X-Nico

23 unusual facts about United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland


Albert and Victoria

Albert Hackett is a middle-class man in late 19th century Britain, who is used to getting the final word over his wife Victoria, and their five children.

Big Twenty Township

The treaty, named for US Secretary of State Daniel Webster and United Kingdom Privy Counsellor Lord Ashburton, ended the Aroostook War and also set the US–Canada border further west.

Burlington Heights

The "Heights" were the location of a British Army post during the War of 1812.

Eighteen Hundred and Eleven

Britain had been at war with France for a decade and was on the brink of losing the Napoleonic Wars, when Barbauld presented her readers with her shocking Juvenalian satire.

Harold or the Norman Conquest

Opera in four acts with music by the British composer Frederic H. Cowen with a libretto by Edward Malet, edited by Frederic Edward Weatherly, adapted into the German by L.A. Caumont, and first performed at Covent Garden, London on 8 June 1895.

Havelock, Quebec

Named after Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, a British general who served in India, the township was created in 1863 from the west end of Hemmingford Township.

Henry Faulds

The following month Sir William Herschel, a British civil servant based in India, wrote to Nature saying that he had been using fingerprints (as a form of bar code) to identify criminals since 1860.

Izyaslav-class destroyer

The ships were delayed due to ordering machinery from Switzerland which was embargoed on the outbreak of World War I. New machinery was ordered from Britain.

Jack Meldon

John Michael "Jack" Meldon (29 September 1869 in Dublin, Ireland – 12 December 1954 in Tunbridge Wells, United Kingdom) was an Irish cricketer.

Jalan Klang Lama

The road was constructed by the British Federated Malay States government from 1905 to 1908.

James Fitz-Morris

Captain James Fitz-Morris MC and Bar (6 April 1897 - 14 August 1918) was a British, World War I flying ace credited with 14 aerial victories.

Louisville and Frankfort Railroad

The rails for the road were purchased in London, England, and shipped upriver from New Orleans.

Morses Creek

The name was changed to Bright in 1861 after British Statesman John Bright who lived from 1811 to 1889.

Naning

Naning was previously part of Negeri Sembilan but it was later annexed by the British into Malacca in 1832 via the Naning War.

Pākehā

Most of these settlers were from Britain, with a disproportionate number coming from Scotland.

Penrhyn Quarry

The quarry holds a significant place in the history of the British Labour Movement as the site of two prolonged strikes by workers demanding better pay and safer conditions.

Rudolph van Pallandt

He was born in Oldebroek and died in London, Great Britain.

Sandokan

The pirates are introduced in The Tigers of Mompracem, which portrays their relentless struggle against the Dutch and British powers that seek to wipe them out.

Shellal

During the 19th century, the Luxor-Aswan railroad line was connected with a narrow-gauge line from Aswan to Shellal which had been constructed in 1884 by the British as a military line during the first Sudan Campaign to accelerate transport of military stores past the First Cataract.

Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy

Not wishing to have Britain unrepresented in the competition, Lipton invited West Auckland FC, an amateur side from County Durham and mostly made up of coal miners, to take part.

St James's Palace

For most of the time of the personal union between Great Britain (later the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) and the Electorate of Hanover (later Kingdom of Hanover) from 1714 until 1837 the ministers of the German Chancery were working in two small rooms within St James's Palace.

Tennis at the 1908 Summer Olympics – Women's singles

Five players, all from the United Kingdom, appeared for the competition.

Vin Mariani

Vin Mariani was very popular in its day, even among royalty such as Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland.


Abdulla al-Hadj

Abdulla was most known for his capture of a British trading vessel that was stopped at Murdu in northern Borneo.

Accessories and Abettors Act 1861

The Accessories and Abettors Act 1861 (24 & 25 Vict. c.98) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (as it then was).

Aga Khan II

Aga Khan II maintained the cordial ties that his father had developed with the British and was appointed to the Bombay Legislative Council when Sir James Fergusson was the governor of Bombay.

Agadir Crisis

Anglo-German tensions were high at this time partly due to an arms race between Imperial Germany and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which included German plans to build a fleet that would be two thirds of the size of Britain's fleet.

Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed

He was a member of the Egyptian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference held in Versailles in 1919, where he pleaded for the independence of Egypt from Britain.

Battle of Ghazni

In the 1830s, the British were firmly entrenched in India but by 1837, the British feared a Russian invasion of India through the Khyber and Bolan Passes as the Russian Empire had expanded towards the British dominion of India.

Battle of Zhangjiawan

Battle of Zhangjiawan was fought at the village of Zhangjiawan (to the east of Tongzhou) by British and French forces during the Second Opium War on the morning of 18 September 1860.

Benjamin Howard Baker

Howard Baker represented Britain at both the 1912 and 1920 Olympic Games.

Cape Guardafui

Due to consistent ship crashes along the coast, King Osman Mahamuud of the Majeerteen Sultanate, which controlled much of the northeastern Somali seaboard during the 19th century, entered into an informal agreement with Britain.

Carl Schuhmann

In the first round, he faced Launceston Elliot of Great Britain and Ireland, who had won the weightlifting competition.

Cihangirzade İbrahim Bey

On 13 April 1919, the capital of the republic, Kars, was occupied by the British troops under the command of General William M. Thomson and after a period of local resistance he was arrested by the British forces and sent, through Batum and İstanbul, to a one-year exile in Malta (see Malta exiles) together with 11 members of his cabinet.

Corruption of Blood Act 1814

The Corruption of Blood Act 1814 (54 Geo. 3 c. 145) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which abolished corruption of blood for all crimes except high treason, petty treason and murder.

DeCou House

During his absence, his house was used by the British army as a detachment headquarters under the command of Lieutenant James FitzGibbon.

Dublin Castle administration

Dublin Castle was the centre of the government of Ireland under English and later British rule.

Before 1707 he represented the government of the Kingdom of England, then that of the Kingdom of Great Britain, and finally from 1801 that of the United Kingdom.

First Hellenic Republic

The Fifth National Assembly at Nafplion drafted a new royal constitution, while the three "Protecting Powers" (Great Britain, France and Russia) intervened, declaring Greece a Kingdom in the London Conference of 1832, with the Bavarian Prince Otto of Wittelsbach as king.

German Conservative Party

The party supported Emperor Wilhelm II's naval policies and Germany's arms race with the United Kingdom, but initially kept its distance towards colonialism and the activists of the Pan-German League.

Henry Raikes

Other reference see HMC Papers of British churchmen 1780-1940, 1987.

Holzminden internment camp

A small number of British internees were also held, including five stewardesses from the Great Eastern Railway ferry SS Brussels.

Jim McFadden

Born in Belfast, United Kingdom and raised in Miami, Manitoba.

Karataş, Izmir

According to an 1856 British report presented to the Secretary of State for War, they numbered as many as 17,000 in İzmir at the time, and owing to the comparative liberty and immunity from oppression they enjoyed, their numbers were rapidly increasing.

Maryland in the American Civil War

Lee's setback at the Battle of Antietam can also be seen as a turning point in that it may have dissuaded the governments of France and Great Britain from recognizing the Confederacy, doubting the South's ability to maintain and win the war.

Military history of Italy during World War I

Italy's representative in the Paris Peace Conference which led to the Versailles Treaty was Premier Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, considered one of the "Big Four" with President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Prime Minister David Lloyd-George of the United Kingdom, and Premier Georges Clemenceau of the French Republic.

Msida

In the late 19th century, a floating British navy hydraulic dock was also planned at the central part of Msida close to where the Torpedo Depot used to stand.

Order of the Crescent

Recipients (usually naval or army officers or representatives of Britain or France, highly present in the region during the Napoleonic Wars) were awarded a lozenge-shaped silver radiant star, embroidered in silver thread on an azure background with a star and crescent in the centre, and a red ribbon, to be worn with the crescent to the star's left.

Patna rice

The seeds of Patna rice were taken to America, grown in Carolina and exported to Britain before the American Civil War.

Renforth, New Brunswick

It is named after James Renforth, a rower from Britain who had died of heart failure during a match against Saint John's famous Paris Crew in August 1870 in the waters of the Kennebecasis River off the community.

Standardwing

George Robert Gray of the British Museum named this species in honor of Alfred Russel Wallace, British naturalist and author of The Malay Archipelago, who discovered the bird in 1858.

The Great War of 1892

The Great War of 1892 was a story of the genre termed "Invasion Literature" written by Admiral Philip Howard Colomb in which he sought to alert Britain to what he saw as the weakness of the Royal Navy.

Treaty of Chaumont

Following discussions in late February 1814, representatives of Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain reconvened a meeting at Chaumont, Haute-Marne on 1 March 1814.

Union of Romanian Jews

The UEP actively campaigned on behalf of Romanian Jews, addressing memoranda to the Romanian authorities and seeking help from abroad, especially from France and Great Britain.

Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills

It was one of three Royal Gunpowder Mills in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the other mills were at Ballincollig and Faversham, but is the only site to have survived virtually intact.

Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland

In 1917, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour communicated the Balfour Declaration to the leader of United Kingdom's Jewish community Lord Rothschild for transmission to the Zionist Federation.