N16Breda Corish

Ooh! Is broadcast date confirmed yet?

Dr Morgan McMonagle: As a surgeon in Ireland, I had never seen “wounded child, no surviving family” on a hospital chart A former colleague in Gaza is getting his children to lick salt before bed to stave off the hunger pangs. Even last spring, children were eating weeds and grass

"Children eating grass and weeds at the side of the road...Families surviving on animal feed, ground down & mixed with measly bits of flour & stale bread, re-baked..."
Not a historian's description of Ireland's Great Famine.
An Irish surgeon's description of Gaza.
www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

'Whitechapel Bell Foundry' (from 'Odd Jobs', 1935) by Pearl Binder

Much less famous than the colour-coded 'Poverty Map', these Charles Booth parish maps of the 1890s are a fantastic resource for London historians

'Oxford Circus Underground Station' (1905) by Maxwell Ashby Armfield

(Government Art Collection)

England Women's team celebrating their win in Euro 2025

Some joy for the timeline courtesy of the #Lionesses 😍
And of course have to point out that Chloe Kelly's grandfathers came from Tyrone & Dublin 💚

A slice of Irish London's lesser-known past - the Irish Club in Belgravia, first founded in 1947 ☘️

A photo of ripe & unripe blackberries beside tansy flowers. Taken on Walthamstow Marshes 27 July 2025.

Blackberry picking season has come early to East London this year

Oooooh! "The great hall and Hogarth stairs will open to the public at 10am on Monday 6th October 2025". I had the good fortune to see these regularly while volunteering in Barts Hospital Museum for @bharchives.bsky.social.
If you've never seen any of these, you're in for a real treat 😍

Extract from Sir William Waad's letter of 7 Oct 1605: "There is at the end of a new built lane called Hogge Lane, towards the fields leading to Ratcliff, a cluster of base tenements termed Knockfergus, peopled with Irish of very base sort, who live only by begging. The best of the inhabitants inform me that of 80 households lately erected the dwellers in them and all the stuff in their houses is not worth 40l., but are mere rogues and lewd people that live by stealth, pilfering and shifting, who disperse themselves abroad in the day time, and lodge there in the night. There are also 20 children at least, begotten upon queans amongst them, of which there is no father known. How to reform this I know not." Source https://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-cecil-papers/vol17/pp445-454

Sir William Waad, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, to the Earl of Salisbury re: Knockfergus ☘️
1605, Oct. 7.
"I gave only signification to you of the great offence that is taken by occasion of the great number of Irish people that frequent these parts..."
www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-cecil-pa...

Another part of 18th century #IrishLondonHistory ☘️ Many of the coal heavers of Wapping & Shadwell were Irish, living in the area known as Knockfergus, today's Cable St.
Knockfergus dates back to at least 1605 & is thought to have been settled by refugees from the Nine Year's War in Ulster 1593-1603.

Screenshot from Freeman's Journal newpaper, 2 March 1894, in the British Newspaper Archive. An account of wood paving in Whitechapel road being taken away by a crowd for use as fuel, with the permission of the Wood Pavement Contracting Company. https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000056/18940302/025/0005

Photo of wood paving blocks still visible on Brooke Road, London N16

A great example of recycling and re-use from 1894. The Wood Pavement Contracting Company announced anyone could remove old paving blocks for their own use from sections due to be repaired on Whitechapel Road.
Photo shows a small section of wood paving still visible in Stoke Newington today.

EastEnders at 40: How the BBC wants to keep its infamous ‘Oirish’ episodes hidden Who can forget the depiction of a grim, resentful, booze-fuelled hellscape peppered with donkeys

It was truly dreadful - "Who can forget the depiction of a grim, resentful, booze-fuelled hellscape peppered with donkeys" 😱

www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-r...

A great thread here on Irish archival records relating to events depicted in Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" 👇

Photo of BFI leaflet about the re-release of Stanley Kubrick's film "Barry Lyndon"

Candle-lit card table scene from the film "Barry Lyndon"

Outdoor landscape shot from the film "Barry Lyndon"

An epic afternoon at the BFI cinema to see Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" on the big screen 😍
The settings (spot the many Irish locations), the music, the costumes, the stylised direction - love all 3+ hr of it.

I'm liking EPIC Museum's creative approach to interrogating the 'Oirish' stereotypes of the film world.
And reminded of the furore generated by EastEnders' depictions of Ireland in 1997 😱

In today's news from the Department of You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up... 🙄

If you're interested in Irish local history, looks like a great online auction starting at 10 am today - the Library of the Late Liam Ó Duibhir, Local Historian and Irish Language Enthusiast From Clonmel, Co Tipperary
www.purcellauctioneers.ie/catalogue/55...

Never change professor Cunk, never change ;)

Headline from the Daily Mail, 11 April 1927: "Stop the Flapper-Vote Folly!"

The right-wing press is going mad over votes at 16 ("a naked attempt to twist democracy in Labour’s favour", an "election-rigging move"...)

Oddly, they said the same 100 years ago when the voting age for women fell from 30 to 21.

Let's revisit the Mail's campaign to"Stop the Flapper Vote Folly"...

Illustration of a squirrel carrying a pile of books, walking towards a tree hollow full of books.

Me after saying I wasn't gonna buy any more books for a while

a close up of a woman 's face with a triangle and a mathematical equation on it . ALT: a close up of a woman 's face with a triangle and a mathematical equation on it .

The eternal mystery that is car hire in Ireland 🧐

Knock Airport to Dublin Airport - £36.45 a day

Knock Airport to Dublin Spencer Dock - £20.89 a day

Anyone got a video of a hare having the shit scared out of it by a curlew — ah, don’t worry, got one anyway!

📌

Reposting this to demonstrate how quick and easy reposting is, and what a big effect it has.

If you see something I post that you like, or indeed anyone else in the folklore community, it just takes a second to share it with others and to give your followers a chance to come and explore too 😀

Screenshot of a 2020 tweet on Twitter [X] by @N16Breda showing a photograph of Oscar Wilde and the Wandsworth Prison register recording Wilde's transfer from Pentonville Prison, then on display in the London Guildhall Art Gallery.

Photograph of Wandsworth Prison register recording Oscar Wilde's transfer from Pentonville Prison 4 July 1895

Many thanks for that feedback - much appreciated 😃
Oscar Wilde would be a great topic - or indeed "Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty Mills Wilde" as he appeared in Wandsworth prison register in 1895

It was indeed an extraordinary sight & so completely unexpected. I haven't been able to find anything which explains it. Perhaps just the innate curiosity of bullocks but it was hard not to perceive it as a wake-like scene

Photo of a greyhound looking at cattle in the distance on the seashore

A herd of bullocks standing and lying beside the body of a dead whale

Closeup of a dead whale stranded on the sands, with three bullocks standing & lying beside it.

A most unexpected encounter while dog-walking in Sligo last week - coming upon a small herd of cattle on the strand, clustered together around a dead whale. It was a strangely moving sight...
(Reported that day to the Irish Whale & Dolphin Group)

People need to move on from colonial history *BUT NOT FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST*

We are so close to the Tory party accusing the Bayeux Tapestry of glorifying small boats crossing the Channel.