Gary Wallace

Samuel Ferguson

Samuel Ferguson, poet, antiquarian, barrister and archivist, was born in Belfast on 10 March 1810. He was the youngest of the six children of John and Agnes Ferguson. His father’s family had lived in Ulster since the seventeenth century but their property in county Antrim did not provide them much towards the children’s [...]

Samuel Barber by Carl Van Vechten

Samuel Barber was born on 9 March 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, USA, the son of Samuel, a doctor, and Marguerite, a pianist. Barber learned to play the piano at an early age and was soon composing. At the age of ten he wrote The Rose, a short opera.

As [...]

Raymonde de Laroche

The “Baroness” Raymonde de Laroche was born on 22 August 1886 as Elise Raymonde Deroche and was the daughter of a plumber. On becoming an actress and singer as a young woman, Elise Deroche took the stage name of Raymonde de Laroche.

An interest in engineering and flight led de Laroche to take [...]

Cuthbert Collingwood

Cuthbert Collingwood was born on 26 September 1748 in Newcastle upon Tyne, the eighth child of Cuthbert and Milcah Collingwood. He was the eldest of three sons. After a schooling at the Newcastle Free School, Collingwood went to sea on the Shannon at the age of twelve on 28 August 1761. He was [...]

Gottlieb Daimler

Gottlieb Daimler was born in Schorndorf, Württemberg on 17 March 1834. He trained as a gunsmith but had a fascination with engineering from an early age. After studying at the Stuttgart Polytechnic Institute he began a career in engineering.

The inventor of the four-stroke internal-combustion engine, Nikolaus A. Otto, employed Daimler as the technical [...]

James Doohan

James Montgomery Doohan was born in Vancouver, in the Canadian Province of British Columbia, on 3 March 1920. His parents, William and Sarah, had emigrated from Ireland and had three older children. The family later moved to Ontario where Doohan was educated at the Sarnia Collegiate Institute and Technical School.

During the Second World [...]

Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric François Chopin (or Fryderyk Franciszek Szopen in Polish) was born on 1 March 1810 in the Duchy of Warsaw to a French father and a Polish mother. His father, Nicholas, took work as a tutor to aristocratic families and later became a French teacher at the Warsaw lyceum.

Chopin loved music from an [...]

John Tenniel (Self Portrait)

John Tenniel was born in Bayswater, London on 28 February 1820, the third son of John and Eliza Tenniel. The Tenniel family had little money to educate their six children so, after attending primary school, John was taught by his father.

Tenniel’s father, a fencing and dancing instructor, taught him riding, dancing, [...]

Roger Mortimer was born at Ludlow on 11 November 1328. At that time the Mortimer family, headed by his grandfather, Roger Mortimer, first earl of March, was the most powerful in England. But, by the time Roger was three, the family’s fortunes had reversed and its future looked bleak.

When the first earl was executed by [...]