Roger England
Sheffield, UK
roger@workable.net
0114 268 0951
workable.net
Roger's talks are now delivered for a charity contribution to Bees for Development
Talks by Roger England
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Lady Mary lived in the eighteenth century, a time of the rise of science and scientific medicine, wars within Britain and abroad, the rise of newspapers and novels, and a time of great inequality of income and opportunity. Despite a difficult family life Lady Mary steered a successful path through all these challenges and her achievements are becoming of increasing interest to modern researchers. She excelled in writing (poetry, newspapers, letters), in travelling (the first Western person to visit a harem), and in promoting the only deterrent to smallpox in Europe before vaccination was discovered. She has local connections to Sheffield and she and her son have large portraits in the Graves gallery.
History of Wortley and its Hall
The history of Wortley is largely bound up with great ups-and-downs of the the Wortley family from Domesday times to the 1950s, when their ancestral home of Wortley Hall became a "worker's stately home", working for trades unions and the socialist movement. The talk utilises an illustrated manorial roll of the late seventeenth century.