Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Yorkshire On This Day, Comprising 365 Historical Extracts, Red-letter Days and Customs, and Astronomical and Meteorological Data

5 January 1846: Writing to fellow-botanist William Borrer, Richard Spruce of Ryedale despairs of his Pyrenean mosses arousing interest amid George Hudson’s railway mania

Richard Spruce. 1908. Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes, Vol. 1. Ed. Alfred Russel Wallace. London: Macmillan and Co. Get it:

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I am afraid I shall find no one but yourself when I return to England who will deign to look at Pyrenean plants — you appear to be all going mad about railways. I get hold sometimes of a Times or Morning Chronicle, with supplement on supplement of railway advertisements, and I turn over page after page until I am quite in despair of arriving at any news. And when at last I come to something that looks readable, I still find it to consist almost entirely of accounts of railway meetings, etc. You appear also to have undergone such strange metamorphoses! pour exemple, when I read “the Railway King is determined to have a narrow gauge into Cornwall,” it is scarcely credible that his said majesty is no other than my old acquaintance George Hudson, quondam linen draper of York! Alack! alack! what will this world come to!!

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Similar

1 August 1813: The Leeds-based 51st Foot wear bay leaves, not white roses, on Minden (now Yorkshire) Day, as they drive Napoleon’s troops back over the Pyrenees
8 May 1849: Amid revelations of fraud at the York, Newcastle and Berwick Railway, Richard Nicholson, business partner and brother-in-law of the Railway King, George Hudson, drowns himself in the Ouse at York
30 July 1798: The homeward-bound Greenland whaler Blenheim fights off a Royal Navy press gang in Hull harbour, killing two boarders
30 January 1846: Charlotte Brontë tells her old schoolmistress, Margaret Wooler, that Emily’s railway investment strategy may be unsustainable
7 January 1397: On the longest of the 42 days of his carnivalesque reign, boy-bishop John de Cave of York goes on a 200-mile begging spree
17 July 1785: Mr Strother, a York draper’s assistant, finds that diarising is not for common folk
11 September 1666: Nine days after the start of the Great Fire, Margaret Hodgson of Richmond tells a York court that a beggar told her yesterday of a plot to burn London
17 July 1815: John Dunhill and William Bewell stand trial for their lives shortly after Waterloo, accused of the riotous demolition of a press-gang pub at 41, Humber Street, Hull
19 February 1557: At a tithe hearing, Ralph Dicconson (60) of Malton recalls his visits 40 years ago as a pedlar to Kirkham Priory before its dissolution in 1539
10 August 1756: Leeds “gentlemen” burn an effigy of Admiral John Byng, scapegoat for the Whig government’s failure to save Minorca (and the Mediterranean theatre) from the French during the Seven Years’ War

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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The Yorkshire Almanac is a day-by-day calendar, featuring modern happenings in the heavens and on earth and some 973 historical serendipities (776K words) from the last 2,000 years, quoted from 1,706 more-or-less contemporary accounts, and dealing with 6,990 subjects. Leeds’s Singing Organ-Grinder has been compiling, composing and coding the Yorkshire Almanac online at bedtime since 2021, and it's now available in paperback. Also: Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder Performs the Yorkshire Almanac Songbook.

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