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Big Steamers
"Big Steamers" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1911 as one of his twenty-three poems written specially for C. R. L. Fletcher's ''"A School History of England"''. It appears in the last chapter of the book. It is intended for children, with the verses responding with facts and humour to their curiosity about the 'big steamers' - as the merchant ships are called. Songs The poem has been set to music by two English composers: Edward German and Edward Elgar. The poem was also put to music by English folk singer and Kipling Society Fellow Peter Bellamy. German's setting was for baritone voice with piano accompaniment, and published by Cramer in 1911. Elgar set the poem to music late in World War I, with the permission of Kipling, and it was published in ''"The Teacher's World"'', June 19, 1918. This was in response to a request from the Ministry of Food Control to set the poem to music, with the intention that it would be sung in schools and bring to the attent ...
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Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British Raj, British India, which inspired much of his work. Kipling's works of fiction include the ''Jungle Book'' -logy, duology (''The Jungle Book'', 1894; ''The Second Jungle Book'', 1895), ''Kim (novel), Kim'' (1901), the ''Just So Stories'' (1902) and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay (poem), Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), "The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If—" (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story.Rutherford, Andrew (1987). General Preface to the Editions of Rudyard Kipling, in "Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies", by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford University Press. His children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and lu ...
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Merchant Ships
A merchant ship, merchant vessel, trading vessel, or merchantman is a watercraft that transports cargo or carries passengers for hire. This is in contrast to pleasure craft, which are used for personal recreation, and naval ships, which are used for military purposes. They come in myriad sizes and shapes, from inflatable dive boats in Hawaii, to 5,000-passenger casino vessels on the Mississippi River, to tugboats plying New York Harbor, to oil tankers and container ships at major ports, to passenger-carrying submarines in the Caribbean. Many merchant ships operate under a "flag of convenience" from a country other than the home of the vessel's owners, such as Liberia and Panama, which have more favorable maritime laws than other countries. The Greek merchant marine is the largest in the world. Today, the Greek fleet accounts for some 16 per cent of the world's tonnage; this makes it currently the largest single international merchant fleet in the world, albeit not the larg ...
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Edward German
Sir Edward German (17 February 1862 – 11 November 1936) was an English musician and composer of Welsh descent, best remembered for his extensive output of incidental music for the stage and as a successor to Arthur Sullivan in the field of English comic opera. Some of his light operas, especially '' Merrie England'', are still performed. As a youth, German played the violin and led the town orchestra of Whitchurch, Shropshire. He also began to compose music. While performing and teaching violin at the Royal Academy of Music, German began to build a career as a composer in the mid-1880s, writing serious music as well as light opera. In 1888, he became music director of the Globe Theatre in London. He provided popular incidental music for many productions at the Globe and other London theatres, including ''Richard III'' (1889), ''Henry VIII'' (1892) and ''Nell Gwynn'' (1900). He also wrote symphonies, orchestral suites, symphonic poems and other works. He also wrote a considera ...
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Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, (; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the ''Enigma Variations'', the ''Pomp and Circumstance Marches'', concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including ''The Dream of Gerontius'', chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-conscious society of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was acu ...
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Peter Bellamy
Peter Franklyn Bellamy (8 September 1944 – 24 September 1991) was an English folk singer. He was a founding member of The Young Tradition and also had a long solo career, recording numerous albums and touring folk clubs and concert halls. He is noted for his ballad-opera '' The Transports'', and has been acknowledged as a major influence by performers of later generations including Damien Barber and Jon Boden. Early years Peter Bellamy was born in Bournemouth, England, and spent his formative years in North Norfolk, living in the village of Warham and attending Fakenham Grammar School in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His father, Richard Reynell Bellamy, worked as a farm bailiff at that time. Peter Bellamy studied at Norwich School of Art, and later at the Berkshire College of Art and Design in Maidenhead, under Peter Blake, and decades later still retained something of the flamboyant art student image, being described as looking like a latter-day Andy Warhol, with blon ...
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Baritone
A baritone is a type of classical male singing voice whose vocal range lies between the bass and the tenor voice-types. The term originates from the Greek (), meaning "heavy sounding". Composers typically write music for this voice in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C (i.e. F2–F4) in choral music, and from the second A below middle C to the A above middle C (A2 to A4) in operatic music, but the range can extend at either end. Subtypes of baritone include the baryton-Martin baritone (light baritone), lyric baritone, ''Kavalierbariton'', Verdi baritone, dramatic baritone, ''baryton-noble'' baritone, and the bass-baritone. History The first use of the term "baritone" emerged as ''baritonans'', late in the 15th century, usually in French sacred polyphonic music. At this early stage it was frequently used as the lowest of the voices (including the bass), but in 17th-century Italy the term was all-encompassing and used to describe the ave ...
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World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fighting occurring throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific Ocean, Pacific, and parts of Asia. An estimated 9 million soldiers were killed in combat, plus another 23 million wounded, while 5 million civilians died as a result of military action, hunger, and disease. Millions more died in Genocides in history (World War I through World War II), genocides within the Ottoman Empire and in the Spanish flu, 1918 influenza pandemic, which was exacerbated by the movement of combatants during the war. Prior to 1914, the European great powers were divided between the Triple Entente (comprising French Third Republic, France, Russia, and British Empire, Britain) and the Triple A ...
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Ministry Of Food Control
The Minister of Food Control (1916–1921) and the Minister of Food (1939–1958) were British government ministerial posts separated from that of the Minister of Agriculture. In the Great War the Ministry sponsored a network of canteens known as National Kitchens. In the Second World War a major task of the Ministry was to oversee rationing in the United Kingdom arising out of World War II. The Minister was assisted by a Parliamentary Secretary. The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Food and Animal Welfare (2018–present) was appointed at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to ensure the continued supply of sufficient food during the Brexit process. The ministry's work was transferred in 1921 to the Board of Trade which had a small Food Department between the wars. This became its Food (Defence Plans) Department in 1937 and was then constituted as the Ministry of Food on the outbreak of war in 1939. ''Jamie's Ministry of Food'' was a 2008 UK ...
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U-boats
U-boats were naval submarines operated by Germany, particularly in the First and Second World Wars. Although at times they were efficient fleet weapons against enemy naval warships, they were most effectively used in an economic warfare role ( commerce raiding) and enforcing a naval blockade against enemy shipping. The primary targets of the U-boat campaigns in both wars were the merchant convoys bringing supplies from Canada and other parts of the British Empire, and from the United States, to the United Kingdom and (during the Second World War) to the Soviet Union and the Allied territories in the Mediterranean. German submarines also destroyed Brazilian merchant ships during World War II, causing Brazil to declare war on both Germany and Italy on 22 August 1942. The term is an anglicised version of the German word ''U-Boot'' , a shortening of ''Unterseeboot'' ('under-sea-boat'), though the German term refers to any submarine. Austro-Hungarian Navy submarines were als ...
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David Alfred Thomas, 1st Viscount Rhondda
David Alfred Thomas, 1st Viscount Rhondda, PC (26 March 1856 – 3 July 1918), was a Welsh industrialist and Liberal politician. He was UK Member of Parliament (MP) for Merthyr Tydfil from 1888 until the January 1910 general election, then MP for Cardiff until the December 1910 general election, when he left politics to concentrate on his business interests. He was made a member of the Privy Council in 1916. He later held office, notably as "Food Controller" in Lloyd George's wartime coalition government. Early life The son of coal owner Samuel Thomas of Ysguborwen, David Thomas was a second-generation industrialist. His energy and flair for innovation swiftly led him to build a commercial empire larger than his father's. Samuel, a man not noted for a cheerful temperament, is said to have remarked on the day of his son's birth (during a thunderstorm), "Well, I see nothing for him but the workhouse."Rhondda, M. ''et al'' (1921) ''D. A. Thomas: Viscount Rhondda''. London: Long ...
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The Unthanks
The Unthanks (until 2009 called Rachel Unthank and the Winterset) are an English folk group known for their eclectic approach in combining traditional English folk, particularly Northumbrian folk music, with other musical genres."They may call themselves folk musicians, but it is the strains of jazz, foreign scales and other unlikely influences that set The Unthanks apart from the rest of the Neo-folk movement.""The Unthanks seem to regard folk music the same way Miles Davis regarded jazz: as a launchpad for exploring the wider possibilities." Their debut album, '' Cruel Sister'', was ''Mojo'' magazine's Folk Album of the Year in 2005. Of their subsequent albums, nine have received four or five-starred reviews in the British national press. Their album '' Mount the Air'', released in 2015, won in the best album category in the 2016 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. In 2017 they released two albums featuring the songs and poems of Molly Drake, mother of singer-songwriter and musician ...
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The Fringes Of The Fleet
''The Fringes of the Fleet'' is a booklet written in 1915 by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). The booklet contains essays and poems about nautical subjects in World War I. It is also the title of a song-cycle written in 1917 with music by the English composer Edward Elgar and lyrics from poems in Kipling's booklet. Kipling's booklet In 1915 Kipling was commissioned by ''The Daily Telegraph'' to write a series of six articles on his view of life in less well-known aspects of the defence of the nation on its seas. These were given the general title "The Fringes of the Fleet", and had three sub-titles "The Auxiliaries", "Submarines" and "Patrols", and published between 20 November and 2 December. Each was prefaced by a short poem which did not have a title itself. Immediately afterwards the poems and essays were re-published in a booklet called "The Fringes of the Fleet". *1. The Auxiliaries – I :The text opens with a poem '' The Lowestoft Boat'' which starts with the words ''"I ...
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