When Scotland were World Champions (at football)

Oh Scotland, on #indyref  day: you don't need to prove your independence.  You were once World Champions of football.  In 1876 the Scottish football team beat ALL the other international football teams in the World - an accomplishment not equalled by England in 1966.  The fixtures and results:

Sunday 5 March 1876:   Scotland 3  -  0  England
Saturday 25 March 1876  Scotland 4  -  0 Wales

Yes, there were only the three international teams in 1876 and so Scotland "only" had to beat their two GB neighbours.  But by seven goals to nil.  Scotland really were champions of the world (before FIFA arrived and corrupted the beautiful game).

The game against England was the first international to have a 15 minute break in the middle and the chance to swap ends - which created the "game of two halves".  Playing with the wind coming from behind you (no stands or stadium to prevent weather arriving on the pitch) was a great advantage: the leather football (often soaking wet) was hard and heavy, extra movement from a gale was a benefit if it was blowing your way.  In this game the tape between the two goal posts was replaced by a wooden bar which made it the first all-wood frame with a crossbar in an international football match.  The "Scotchmen" as English newspapers would describe them, scored all three goals in the first half.

The game against Wales was the first outing for an international Welsh football team.  Originally the invitation for a game had been for a rugby match.  Scotland threw a gauntlet into the sports magazine "The Field" asking for a rugby game - and interested Welshmen met in the Wynnstay Arms Hotel in Wrexham and responded with a team to play football.

More info on the two games and all the other news from 1876 in the iPad book "In 1876: Bananas & Custer".  A big thank you to Wrexham Heritage Services for the use of their image of the Wales v Scotland programme. 

If you are not Scottish - or you are Scottish and not resident and therefore not allowed to vote - register your view on this poll for the same referendum question.

What is the driving test & seat belt equivalent of preventing Suicide?

The sad case of Robin Williams and his suicidal depression has brought the subject into polite conversation.  This graph shows how much easier it has been to talk about the visible problem of road deaths and easier to avoid the invisible subject of suicide.  A car accident is not necessarily the victim's fault; suicide by its very nature is seen as a personal choice - though depression can make it less an option and more like a compulsion.

You can see in this graph of a 100 years of car and population growth that more effort has gone into preventing Road deaths than Suicide.  Everyone now takes a driving test and wears a seat belt for even the shortest journey.  You can almost see the introduction of the driving test (1934), drink driving tests (1967) and compulsory seat belts for those in the front seat (1983). Car design is certainly safer.

Are there anti-depression activities we could all adopt that would be the equivalent?

The Red line is UK Suicides since 1901.  The Blue line is Road Traffic fatalities since 1926.  Scraping along the bottom of the scale are Railway Passenger fatalities since 1900.  It excludes suicide by train which is included in the Suicide figures.  (In the UK Suicide by Train has been running at around at about 150-200 annual deaths since 1995)

The reports of 1876 were full of accidents and wrecks.  Hundreds would be lost at sea or dozens die in train crashes.  I researched the stats to find out how fatal travel could be.  Although I could not find reliable shipping fatality figures, the interesting result I found was that suicide was just as deadly as transport.

www.in1876.com

Source:
Road Traffic Fatalities: Department of Transport (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/ras40-reported-accidents-vehicles-and-casualties#table-ras40001)
Rail Passenger Fatalities 1900 - 1948: Railway Archives
Rail Passenger Fatalities 1949 - 2011: Rail Board Ltd
Suicides:  Office of National Statistics & Samaritans 

Accomplice to murdering printed books

I love books.  Perhaps one of the signs that my marriage was in trouble was when my wife relegated our hundreds of books to the shed.  And yes, I carried them out there.  The rain broke through and many of the books were spoiled to the point of destruction.  That was not a metaphor for my marriage, real books were harmed.

And now I am all schizophrenic about my part in the eradication of the book.  Within 2 or 3 generations, paper books will go the way of the vinyl record.  There will be specialists and collectors but the mass consumption of words will be digital.  Probably in some way not even imagined by us today.  My books are only available on the iPad where they look beautiful and have behaviours that you cannot get in print.  I sacrificed the joy of a physical book for electronic functionality.  In actual fact I would not have been able to publish "In 1876: Bananas & Custer" in print; it is 2,000 pages with 1,000 mostly colour or colorised images.  Nobody would want to print or carry a book like that.  The digital format makes it easy to flick through the pages and skip around the bite-sized chunks you want.  And the illustrations look gorgeous on a back-lit screen.

It is the independent book sellers that I feel I have betrayed most.  Before I wrote my book I had done some Amazon shopping and then saw a local bookstore fail.  I changed my shopping habits and ordered new books from brick bookshops - though I started using eBay and Abebooks for old books for research.   Now my book cannot be sold in a proper bookstore, just in the difficult-to-fathom Apple iBookstore.  I have left real shelves.  It is so difficult for a reader to wander Apple's electronic bookcases and come across my book.

The second hand books I bought included first editions of some of the works that were first written/published or were topical in 1876.  One had a great story: my copy of the 5th edition of "The Unseen Universe" had a sticker in the front saying it was the property of Isabella L. Bishop, and had been given to H.A. Bird with an address of Tobermory, Mull and a date of October 19th 1876, both written by hand.  Google the names and you find H.A. was sister to Isabella and H.A.'s book likely passed in to Isabella's hands when H.A. passed away from typhoid.  Isabella Bird is known as a famous travel writer and the donor of the clock that stands in Tobermory as a memorial to her sister.

I have rescued the remaining books from the shelf; the marriage was not so lucky.  At some point I will have to go through them and find the memorabilia that has occasionally been left between the pages as book marks. I know there are dollars and Scottish pound notes in there somewhere.  Hopefully not in the ones that were mangled by damp.  The Scottish notes may soon be necessary for visits abroad up north.  I am not sure that I have left any bacon or diamonds in my books, not like in these stories:

http://www.abebooks.co.uk/docs/Community/Featured/found-in-books.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-U140717-h00-insideAM-141211HV-_-01cta&abersp=1