Aunt Branwell went about the house in pattens.

Emily Brontë

‏ @EmilyInGondal

6 uur

Aunt Branwell dreaded the cold damp arising from the flag floors in the Parsonage. She always went about the house in pattens, clicking up and down the stairs, from her dread of catching cold. Now she was gone we missed the sound...

6 uur geleden

To create this tea caddy......

To create this tea caddy, Charlotte wound coloured paper into tiny rolls and arranged them in a decorative pattern. This technique is known as quilling, and was a popular pastime for girls and women in the nineteenth century.
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We Will Remember Them: Remembrance Sunday 2018.

Very interesting article on the blog of Nick Holland  annebronte/we-will-remember-them-remembrance-sunday-2018

We are in the middle of a period known as the Brontë 200, marking the 200^th anniversaries of the births of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë, but today is a special day of an altogether different kind – the 100^th anniversary of the end of World War One. At 11am on the 11^th day of the 11^th month in 1918 the armistice came into place and the guns of the western front fell as silent as the men who lay buried beneath it; it was the war to end all wars, they said, but of course they were wrong.

The Brontës grew up in a time of relative peace on the international stage for Britain, although their parents’ generation had grown up when we were embroiled in the Napoleonic wars, so they heard story after story of legendary military leaders like Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, and Admiral Horatio Nelson, whose Brontë fiefdom in Sicily had inspired their own surname.

Captain Arthur Milton Cooper Branwell

Captain A M Branwell (HU 114269) Unit: 4th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Copyright: © IWM.

Another Branwell served a long career in the military and survived, Captain Arthur Milton Cooper Branwell. He was a veteran of the army who had been recalled at the start of World War 1, and had fought in the Boer War among other conflicts. We may think that a soldier in ‘The Great War’ must be a very distant relative of the Brontës, but in fact he was a very close one. Born in 1862, he was a first cousin once removed of the Brontë sisters – his father Thomas Brontë Branwell was the Brontë cousin who visited Charlotte and Patrick in Haworth in 1851, and his grandmother was Charlotte Branwell, after whom Charlotte Brontë was named. During World War One he was a Captain in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment’s 4th Brigade.

The following picture appeared in The Tatler of 23rd August 1916 when fighting on the Western Front was approaching its fiercest. As the senior officer, the grand looking Captain Branwell is seated at the centre, but as noted by the caption many of the officers around him were by then dead.

Captain Branwell himself escaped the horrors of the trenches however, as the 4th Brigade was the Royal Warwickshire’s Extra Reserve, and in fact it never left England during the duration of the war. He was heavily involved in training new recruits, and was ready and willing to fight in France if called upon, despite being then in his mid fifties; as the Tatler picture shows, Captain Branwell did arrive in France himself during the conflict, where he would have again taken a training role, passing on his wealth of experience on military matters.

Thomas Branwell paid the ultimate price, and Arthur Branwell was willing to do so, because they believed in their country, and they believed in the importance of freedom from tyranny – many millions then and since have followed a similar path, and today, and all days, we should and will remember them.

Read all on: annebronte/we-will-remember-them-remembrance-sunday-2018