East is East, and West is West, and never the twain... - Oh, wait, I forgot about Greenwich


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Published: June 1st 2022
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We started our day with an early hotel departure in order to get front row places to see what we could of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. While I am sure the guard is actually changed regularly, the ceremony with accompanying band and horse troops is only done about 4 times per week, weather and covid allowing. It is actually a complicated procedure, involving horse troops, marching troops, a military band, and three venues (St. James Palace, Buckingham Palace, and Wellington Barracks). It includes troops marching, riding, and performing up and down the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace. known as The Mall. That was our chose vantage point. You don't see the actual ceremony from there, but the area in front of Buckingham Palace is currently very disrupted due to preparations for Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.What we missed was the part where all the units that we saw on the Mall get together and do a great deal of what the Navy used to call milling about smartly. The red uniforms and bearskin hats are quite showy. However, I must give one piece of advice to the Brits, who otherwise put on a fine show: find yourself a John Philip Sousa or equivalent. Your band sounded like a dirge machine.

We strolled through beautiful St. James Park with its willow-lined lake on our way to a tube station to take us to our next stop, the Tower of London. This World Heritage Site was founded in 1066 as part of the Norman conquest. Construction on the White Tower, probably the most famous structure on the site, was begun in 1078. The Tower of London was primarily to serve as a royal residence, and was deliberately constructed to be an oppressive presence to help control rule over the Londoners. During its existence it has served as a residence, armory, menagerie, office of public records, prison, torture chamber, execution site, home of there Royal Mint, and most recently as the home to the Crown Jewels and one of the most popular tourist sites in London. Touring the outer walls you encounter several areas that have served as royal residences, and also pass by the Traitor's Gate, a water entrance into the castle from the Thames. Notable prisoners such as Sir Thomas More were often brought in by this entrance. I am sure there is some clever
Clipper ship Cutty Sark 002 London UK 050822Clipper ship Cutty Sark 002 London UK 050822Clipper ship Cutty Sark 002 London UK 050822

Robbie, Jennie, Jim on the Cutty Sark
line about Watergate in here somewhere, but it eludes me at present.

The centerpiece of the visit is the visit to the White Tower itself. One portion holds the Crown Jewels. Gazing at these large stones of varied hues, one cannot help but think of the famous line from Mel Brooks' History of the World Part I - "It's good to be the king". The 505 carat Culling diamond and the 105 carat Koh-I-Noor diamond are used in crowns, along with large sapphires, emeralds, and rubies. They are technically the property of the monarch, but with restrictions with regard to any possible sale.

Another part of the White Tower is the armory collection, with suits of armor, weapons from various ages, and some instruments of torture as well as a large wooden block carved in such a way as the readily present the neck for beheadings.

Outside on a green lawn we saw several of the famous ravens of the Tower of London. Legend has it that the royal observer asked King Charles II to have the ravens exterminated at the Tower, some time in the early 1700's, because they were interfering with his observations and their droppings were befouling his instruments. Charles ordered their destruction, but was told that if the ravens ever left the Tower that a great disaster for the Tower and the monarch would follow. He therefore decreed that 6 ravens must always be kept at the Tower. A dedicated Beefeater is the Ravenmaster, and he maintains the required number of 6 plus one for a spare if needed. Their wings are partially clipped so that they are not able to fly very far. They are fed daily a diet of raw meat and blood-soaked bird biscuits, plus one egg a week and occasional kitchen scraps. This diet is apparently lacking one essential element, since in one of the few raven escapes the raven named Grog escaped after 21 years at the Tower, and was last seen outside an East End pub called the Rose and Punchbowl. Today's fun fact; a group of ravens is called an unkindness of ravens.

We next headed over to St. Paul Cathedral, the second largest cathedral in Great Britain, after that in Liverpool. It stands on a site that has been occupied by a church dedicated to St. Paul since 604 CE. It is an imposing edifice that was the tallest building in London until the 1960's, and along with its daily functions has served as the site of many royal and dignitary funerals and weddings, as well as thanksgiving services after the ends of World War I and II and during celebrations of significant anniversaries for the crown. We had hoped to be able to visit after mass let out about noon, but arrived early and found that we could only enter on Sunday to attend services, so we went in for the last few minutes of mass and then left with the rest of the crowd. We had no chance to explore.

From the Cathedral we took the tube to the clipper ship Cutty Sark. The ship is the last survivor of the great British tea clippers. It was built in 1869, at the end of the era of building sailing vessels to transport tea. That same year the Suez Canal opened and along with improvements in fuel efficiency enabled steamships to become a faster alternative. The name of the ship is from the overly short (and therefore revealing) undergarment worn by Nannie Dee, a witch in Robert Burns' poem Tam O'Shanter. The
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Buddy standing in two hemispheres
carved figurehead was of a bare-breasted Nannie Dee. Speed was of the essence in transport of a seasonal commodity such as tea, and Cut Sark was the fastest of the clippers. But as she lived by speed, she died by speed. Replaced the tea trade by faster steamships, she was sold to a Portuguese company and carried wool from Australia. Eventually she was bought back by a sea captain and used as a training vessel, before eventually being placed in dry dock storage in Greenwich near the Royal Navy College. The area nearby is a popular gathering place, and very near the entrance to an underwater foot bridge going under the Thames. The area across the Thames is known as Isle of Dogs. It is the site of Poplar, made known to the wider world in the popular British series Call the Midwife. It includes the undoubtedly beautiful Mudchute Farm and Park.

Leaving the Cutty Sark, we re-traced our steps (actually, it was an Uber, but I think the larger point holds) to the Royal Greenwich Observatory Museum. Commissioned in 1675, the Royal Observatory sits atop a hill in Greenwich, looking down on a broad green backed by the
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View over large green space to Queen's House
Queen's House and the Thames itself. From its inception, it has had as its main charter the work necessary to make for safe ship navigation, in particular the determination of longitude. Concurrent with the commissioning of the Observatory was the appointment of the Royal Observer, whose job was to "apply himself with the most exact care and diligence to the rectifying of the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find out the so much desired longitude of places for the perfecting of the art of navigation."

Most of the work of the Observatory has been related to that accurate star charting, often using a transit circle, a type of telescope with restricted travel, used to measure positions of the sun and stars relative to a fixed meridian. Initially many countries had their own meridians, the fixed lines marking the zero point for longitude. However, the nautical prominence and worldwide of the British Empire resulted in agreement on the meridian at Greenwich as the international prime meridian. It is defined in terms of the relationship of the line to the magnetic vectors at Greenwich. It was adopted as an international standard in 1884. More recent measurements have led to the actual location of the International Terrestrial Reference Frame to be about 102 meters to the east.

Once the prime meridian was established, one could fix one's position on the oceans by using a simple measuring instrument to determine the elevation of the North Star above the horizon. In the Southern Hemisphere the calculations were a little more difficult, but still not too unwieldy. Determination of longitude was a considerably more complicated endeavor. It was recognized early on that accurate timing of celestial events could be used, but this required a precise timepiece in order to compare the timing of the event with its timing a t a place of origin where it was defined. The Scilly disaster, in which four British warships were lost along with 1500-2000 sailors off the Scilly islands because of inaccurate longitude determination, made it clear that dead reckoning was not going to be sufficient. The Longitude Act provide for a very princely sum of ₤20,000 to anyone who could invent a timepiece of sufficient accuracy and shipboard utility as to be useful in determining longitude within first 10 then 0.50. A self-taught carpenter,
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John Harrison's second timepiece
musician, and clockmaker named John Harrison produced 5 timepieces over 3 decades, the last (called H4) finally being judged the winner of the prize. After experimenting with much larger types of mechanisms, he eventually ended up with what looked like an overly large pocket watch. Along the way he had to invent component parts such as bimetallic strips and roller bearings, as well as a mechanism that allowed the clock to continue running while being wound. If you have not read Data Sobel's book Longitude I highly recommend it. Makes for fascinating reading. Outside the observatory is a stainless steel marker line on the ground marking the division between east and west which makes a popular photo site.

Even an accurate timepiece requires synchronization from time to time, and so atop the Observatory is a time ball, a ball on a staff that is dropped precisely at 1 PM every day. From its position atop the observatory which itself is set on a tall hill, it would be possible for the ships in the docks at the East End of London to get an accurate starting point for their timepieces.

As an aside, I have frequently observed Chinese horse chestnuts dripping with panicles of white flowers when in Europe in the spring, but this was the first time I got to see the beautiful blossoms up close.

We concluded our day with the obligatory visit to Platform 9¾ at King's Cross Station.


Additional photos below
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Royal Observatory Greenwich 028 London UK 050822

John Harrison's fourth timepiece, which won him the prize
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Tower of London 043 London UK 050722

Buddy, Jennie along ramparts
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Tower of London 026 London UK 050722

The ravens of the Tower of London


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