Plaques Wrapped in Bubble Wrap, Paragon Interchange, Hull, 08/11/14.

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Hull, Hull City of Culture 2017, Hull Daily Mail, memorials, Paragon Interchange Hull, Train stations, World War One

The Hull Daily Mail informs me that these memorial plaques are going to be unveiled tomorrow and as it happens I will be back in Hull on Monday, so I will be able to see them and photograph them without the bubble wrap to; God willing. The 20 plaques, recording the names of the 2,000 Hull servicemen who lost their lives during World War One, looked so striking this morning, even covered up, that I thought I would take some photographs.

 

“The Railwaymen’s Friend”, Bristol Temple Meads Railway Station, August 2014.

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Bristol, Bristol Temple Meads Station, flowers, Memorial plaques, memorials, Miss Emma Saunders, Public Transport, Railway Stations, The Railwaymen's Friend, Victorian., Victoriana

The plaque is on the wall behind the rather impressive flower arrangement.

This flower arrangement was probably worth a blog post all of its own, but it is obscuring something I found even more interesting…

Going deeper into the flowers…

It seems that Miss Emma Saunders, known as The Railway Men’s Friend or “The lady with the basket” was a Victorian woman with a mission. In brief Miss Saunders sort to stop the ever increasing numbers of Bristol railway employees from turning to alcoholism by handing out Christian literature and posies from her basket of flowers. She also set up Bristol & West of England Railwaymen’s Institute, the forerunner of the British Rail Staff Association, which offered railway workers with access to a canteen and a skittle alley. You can read more about Miss Saunders here: http://www.redland.org.uk/cgi-bin/page.cgi?20:20:32

Here’s a close up.

To quote Clifton Online’s “famous and infamous” section:

“Her funeral service at Christchurch on her 86^th birthday was conducted by three vicars and Clifton society rubbed shoulders with over a thousand of “her” railwaymen, all of whom wore a daffodil in her memory of their friend”.

Merchant Navy Memorial, Hull, 2014.

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Hull, Hull City of Culture 2017, Maritime Museum, memorials, Merchant Navy, Ships

The Memorial.

Striking, isn’t it? If you’re visiting Hull you will find it behind the Maritime Museum on Queen Victoria Square. You can’t really get an impression of the height of the memorial in this photograph photograph, but this article about on the BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-24867099) informs me that it is 13 feet (that’s 4 metres) high.