It’s the parliamentary equivalent of turkeys voting for Christmas. In this case, Christmas might involve decanting to a village of Portakabins somewhere near York while the Palace is gutted and restored.
The Breezer - the joyride for a curious mind: A weekly newsletter from Steve Winduss at the Batting the Breeze podcast. Spend a few minutes with me discovering historical snippets and fascinating facts related to the forthcoming week. Add to that occasional updates relating to the podcast, a touch of humour and a dash of "lots more".5th October 2025.
Happy Sunday Reader! Just before my annual three-day trip along the Grand Union Canal last week, I had time for another great day in London, crowned by a pie and a pint with an old school friend at St Stephen’s Tavern, Westminster, under the shadow of Big Ben.
I was reminded how magnificent the tower looks having emerged from her six-year facelift in 2022.
Dammit, I’ve just committed architectural fraud. Just as the name of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often applied to the monster rather than its creator, so the tower at the northern end of the Houses of Parliament is commonly referred to as ‘Big Ben’.
Big Ben is actually the name of the bell inside the tower.
The correctly named Elizabeth Tower, renamed in 2012 to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, was originally known as the Clock Tower.
The 13.5-ton bell behind the clock which dutifully chimes every 15 minutes was installed in 1859 under the watchful eye of the rather portly Sir Benjamin Hall, hence ‘Big Ben’.
Anyway, since autumn is closing in, the spotlights on the tower were already illuminated as we reached the pub.
Elizabeth Tower, Westminster, at night.
These spotlights highlight the sparkling gold leaf which now adorns the clock surface and the sheer complexity of the tower’s ornate stonework. The definition of every crevice is so crisp that it might be made from LEGO, or perhaps a fancy foil-wrapped chocolate bar. You could break off a piece and eat it.
The rest of the Houses of Parliament are similarly lit, all sharp edges and impossible cleanliness, as if they’ve just been unwrapped.
But the external gloss belies a different story inside. The Palace of Westminster is falling apart the British way - slowly and quietly. Stonework is crumbling, the roof leaks in a hundred places, electrical wiring is outdated and the plumbing is on life support.
In short, the home of British-English politics for 730 years - since Edward I convened the Model Parliament in 1295 - is falling down.
But, here’s the problem.
A refurbishment would require MPs to vote themselves out of the building for several years. For many one-termers, they would never return.
It’s the parliamentary equivalent of turkeys voting for Christmas. In this case, Christmas might involve decanting to a village of Portakabins somewhere near York while the Palace is gutted and restored.
Voting to leave the building would require levels of self-sacrifice rarely seen in Westminster, so I am not betting on it happening any day soon.
Westminster has been abandoned by Parliament a few times over the years, but these have usually been partial relocations.
But, there is one memorable occasion when the entire machinery of British government deserted Westminster, Charles II and all.
In September 1665, London was dying. Not metaphorically but physically. Bodies were piling up in the streets faster than carts could take them away.
The Great Plague of 1665-1666 would be the last outbreak of bubonic plague in England. Since the Black Death (1348-1349) had found its way to England via fleas on black rats from merchant ships on trading routes from Asia, an estimated 45-50% of England’s population of five million had died from plague.
“Bring out ‘yer dead.” The Great Plague of London 1665.
In London, half a million people were crammed into the narrow streets. Personal hygiene was optional. Medicine optimistically relied on the Theory of the Four Humours.
Out of Curiosity
The Four Humours was the binding theory of world medicine for 2,000 years up to the 18th century. According to this theory, the human body contained four essential bodily fluids:
Sanguine: Blood (hot and wet) - related to air
Phlegmatic: Phlegm (cold and wet) - related to water
Choleric: Yellow bile (hot and dry) - related to fire
Melancholic: Black bile (cold and dry) - related to earth
The Four Humours as depicted by Charles Le Brun, designed for the Palace of Versailles in the 1670s; Choleric, Sanguine, Melancholic, Phlegmatic.
The body needed all four humours to be in balance for perfect health. An imbalance of one of the humours would lead to disease. Treatments would look to restore this balance through bloodletting, purging, dietary changes etc.
In the case of The Great Plague, The Four Humours turned out to be three humours short - 100,000 Londoners (20% of the city’s population) perished. Amidst the death and disease, Parliament was due to meet in October 1665. But Westminster was at the heart of the plague. Tucked up safely in their country houses, very few MPs had the desire to risk their lives over herring quotas or wool tariffs. Nonetheless, Parliament couldn’t be postponed - there were more important matters than fish or sheep to debate. The British were at war with the Dutch. Wars cost money, and that meant higher taxes. Charles II couldn’t raise taxes without Parliament’s approval - a lesson his father, Charles I, had learned the hard way, losing his head in the process. If the king wanted money, he had to ask nicely. The solution was to reconvene Parliament outside London. The city of Oxford was the perfect choice. It was far enough outside London to dodge the intense effects of the plague and boasted plenty of suitable buildings fit for parliamentary gatherings. What’s more, Oxford was believed by many to be England’s intellectual brain centre, home to one of Europe’s great universities since the 12th century. Oxford University had been used by the government under Charles I for an earlier, less significant, plague in 1625. The ‘Useless Parliament’ achieved little other than to stoke up further tension between crown and Parliament. This session would be different. It would be emblematic of England’s determination to carry on regardless. So, Parliament convened in Oxford 360 years ago this Thursday, 9 October 1665. The House of Commons settled into the Bodleian Library complex while the House of Lords met in the more down-to-earth Geometry School. Oxford was awash with MPs. The painful cohabitation of academics and politicians lasted for three weeks. Lectures were suspended, buildings commandeered and the daily rhythms of academia shattered.
Convocation House, part of the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, where the English Parliament convened in 1665.
By the end of October, Parliament was prorogued, meaning suspended without formal dissolution. The king had been granted his funds to continue the war with the Dutch. When Parliament reconvened back in Westminster in September 1666, the plague had abated and the Great Fire of London had destroyed many of the rat-infested slums which had nurtured the plague in the first place. The regional experiment was over, Parliament had survived. It turns out that democracy is portable in a crisis. It wasn’t pretty and perhaps couldn’t have survived for much longer. But it had done its job. However, nobody was in any doubt - Parliament belonged in Westminster.
Out of Curiosity
Established in 1096, Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire. It had been educating men for 230 years before the capital city of the Aztecs, Tenochtitlán, was founded. By 1920, the university had been at it for 825 years; that is, educating men exclusively. Then, 105 years ago this Tuesday, 7 October 1920, Oxford University hit the headlines. Women were at last able to receive degrees from Oxford. To be fair to the venerable troglodytes, women had been attending lectures and sitting examinations at Oxford since 1878. They just hadn’t been allowed to receive any credit for their work. Imagine studying hard for years, passing all your exams with flying colours and being patted on the back with a “Congratulations, here’s nothing.” The First World War had changed everything. It turns out that women had proved quite useful. They had worked the factories, driven the ambulances, maintained hospitals and the welfare of the country at least as capably as the usual male incumbents then bogged down over the Channel in brutal and unforgiving trenches. Further, women over 30 years old had won the right to vote in 1918, so the degree ban was looking increasingly absurd. Imagine the squirming and harrumphing that accompanied the debate between academics. Would women be able to maintain standards? Would they be an unnecessary distraction to male students? Under overwhelming pressure, the University’s legislative assembly agreed to legitimise women’s degrees. Interestingly, Oxford’s main rival, Cambridge University, wouldn’t award degrees to women until 1948 after World War II. Today, Oxford University awards more degrees to women than to men.
The first women Oxford graduates return to receive their degrees, October 1920.
Dates with History
Tuesday… Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born in 1910 in Skopje, North Macedonia. After Anjezë had joined the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin in 1928, she moved to India to teach at the Loreto Convent School in Calcutta. In 1937, Anjezë completed her vows and thereafter would be known as Mother Teresa. Seventy five years ago this Tuesday, 7 October 1950, Mother Teresa left the Loreto convent to establish the Missionaries of Charity, supporting the poor of Calcutta. The lady in the emblematic white sari with blue-striped border would receive the Nobel Peace Prize and the Bharat Ratna, India’s most prestigious civilian honour. Mother Teresa died in 1997 at the age of 87. Today, 5,000 sisters of the Missionaries of Charity operate over 750 missions in 120 countries around the world.
With Nancy Reagan looking on, US President Ronald Reagan presents Mother Teresa with the Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony in June 1985.
Thursday Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was born in Moscow in May 1921. This was the period when the Bolshevik Revolution was taking hold and the Russian Empire’s citizens were coming to terms with a new reality. Sakharov was a proud citizen. He worked hard throughout his education while Stalin was tightening his grip on the expanding USSR. In 1942, Andrei graduated with honours in Physics from Moscow State University and was recruited to support development of the hydrogen bomb. As a Soviet patriot, Andrei believed that America’s monopoly on nuclear weapons should be broken. In 1953, the Soviets test-launched their first hydrogen bomb. The Soviets rewarded Sacharov with election to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was only 32 years old. Then everything changed. Sakharov watched with horror as the nuclear arms race built momentum. By 1965, America and the USSR were pointing a combined 37,000 nuclear weapons at each other. Mutually assured destruction was now a reality.
The United States tests the world’s first hydrogen bomb in 1952. ‘Ivy Mike’ was an 82-ton monster, 500 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. It was tested on Elugelab Island in the Pacific Marshall Islands. The island entirely vapourised and a crater a mile wide and 162 feet deep was imprinted in the sea bed.
Andrei started to voice concerns about nuclear proliferation and actively supported international human rights causes. He wrote, ‘Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom’, a thesis calling for an end to the arms race and greater respect for human rights. Andrei smuggled the work out of the USSR and it was published by the New York Times in July 1968. As a result, Sakharov was dismissed from his scientific roles and became a pariah among his Soviet peers. Sakharov had fallen from hero to zero overnight. When the Nobel Committee awarded Sakharov the Nobel Peace Prize 50 years ago this Thursday, 9 October 1975, they described him as “a spokesman for the conscience of mankind”. Of course, Andrei wasn’t allowed to leave Russia to receive his prize. Instead, his wife, Yelena Bonner, travelled to Oslo the following day to receive it on his behalf. Having denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Sakharov was exiled to Gorky, a closed city 250 miles east of Moscow. He wouldn’t see family or friends for seven years. Andrei was released in 1986 once Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power and started the reforms of ‘Glasnost’ and ‘Perestroika’. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and only 35 days later Andrei Sakharov died. He was 68 years old. Andrei was honoured with a state funeral, attended by Gorbachev himself. He is remembered today by ‘The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought’, established by the European Parliament in 1988 and awarded each year.
Andrei Sakharov six months before his death, 1989.
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On this Day
The Soviet author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, famous for books such as ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ and ‘The First Circle’, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 55 years ago this Wednesday, 8 October 1970. Matt Damon - Hollywood star of the Bourne series and Good Will Hunting - was born on the same day.
In 1969, the film The Battle of Neretva was released. It was the most expensive film ever made in Yugoslavia, approved by President Tito himself. Pablo Picasso designed the advertising poster. 10,000 Yugoslav troops were used as extras and real bridges were blown up for greatest effect. The film is also remembered for two of its headline stars, Orson Welles and Yul Brynner. It was a spectacular clash of Hollywood egos. Welles, star of Citizen Kane, imposed his 6’ 2’’ 300 pound frame on the set, while Brynner, star of The King and I, was apparently never very far from a mirror. By a quirk of fate, both men died 40 years ago this Friday, 10 October 1985, just hours apart.
Yul Brynner (left) and Orson Welles at the premier of the Battle of Neretva, 1969.
Question of the Week
The Wright Brothers achieved man’s first powered flight in 1903. Seven years later, their biplane became the first to carry a US President aloft. Which President?
And Finally…
Billiards was established in the 15th century. This is the game played with cues on a table 12 feet by 6 feet with six pockets and a green felt surface. Only three balls are in play and players can accumulate points by potting either of the two other balls, potting their own ball off another (an ‘in-off’) or by touching both other balls with their own in one stroke (the “cannon”). King Louis XI of France received the first known indoor billiard table in 1469. Mary Queen of Scots complained to the Archbishop of Canterbury just before her execution in 1587 that her captors had taken away her billiard table. After her execution, she was apparently wrapped in the green cloth from the same beloved table.
‘Indifference’ – one of a set of 12 prints by Daniel Thomas Egerton showing well-dressed Victorian gentlemen paying billiards in an elegantly furnished room, 1823.
Although initially a game for nobles, billiards’ popularity broadened over the centuries. However, by 1863 the billiards industry was in crisis. Balls were made from ivory; elephants were being culled at an unprecedented rate for their ivory tusks. The slaughter of elephants didn’t raise an eyebrow but the soaring price of ivory caused by increasing scarcity did. The New York billiard manufacturer Phelan & Colander offered a prize to anyone who could invent an ivory-substitute ball. John Wesley Hyatt, a New York-born printer, was in his late twenties when he heard news of the $10,000 prize on offer. He was determined to claim the prize. And so began Hyatt’s descent into obsession. Night after night he lived in his laboratory. He mixed compounds with the fervour of a medieval alchemist. He experimented with anything that might send a billiard ball spinning across green felt in the same manner as an elephant’s tusk.
James Wesley Hyatt, c1890.
One hundred and sixty years ago this Friday, 10 October 1865, John Wesley Hyatt received his first patent for a new manufacturing process for billiard balls. Hyatt’s billiard ball used a composition of shellac (the resin from a lac insect) dissolved in alcohol and mixed with ivory dust. The new product had significantly reduced the quantity of ivory needed, but not removed it altogether. It wouldn’t be until around 1870-71 that Hyatt’s new company, the ‘Hyatt Manufacturing Company’ created a billiard ball without any traces of ivory. Hyatt had dissolved nitrocellulose with camphor under heat and pressure. No ivory needed. The resulting hard, mouldable substance could be shaped into perfect spheres. However, Hyatt admitted to a problem with his cellulite balls. He recalled...
...occasionally the violent contact of the balls would produce a mild explosion like a percussion cap.
This might be little unsettling for gentlemen relaxing around a billiard table. Hyatt further recalled that he had received a letter from a concerned billiard saloon operator in Colorado…
...each time an explosion occurs, instantly every man in the room pulls his gun.
The contribution of Hyatt’s patent for ‘celluloid’ would reach far beyond the genteel world of billiards. He had developed the world’s first commercially successful synthetic plastic. His manufacturing process would extend to the production of piano keys, denture plates, detachable shirt collars and cuffs and would eventually provide the foundation for modern photographic film. It is not clear if John Wesley Hyatt ever received his $10,000 prize. I don’t suppose the then wealthy, successful businessman cared.
Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!
Steve
HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER
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Theodore Roosevelt was the first US President to fly in an aeroplane (well, technically a former US President as he had left office eighteen months earlier). One hundred and fifteen years ago this Saturday, 11 October 1910, the Wright Brother’s biplane flew Roosevelt for four minutes at the dizzying height of 50 feet over Kinloch Field near St. Louis, Missouri. Roosevelt’s pilot that day, Arch Hoxsey, would be killed in an air crash just two months later. He was 26 years old.
Theodore Roosevelt prepares for his first ride in an aeroplane, 1910.
ATTRIBUTIONS
Elizabeth Tower, Westminster, at night: mutovkin, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Great Plague of London 1665: unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Four Humours: Charles Le Brun, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Convocation House: Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Women Oxford graduates: University of Oxford, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Mother Tersa with Ronald Reagan: Series: Reagan White House Photographs, 1/20/1981 - 1/20/1989Collection: White House Photographic Collection, 1/20/1981 - 1/20/1989, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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