Ferguson's Gang

Ferguson's Gang PDF Author: Polly Bagnall
Publisher: National Trust
ISBN: 1909881864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
1927. Britain’s heritage is vanishing. Beautiful landscapes are being bulldozed. Historic buildings are being blown up. Stonehenge is collapsing. Enter Ferguson’s Gang, a mysterious and eccentric group of women who help the National Trust to fight back. The Gang raise huge sums, which they deliver in delightfully strange ways: Victorian coins inside a fake pineapple, a one hundred pound note stuffed inside a cigar, five hundred pounds with a bottle of homemade sloe gin. Their stunts are avidly reported in the press, and when they make a national appeal for the Trust, the response is overwhelming. Ferguson’s Gang is instrumental in saving places from Cornwall to the Lake District, a legacy of incalculable value. Yet somehow these women stay anonymous, hiding behind masks and bizarre pseudonyms such as Bill Stickers, Red Biddy, the Bludy Beershop and Sister Agatha. They carefully record their exploits, their rituals, even their elaborate picnics, but they take their real names to the grave. Now Sally Beck and Polly Bagnall can reveal the identities of these unlikely national heroes and tell the stories of their fascinating and often unconventional lives. With the help of relatives, colleagues and friends, we can finally get to know the women who combined a serious mission with such a sense of mischief.

Ferguson's Gang

Ferguson's Gang PDF Author: Polly Bagnall
Publisher: National Trust
ISBN: 1909881864
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
1927. Britain’s heritage is vanishing. Beautiful landscapes are being bulldozed. Historic buildings are being blown up. Stonehenge is collapsing. Enter Ferguson’s Gang, a mysterious and eccentric group of women who help the National Trust to fight back. The Gang raise huge sums, which they deliver in delightfully strange ways: Victorian coins inside a fake pineapple, a one hundred pound note stuffed inside a cigar, five hundred pounds with a bottle of homemade sloe gin. Their stunts are avidly reported in the press, and when they make a national appeal for the Trust, the response is overwhelming. Ferguson’s Gang is instrumental in saving places from Cornwall to the Lake District, a legacy of incalculable value. Yet somehow these women stay anonymous, hiding behind masks and bizarre pseudonyms such as Bill Stickers, Red Biddy, the Bludy Beershop and Sister Agatha. They carefully record their exploits, their rituals, even their elaborate picnics, but they take their real names to the grave. Now Sally Beck and Polly Bagnall can reveal the identities of these unlikely national heroes and tell the stories of their fascinating and often unconventional lives. With the help of relatives, colleagues and friends, we can finally get to know the women who combined a serious mission with such a sense of mischief.

Ferguson's Gang - The Maidens behind the Masks

Ferguson's Gang - The Maidens behind the Masks PDF Author: Anna Hutton-North
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1291538941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
When a group of friends formed 'Ferguson's Gang' they had no idea of the notoriety their antics would produce. Society was astounded by the daring tricks the Gang used to raise money but these were no common robbers. They presented the booty in the carcass of a goose or wrapped round a cigar; pledging undying support to the National Trust. Their greatest feat was preserving their anonymity; now almost a century later the fascinating story of Ferguson's Gang is finally revealed in this book. It is a world now forgotten; of genteel tea parties, debutantes' balls and stately homes with armies of servants. Yet amongst this wealth and splendour lurked a group of rebels. The personal stories of the masked maidens are startling; mixing with Royalty, they belonged to the leading political dynasties and rubbed shoulders with the literary elite. It is no wonder these women kept their identities so heavily concealed.

Ferguson's Gang

Ferguson's Gang PDF Author: Polly Bagnall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Historic buildings
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Book Of Ferguson's Gang

Book Of Ferguson's Gang PDF Author: Andrew Thackery
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Ferguson's Gang, formed during a picnic at Tothill Fields in London in 1927, was an anonymous and somewhat enigmatic group that raised funds for the National Trust during the period from 1930 until 1947. The inner circle of the group was six women, who hid their identities behind masks, unusual pseudonyms, and mock-Cockney communiqués. They took the following pseudonyms: Bill Stickers, Sister Agatha, Kate O'Brien The Nark, Red Biddy, The Lord Beershop of the Gladstone Islands, and Mercator's Projection (The Bloody Beer shop, or Is B) and Shot Biddy. When a group of friends formed 'Ferguson's Gang' they had no idea of the notoriety their antics would produce. Society was astounded by the daring tricks the Gang used to raise money, but these were no common robbers, they presented the booty in the carcass of a goose or wrapped around a cigar. Pledging undying support to the National Trust, the Gang passionately fought against the spread of urbanization and destruction of our English heritage.

Doom

Doom PDF Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593297385
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
"All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.

Ferguson's Gang

Ferguson's Gang PDF Author: Polly Bagnall
Publisher: National Trust
ISBN: 9781909881211
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Ferguson’s Gang was a mysterious and deeply eccentric group of women operating in the 1930s who combined anarchic stunts and fine dining with saving the English countryside. Disturbed by the growing destruction of British landscape and historic buildings in the UK, they began to raising money for the National Trust, which a masked member would deliver in bizarre ways—Victorian coins sewn into a goose's carcass, a one hundred pound note wrapped around a cigar, or cash stuffed into miniature bottles. Fuelled by delicious food hampers from Fortnum & Mason, they travelled the country finding property and land under threat. Their escapades were followed religiously by the national press, and when "Ferguson" broadcast a BBC radio appeal on behalf of the Trust, they netted six hundred new members and hundreds of pounds. The Gang helped to save many properties and tracts of the Cornish coast, and supported appeals to buy land in the Lake District, Devon, and Wiltshire. To preserve their anonymity they wore masks and adopted pseudonyms (including "Bill Stickers", "Red Biddy", "The Bloody Beershop", and "The Artichoke"). They remained anonymous until their deaths, but with the help of their relatives, colleagues and friends of the Gang, Polly Bagnall and Sally Beck provide the true facts and reveal this group of eccentric English women in all their glory for the first time.

Cumberland Blood

Cumberland Blood PDF Author: Thomas D. Mays
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809387034
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
By the end of the Civil War, Champ Ferguson had become a notorious criminal whose likeness covered the front pages of Harper’s Weekly, Leslie’s Illustrated, and other newspapers across the country. His crime? Using the war as an excuse to steal, plunder, and murder Union civilians and soldiers. Cumberland Blood: Champ Ferguson’s Civil War offers insights into Ferguson's lawless brutality and a lesser-known aspect of the Civil War, the bitter guerrilla conflict in the Appalachian highlands, extending from the Carolinas through Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. This compelling volume delves into the violent story of Champ Ferguson, who acted independently of the Confederate army in a personal war that eventually garnered the censure of Confederate officials. Author Thomas D. Mays traces Ferguson's life in the Cumberland highlands of southern Kentucky, where—even before the Civil War began—he had a reputation as a vicious killer. Ferguson, a rising slave owner, sided with the Confederacy while many of his neighbors and family members took up arms for the Union. For Ferguson and others in the highlands, the war would not be decided on the distant fields of Shiloh or Gettysburg: it would be local—and personal. Cumberland Blood describes how Unionists drove Ferguson from his home in Kentucky into Tennessee, where he banded together with other like-minded Southerners to drive the Unionists from the region. Northern sympathizers responded, and a full-scale guerrilla war erupted along the border in 1862. Mays notes that Ferguson's status in the army was never clear, and he skillfully details how raiders picked up Ferguson's gang to work as guides and scouts. In 1864, Ferguson and his gang were incorporated into the Confederate army, but the rogue soldier continued operating as an outlaw, murdering captured Union prisoners after the Battle of Saltville, Virginia. Cumberland Blood, enhanced by twenty-one illustrations, is an illuminating assessment of one of the Civil War's most ruthless men. Ferguson's arrest, trial, and execution after the war captured the attention of the nation in 1865, but his story has been largely forgotten. Cumberland Blood: Champ Ferguson's Civil War returns the story of Ferguson's private civil war to its place in history.

The Press Gang

The Press Gang PDF Author: Nicholas Rogers
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826423736
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
The press gang, and its forcible recruitment of sailors to man the Royal Navy in times of war, acquired notoriety for depriving men of their liberty and carrying them away to a harsh life at sea, sometimes for years at a time. Nicholas Rogers explains exactly how the press gang worked, whom it was aimed at and how successful it was in achieving its ends. He also shows the limits to its operations and the press gang's need for cooperation from local authorities, who were by no means prepared to support it. Written by an expert in the social history of eighteenth-century Britain, it is both well-researched and highly readable.

The Ferguson Gang

The Ferguson Gang PDF Author: Steven Bissett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781676078692
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Jase Walker is a happy man. He's about to get married and finally settle down into the life he's wanted for years. His sweetheart Cindy Hoffman is on a stage headed west to meet him, and within a week they'll be married.But the warning of a dying friend changes all that. Derrick Ferguson, renegade, outlaw, killer, is out of jail and gunning for him. And he's only minutes away with a gang of cutthroats only less dangerous than himself.Can Walker overcome such odds by himself, or will he become just another casualty of the vicious Ferguson Gang?

The Crazy Gang

The Crazy Gang PDF Author: Dave Bassett
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473526906
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
'If we can sell Newcastle Brown to Japan, and if Wimbledon can make it to the First Division, there is surely no achievement beyond our reach.' Margaret Thatcher The Crazy Gang is the story of a football miracle. Promoted to the Football League in 1977, Wimbledon FC was a small team from south London that against the odds went all the way to the top of the First Division, then to win the FA Cup, in only just over a decade. With no money, scant resources and a blend of youth players and offcuts from other clubs, they were christened 'Rag-Arse Rovers'. They played hard on the pitch and partied hard off it. Dave 'Harry' Bassett was the manager who drilled a fierce fighting spirit into his players, an unbreakable team ethos, but he was also an underrated master tactician and pioneer of innovative training methods. Wally Downes was the midfield fulcrum of the Dons, but also the ringleader for the various acts of debauchery and general silliness that earned the club their reputation. In The Crazy Gang, Harry and Wally are joined by a host of former Wimbledon players and staff, both famous names like Vinnie Jones, Lawrie Sanchez and Dave Beasant, but also unsung heroes in the club's history, to tell it as it really was. This is real football, the way fans remember it, and a world away from multimillionaire Premier League primadonnas.