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It had been discovered, by 1975, that an eighteenth-century manuscript on English strata written by a John Player had been donated to a museum in Bath, England in 1857. The hunt for this, lost since some time after 1879, led in 1991 to the realization that an earlier MSS version had survived in private hands. This paper is the result of a collaboration between Madeleine Gill, historian and lineal descendant of the Gloucestershire Quaker John Player (1725-1808), Hugh Torrens, an historian of English geology. We first investigate, and publish part of, Player's MSS 'Observations on the Strata of the Earth' of 1765/1766. Its content is highly complex, because of the lack of any adequate terminology which would have allowed Player to describe the many lithologies he had encountered, coupled with his failure to give any place names to the localities at which he had found them. The later history of this MSS is next discussed, and how it came to the attention in 1801 of the circle which then surrounded William Smith at nearby Bath. But this was clearly too late to have influenced Smith directly. It was next discovered that Player had also been the author of a series of articles between 1764 and 1766 in the journal Museum Rusticum, which was an early publishing outlet in support of the work of the Society of Arts, founded in London in 1754. Player wrote these articles under the pseudonym of \"Ruricola Glocestris\". His first article, which gave \"easy-to-be-known signs by which to direct the search for Coal\", gave us a second, printed, source by which we could investigate his early investigations of English strata. It became clear that his main interest was in helping the discovery of unknown deposits of coal, outside the known coal fields, which were fuelling the nascent 'Industrial Revolution' here, and which now surrounded Player as he worked, first as a farmer, and later as a significant land surveyor, widely away from his Gloucestershire base. The final parts of our paper discuss the history of the English study of strata. Here we reject Martin Rudwick's claim that this had owed much, or anything, to German geognosy. We support this by pointing out that Player had been preceded by John Strachey, whose earlier work on such strata we also discuss, as we do that of Player's contemporary, John Michell. Finally, we urge the importance of coal, which fuelled the world's first 'Industrial Revolution' in Britain, and which historians now point out has provided the 'key break in the history of humanity'. We hope this paper will inspire others to examine more the effects that coal and its 'Revolution' have had on the rise of the new science of geology.

In 1948, John Strachey, as UK food minister, announced to the nation that a certain South African fish was good, palatable, a little dull maybe, but delicious in sandwiches. Snoek is a bony, oily fish of the Southern seas and it had a frosty reception in the north.

During my first week in Shekhpur I asked if anyone had ever spoken of the hedge. No one could help. At first I was not too downcast because the village was 20 miles from the supposed line of the hedge and in the 19th century people probably never moved far from home. But then I began to think that they must have needed salt and the Customs Hedge, and the salt tax levied on crossing it, would have been something to complain about. I set off to look for the hedge by Land-Rover but found no evidence of it. It is impossible to say who first had the idea of making the customs barrier a live green hedge. We know from the reports that by 1854 the hedge, both as an idea and in practice, was energetically taking root. G. H. Smith, Commissioner of Customs from 1834 to 1854, wrote: \"In the performance of their preventative duties, the establishment are aided in many beats by a thick horny hedge . . . raised sufficiently high to prevent its being surmounted without being broken through . . . In his report of 1869-70, Commissioner Allan Octavian Hume noted: \"With the dry hedge, our labour is as that of Sisyphus, ceaseless and, beyond the immediate moment, resultless . . . Except, therefore, where we cross bare solid rock, a live hedge is what we aim at, but no one who has not taken in hand the cultivation of a thousand miles of live hedge, stretching over a vast continent, where soil and climate are not only variable in the extreme, but, as in our case, too often adverse to a degree to any line of continuous vegetation, can form any conception of the Herculean labour this involves.\"

BACK BITE January 28, 1985 n THE Herald recorded the death of veteran journalist James Cameron. \"His career took him to virtually every country in the world. He was the doyen of Britain's foreign correspondents. He was a man of great integrity. After working in Manchester, Dundee and Glasgow, he joined the Daily Express in Fleet Street, where he resigned on a point of principle because of a campaign against John Strachey, a Minister in the Attlee Government. James Cameron was always a socialist.

In so far as one individual can be said to have saved Ghana's cocoa industry that individual is surely [Eric Stewart Packham] - Secretary of Agriculture in Accra in the 1950s. Packham made it an almost personal crusade to urge his many African friendstoadoptmorecarefulwaysoftendingthe cocoa. Had he not done so, Ghana's plantations might have gone the same way as the ill-fated ground-nuts scheme initiated by John Strachey in the 1940s. Eric Packham was the son of an army officer. Born in Ipswich, he attended Hove Grammar School and then the London School of Economics. After undertaking a postgraduate Colonial Officers' Development Course in 1938 at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he was posted to the Gold Coast just before the outbreak of war. He enlisted in the Gold Coast Regiment and saw fighting in Abyssinia and Italy - returning to the Gold Coast in 1946, and becoming Secretary for Agriculture in 1952; he was to remain in post for four years after the colony won its independence as Ghana in 1957.

Meanwhile, there was the other great area of stress. 'The Christmas gift-hunt has turned into a strenuous obstacle-race,' declared Vogue, 'with increased austerity adding to the triumph of finding just the right gift, whether it is something gay and decorative or something that is doubly practical now.' One of the magazine's tips - 'Thermos food jar, greatest boon in fuel-cut crises, have hot food always ready to hand' - definitely fell into the latter category. Woman's Own helpfully suggested a list of make- your-own presents, including slippers for father ('the rate at which men wear their slippers out is little short of astonishing'), a footmuff for grandma made chiefly from an ex-Army gas-mask case, and for baby a 'beauty basket' requiring a fruit basket from the greengrocer. On the musical front, Melody Maker had most of the bases covered. Joe Loss's South America, Take it Away! for the Christmas party, Vera Lynn's How Lucky You Are for mum and dad, Ambrose's Swing Low, Sweet Clarinet for the sophisticated brother or boy friend, Frank Sinatra's One Love for the girlfriend. There was some football - thousands of cyclists among the 27,613 at Highfield Road watching Coventry beat Barnsley 3-2 - but for the great majority, with the bad weather spreading, an afternoon by the coal-burning hearth beckoned. At 3 o'clock, introduced by a Durham miner's wife, George VI gave the by-now traditional broadcast through the special golden microphone in his study at Sandringham. 'We all know what it is to toil up a steep hill,' he stammered with painful sincerity, 'only to find that what we had thought was the top is not the top after all, and that the path still leads upwards.' Straight afterwards, on the Light Programme, it was [Wilfred Pickles] again, hosting a 'Children's Party' from the Children's Hospital in Bradford where, dressed up as Santa Claus, he introduced his fellow stars (including June Whitfield) from the Cinderella panto at the Bradford Alhambra. There was even a link from the hospital to Walt Disney in Hollywood, who persuaded Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse to send their Christmas greetings to the children. That evening, in her hotel, [Gladys Langford] played hard to get - 'several people urged me to go into the bar, but I refused. I can't afford to waste an evening when I'm 57 plus!' - and perhaps listened instead to a Home Service talk on 'Christmas Nostalgia' in which John Betjeman contrasted 'the flavour of former Christmases with the canned Christmas of today'. But for [Florence Speed] in Brixton it was a 'night of wild dreams', with one of those dreams being about the 'negro clergyman' she had seen at the Abbey. 'The family went to Wolverhampton Races in the extreme cold wind,' a more upper-class diarist, James Lees-Milne, recorded on Boxing Day. 'Papa's horse was third and Mama says it is a dud. All morning I read Virginia Woolf's latest essays [the posthumous The Moment and Other Essays]. I really believe she is the best prose writer of this century.' Elsewhere, there were four other horse racing meetings, big crowds at football matches (Barnsley failing to get revenge at home to Coventry), and a full card of eight races at Walthamstow Stadium, the self-proclaimed 'Goodwood of Greyhound Racing'. The pantomime season was now in full swing, with the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, going to the Troxy in Stepney to see Claude Hulbert in Dick Whittington, while at the Queens Hotel in Torquay there was a 'Grand Boxing Day Dinner, Dance and Cabaret' for 25s, an occasion guaranteed to be 'Bright, happy and gay'. Soon after darkness fell, [Anthony Heap] and his wife made their way to Trafalgar Square 'to see the 48-feet-high, illuminated Christmas tree that has been sent to London from Norway'. It was a gift in gratitude for Britain's support for Norway during the war and would become an annual, enduring part of the Christmas ritual. 'Truly a pretty sight,' said Heap. 'And so back once more to our fireside, our books and our radio.'

[Stafford Cripps] was highly regarded in England as well, if for somewhat different reasons. The word \"image\" was not in general use then, though the concept it expressed was familiar enough, as it had been, indeed, since Victorian times. Cripps's image was one of political rectitude and personal austerity. In fact he was not as frugal as reputed, being a chain-smoker with a nice taste in wine which he could afford to indulge because he was very rich. He welcomed the image of \"austerity Cripps\" because it conformed to his own policy for the British people. He failed - he certainly thought he had failed - with the devaluation of 1949. Though surrounded by mountains such as Aneurin Bevan, Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison, he remained one of the glittering peaks of the first Attlee administration. Mr Gordon Brown shines with equal or greater luminosity in Mr Tony Blair's second administration, as he did in the first. But as Karl Marx once observed of John Stuart Mill, he stands out because of the flatness of the surrounding countryside. Cripps was as imposing a figure in the 1940s as Mr Brown is today. Cripps was not successful, whereas Roy Jenkins was. Barbara Castle and R H S Crossman led the prosecution in trying to make the case against him for having lost the 1970 election by omitting to fabricate a pre-election boom. But that election was probably lost through the devaluation of 1967, when James Callaghan was Chancellor. In any case, engineering a boom is not so much a matter of economic competence as of political skulduggery. Lord Jenkins was at the wicket for less time than Mr Brown but he scored a good number of runs in more difficult circumstances.