brett, a producer at BBC radio, who indicated that he would be willing to commission a comic science fiction series which became 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. With encouragement from his family and his friend Jon Canter, Adams returned to London where he and Canter shared a flat off the Holloway Road. Shortly afterwards he was also commissioned by BBC television to write a four-part serial for the long-running science fiction series, 'Doctor Who'.
The creation of the six Hitch-Hiker scripts was difficult and John Lloyd was drafted in to help with episodes five and six. On 8 March 1978 the first episode of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' was broadcast at 10.30 p.m. on BBC Radio 4. Nothing like it had ever been heard before; its freshness was shocking. Unusually for radio, the series was reviewed by the Oberver as 'possibly the most original radio comedy for years' The audience grew exponentially from episode to episode. Adams was offered a post as a producer in BBC radio's light entertainment department, which he held between May and October 1978. Adams then wrote a Christmas special and a second series of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. The first of many stage versions was produced in May 1979 by Ken Campbell and the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
The rights to a novel based on the series were sold to Pan Books, then the leading mass-market paperback house. The book, adapted from the first four episodes, was published in October 1979 and was an instant bestseller, winning a Golden Pan award for selling a million copies faster than any other title in Pan's history. Writing the book conspired with the pressure of work as script editor of 'Doctor Who' (a post which Adams held throughout 1979) to delay the production of the second series of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy', which was eventually broadcast in five parts on Radio 4 in January 1980. A second book, 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe', followed at the end of 1980 and was also a bestseller. Adams meanwhile adapted 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' for BBC television, with Alan J. W. Bell as producer and director. It was broadcast in six episodes in January and February 1981.
Adams' wit made him much in demand on the promotion circuit, and he was one of the first to see how radically information technology would change the world. He was especially passionate about the virtues of the Apple Macintosh over the IBM-derived PC. In 1981 he met Jane Elizabeth Belson. They lived together and eventually married on 25 November 1991. Polly Jane Rocket Adams, their daughter, was born on 22 June 1994.
Adams continued to produce books all through the 1980s. 'Life, the Universe and Everything', the third Hitch-Hiker novel, was published in 1982. 'The Meaning of Liff', a mock dictionary of humorous definitions co-written with John Lloyd, followed in 1983. 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish', a fourth Hitch-Hiker novel, appeared in 1984. He then broke away from the constraints of the Hitch-Hiker format with 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' (1987) and 'The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul' (1988). The year 1990 saw another collaboration with Lloyd, 'The Deeper Meaning of Liff' and the same year saw another collaboration with the zoologist Mark Carwardine which resulted in a book about endangered species, 'Last Chance to See'. This was Adams's favourite among his own works.
The 1990s saw Adams produce fewer new books but he managed to produce a fifth Hitch-Hiker novel, 'Mostly Harmless', in 1992. However, he was in great demand on the American university and corporate lecture circuit, being an amusing and prescient thinker and speaker on the impact of the personal computer. He was also committed to making the film of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' and he and his family spent much of the decade trying to source funding for the project in Hollywood, California, and they settled in Santa Barbara, in 1999.
Adams was writing another book 'The Salmon of Doubt', when he died of a heart attack in Montecito, California, on 11 May 2001. Adams's remains were cremated and later interred in Highgate cemetery, London, in June 2002. In that year, ten chapters of his uncompleted last novel were published with other articles and stories under the title 'The Salmon of Doubt'. Adams's creativity survived him; his ideas are still cited as inspirations by thinkers in both the arts and sciences, and new iterations of his work continue to appear. A film of 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' was released in 2005, while the BBC broadcast a third, fourth, and fifth series, adapted by Dirk Maggs from 'Life, the Universe and Everything', on Radio 4 in 2004–5.

Nigel John Spearing was born on the 8th of October 1930, to Austen and May Spearing. He was educated at Latymer Upper School, Hammersmith, before going up to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge.

After his graduation, Spearing worked in education at both Wandsworth and Elliott School. However, he was best known for his career in politics, which began when he joined the Labour Party. He became the MP for Acton in 1970, and Newham South in 1974; he would hold this seat until the abolishment of the constituency in 1997. During his time in politics, he promoted the Private Members Bill, which became the Industrial Diseases (Notification) Act 1981. A noted Eurosceptic, Spearing chaired a panel on European Legislation and campaigned both against the common market and for British independence from the European Union.

Spearing occupied his spare time with rowing, cycling, and reading. He married his wife Wendy in 1956, and they had one son and two daughters. He died on the 8th of January 2017.

Dr. Sandra Billington was born on 10th September 1943. After working in theatre including gaining a scholarship to RADA and working with Mike Leigh, she attended Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. There, she became fascinated by folklore, theatre and disorder in the Middle Ages. She was Lecturer and Reader in Renaissance Theatre at the University of Glasgow from 1979 to 2003, a specialist in Shakespeare and folklore. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 1998 to 2005.
Her books include ‘Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama’ (1991), ‘Midsummer: A cultural sub-text from Chretien de Troyes to Jean Michel’ (2001), and ‘Coming up for the third time’ (2011). She also edited ‘The Concept of the Goddess’ with Miranda Aldhouse-Green in 1986. Her book ‘A Social History of the Fool’ won the Folklore Society's Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 1984. She also wrote an article on 16th Century Drama in St. John’s College, Cambridge which was published in February 1978 in the ‘Review of English Studies’ Vol. XXIX, Issue 113.