Latest news with #HerefordCathedral
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
City to host UK's first military history festival
A military history festival that is the first of its kind in the UK is set to take place in Hereford. The festival will feature talks and panel discussions about conflict and the lessons history provides in a time of geopolitical instability. The line-up includes historian Antony Beevor, authors Ben Macintyre and Lord Daniel Finkelstein, as well as Winston Churchill's grandson, Sir Nicholas Soames. The event will be set across three venues in the city - Hereford Cathedral, The Green Dragon Hotel and the Castle Green Pavilion - and will run from 26 to 28 September. The festival will also feature discussions with Kate Adie, Philippe Sands, Claire Mulley, and Conn Iggulden, and explore global military history through a variety of themes. A spokesperson for the festival said Hereford was the "perfect setting" for the event, as it was "steeped in history" and had been a "military stronghold for over two millennia". Founder Christian Dangerfield said he had been planning the festival for five years. "We started thinking about the festival in 2020, a long time before defence and geopolitics came back into focus in such a big way. He added that the SAS headquarters in Credenhill, on the edge of the city was a "constant reminder" of what was going on in the world. Mr Dangerfield said the range of the talks would be "very thought-provoking and stimulating". The festival will also host a schools programme aimed at helping young people gain a better understanding of the role of military history in shaping the modern world. The full event programme will be released later in the year. Follow BBC Hereford & Worcester on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram. New festival will celebrate county's history Medieval festival for city wins business backing Hereford Military Festival
BBC News
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
New statue of Hereford dog that inspired Elgar composition
A much loved pet that inspired the composer Edward Elgar has been honoured in a stone sculpture. Dan the bulldog is the hero of Elgar's 11th Enigma Variation, but a wooden statue in Hereford installed in 2002 was looking a bit worse for wear. With funding from Hereford Guild of Mayor's Guides, a new sculpture of Dan has been carved in local sandstone and will soon be back on the banks of the River Wye. "It's amazing. For so long, when we've taken our walks along the river bank we've been a bit sorry to show people poor old Dan in his shabby state," said Angela Eaton from the guild. "He was thrown into the river at one point and travelled downstream to Mordiford, where he was spotted by a local resident," Ms Eaton said."He installed him in his own garden and tried to hold Herefordshire Council to ransom for not looking after him properly." The original Dan was a much-loved pet of the former organist at Hereford Cathedral, George Robertson 1898, he was walking along the River Wye with his friend Edward Elgar when Dan fell into the 14 parts of Elgar's orchestral work are inspired by one of his dedicated the 11th to Dan and recreated the sounds of him falling down the bank, paddling upstream and celebrating climbing out with a new sculpture has been carved by Saul Sheldon at Hereford Cathedral's Stonemason's Yard, a few metres away from where the real Dan lived. "He's climbing out of the reeds, out of the river," said Mr Sheldon. "If he was just sat there, gazing up at the clouds it would have been a bit easier I suppose but it's nice to do something a bit different."The old wooden one, he's been on his travels down the Wye."Hopefully this one will be much harder to tip over, that's for sure." The new stone Dan has been funded by the Hereford Guild of Mayor's Guides, the Elmley Foundation, Hereford City Council and the Herefordshire Community will be on permanent display on the Bishop's Meadow, opposite Hereford sculpture will be unveiled on 26 July to mark the opening of the Three Choirs Festival in original wooden carving of Dan will be put on display at Hereford Museum.
Indian Express
24-04-2025
- General
- Indian Express
Opinion The Bard's love story and a Shakespearean twist
Like any good Shakespearean revelation, this comes not with thunder and lightning, but in ink and parchment. A crumbling letter has upended one of literary history's long-held assumptions — that William Shakespeare abandoned his wife Anne Hathaway in Stratford-upon-Avon while he made his fortune in London. Analysed by professor Matthew Steggle of the University of Bristol, the fragment found in the binding of a book in Hereford Cathedral's library and addressed to 'Good Mrs Shakspaire' suggests Anne may have been far more present in his life than the myth of the forsaken provincial wife allows: It is an appeal to her by a London widow to repay the money entrusted to Shakespeare by her husband. Biographers have chipped away at Anne's agency over the centuries. She has been cast variously as a supportive wife bringing up their three children in the countryside while running the family brewery, a woman of weary estrangement, a harridan who forced Shakespeare into marriage because she was pregnant with their child. But what if Shakespeare's creative life and their marriage weren't at odds? What if Anne was Sonnet 137's 'fair truth' — not an absence in his story, but its quiet anchor? In his will, Shakespeare had bequeathed '…my second best bed with the furniture' to Anne, interpreted by later scholars as a snub. But in the Elizabethan world, the second-best, often the marital bed, symbolised fidelity; the 'best' was usually kept in the guest room as a status symbol.
