The Bremen Bod Blog

  Today's object is my 1842 edition of John Bunyan's The Pilgrims Progress which was first published as a Christian allegorical work of theological fiction in 1678. The Pilgrims Progress is important and significant for some Christian Socialists because it influenced the Beveridge Report. William Beveridge’s lifted Bunyan's same allegorical language contained in The Pilgrim’s Progress, to inspire his own ‘Beveridge Report’, written in 1942. Like Bunyan, Beveridge speaks of slaying the five giants of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The Beveridge Report, together with Archbishop William Temple’s ‘Christianity and the Social Order’, formed the basis of the post-war settlement and the creation of the Welafre State, NHS, Council Houses, National Insurance etc all implemented by Clement Attlee’s 1945 Government. Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour Government’s was quite Christian in both its ethos and origin. All the new council houses built after 1945 were rega

  The other day I wrote about my Granda's Pacific Star medal from the war and how he struggled to find work after WWII . By way of contrast, today's object is a Glasgow Corporation Peace Medal from 1919, to mark the ending of hostlities, set into a white poppy. These brass peace medals were issued by nearly every town and local authority across Britain to commemorate the Versailles Treaty and given out to children as part of the Peace Day public holiday of 19 July 1919. It is perhaps helpful for us to remember just how unhappy the British public were about the various military parades and extravagant victory celebrations which took place immediately after WWI. Especially when so many ex-servicemen were now unemployed, ex-soldiers suffered greatly after the war and also during the 1921 economic slump. In Manchester, demobilised soldiers marched with banners proclaiming ‘Honour the dead - remember the living’, and ‘work not charity’. Just like their forbearers before them, f

  I mentioned in yesterday's post, the history of the strict Presbyterian Highland Gaels in Greenock and in a previous post, I discussed the history of the temperance movement Inverclyde. My Papa Robert 'Robey' Ritchie Ahlfeld was also a lifelong teetotaller who never touched alcohol. We think this was possibly due to the fact that he was descended from a long line of strict Presbyterians on his Mother’s side, Margaret ‘Meg’ Ritchie. Although, others in the family did enjoy a drink.  The Ritchies are a very old Gourock family who joined the dissenting party during the great disruption of 1843. It is said that Gourock’s Free Church adherents belonged to families descended from Covenanters. As such, they spent sometime during the early days of the disruption, holding their services of worship at old conventicles out on the open moors above Gourock, just as their ancestors had done centuries earlier during the ‘Killing Time’ of the 1680s. The location of one such conventi

  I mentioned in yesterday's post that my Grandfather Dennis Haggerty worked as a docker for period after the war. Granda Haggerty was in the Royal Navy during the war and was awarded the Pacific Star but he never wore any of his medals or ever wore a poppy either. This is because Granda was still fighting the Japanese in the Pacific right up until VJ day and by the time he got home, he couldn't get his old job back or find any other work or receive any financial help from the Earl Haig fund. For Wee Dinny, post-war Scotland wasn't 'a land fit for heroes'. However, my Granda came back from the Pacific Campaign with a deep respect and admiration for Australians, and he actually wanted to move to Australia but my Gran didn't want to move way. The other thing my Granda brought home from the war was a dislike of what he called "Teuchters' and 'Wee Frees' from the Isles and this antipathy towards Highlanders continued into his working life at the

  My Granda Haggerty worked as a docker for a period after the war, so today's object is my dockers brass tally which originally comes from East London. Y esterday I wrote about Cardinal Manning's involvement in the Temperance movement here in Greenock. Manning was also instrumental in resolving the London Dock’s strike of 1889; many of the Dockers were Irish, whereas lots of the shipyard workers at Thames Ironworks in East London were Scots mainly from Dundee, while Germans were mostly employed in the Sugar refineries in places like Whitechapel. Indeed, Cardinal Manning’s sincere empathy for the Irish poor informed his political outlook and his strong support for workers rights and trade unions. This brass tally of mines is a ' Docks and Inland Waterways Executive' brass tally from 1948 following nationalisation of the Docks by Attlee's post-war Labour Government. Before the Dock Labour Scheme was created in 1946, bringing with it at least some guarantee of p

  This beautiful little pin of the Sacred Heart came down to me from my Mum's Haggerty and McGarry side of the family, it once belonged to a Great Aunt who had been a member of the 'Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart'. PTAA members were known as pioneers and they had a special devotion to the Sacred Heart, pioneers wore a lapel pin just like this one. Abstinence and temperance have always been a big deal in Greenock, John Dunlop established Britain’s first temperance society in Greenock in in 1829. A few years earlier in 1820, the famous sugar baron Abram Lyle was born in Greenock, in the same year the Scottish radical James Wilson was executed for breaking prisoners out of Greenock jail during the Scottish Radical War. Abram had been the grandson of a weaver and the son of an alcoholic cooper, who left his son in debt and it was Abram's deep Christian faith which drove him to promote sugar and confectionary as an alternative to alcohol. Lyle once