The top 100 great britons

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Adapted from BBC The Top 100 Great Britons

Transcript of The top 100 great britons

Page 1: The top 100 great britons

Adapted from BBC

The Top 100 Great Britons

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‘Great Briton’

The definition of a ‘Great Briton’ is anyone who was born in the British Isles, including Ireland; or anyone who lived in the British Isles, including Ireland, and who has played a significant part in the life of the British Isles.

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13 out of 100

92 JRR Tolkien

93 Geoffrey Chaucer

70 Jane Austin

58 Freddie Mercury

51 King Arthur

41 Charles Dickens

42 King Henry VIII

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35 Boudicca

33 David Beckham

25 Professor Stephen Hawking

18 Queen Victoria

16 Margaret Thatcher

12 Captain James Cook

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9 William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

The prophecy of his great contemporary, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare ‘… was not of an age, but for all time, has been fulfilled.

Did you know?Shakespeare invented 1700 words. Bandit, laughable, moonbeam, elbow – all these simple words we take for granted were actually Shakespeare’s inventions.

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8 Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

He was a precocious child, and a local school master convinced his mother that her son should be well educated.

Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which explored how things fell to the earth set Newton thinking. He also knew all about Johannes kepler’s work on how planets circle the sun.

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Newton wondered if he could join the two ideas. Could the same force that kept the moon from being thrown away from the earth apply to gravity at the earth’s surface? He made the link, and called his findings the law of Universal Gravitation.

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Newton then starting experimenting with the ‘celebrated phenomenon of colours’

and proved that white light is made up of colours mixed together, and the prism merely separated them – he was the first person to understand the rainbow.

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6 John Lennon (1940-1980)

He was born in Liverpool on 9 October 1940. John’s mother’s died when he was 17, killed by a car outside his aunt’s house. Although he didn’t live with his mother, he worshipped her, she had encouraged his interest in music and offered to buy him his first guitar.

Lennon didn’t fare well at school and spent most of his time playing truant.

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He loved drawing and writing.

Did you know?

Elvis Presley warned Nixon against the Beatles, claiming they were a real force for anti-America spirit.

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5 Elizabeth I (1533-1603)

Her reign is considered by many to be a Golden Age, but with many dangers. When Elizabeth was two years old, her mother Anne Boleyn, was beheaded by her father, Henry VIII, and the young princess was brought up in the care of governesses and tutors.

Always a popular monarch and a brilliant

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public speaker, her great legacy was to secure the Protestant faith in England, avoiding bloodshed.

Did you know?Despite pressure from her Council, Elizabeth never married; once remarking, ‘I am already bound unto a husband which is the kingdom of England’

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4 Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

‘We have many local heroes; we only have one world changer. His name was Charles Darwin’.

Queasiness at the sight of blood curtailed Darwin’s medical career, so he went to Cambridge to study divinity and join the Church. While there, an interest in natural

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history was sparked. At 22 he heard of a scientific expedition to send scientists to travel the world by ship, the Beagle. A naturalist was needed and Darwin was accepted. Reaching South America he observed a rich variety of animal life and bgan pondering the origin of all these species. The key evidence for these ideas he was forming came in the Galapagos Islands. He observed that,

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while they were all undeniably finches, they were also very different from each other.

Darwin wrote that ‘…one might really fancy that… one species had been taken and modified for different ends’. He made similar discoveries with plants.

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Darwin tried to solve the riddles of these observations and the puzzles of how species evolve. He realized that the key was that any group of animals would continue to breed until there was insufficient food to feed all them. The implication was staggering – as long as there was heredity, variation among the offspring, and limited food, there had to be evolution. In 1859 Darwin published

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his controversial book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.

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2 Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

The English statemen Winston Churchill successfully led Britain through World War Two, task he described as his ‘walk with destiny’- a destiny for which he believed he had spent all his life in preparation.

He became a politician in 1990 as Conservative MP, but migrated to the Liberal Party in 1906. His presence in the House of Parliament

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was notable, marked particularly by his rehearsed rhetorical method (meticulously prepared).

Although he was seen as a great leader who didn’t give an inch during war, he was not considered the man to establish a better Britain during peacetime. He lost power

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In the 1945 election but remained a vital leader of the oposition encouraging European and Atlantic unity- this resulted in the formation of NATO.

Did you know?

Churchill’s great passion in life outside politics was painting. He produced over

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500 works during his lifetime.

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1 Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859)

The son of a French engineer, Brunel was born in Portsmouth and educated at Hove and the Colledge Henri Quatre, Paris. He returned to England in 1823.

The work for which he is probably best remembered is his construction of a network of tunnels, bridges and viaducts

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for the Great Western Railway.

In March 1833, he was appointed their chief engineer and his work began with the line that linked London to Bristol.

While he was a great engineer, he was also a canny businessman. When it came

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to pitching for the Clifton Suspension Bridge, he presented four designs. He went beyond technicalities to include arguments based on the grace of his tower design. He wrote:‘…of all the wonderful feats I have performed, since I have been in this part of the world, I think yesterday I performed the most wonderful. I produced unanimity

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among 15 men who were all quarreling about the most ticklish subject – taste’.

Did you know?Brunnel also designed railways in India (Bengal) and Italy (Genoa and Florence).He smoked over 40 cigars a day, kept in a purpose-built bag, which he carried with him at all times.

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Who is number 3?