There was an item in today's Daily Telegraph suggesting that there should be more ethnic diversity in the historical figures on British bank notes.
[tinyurl.com]

In the longer piece on paper there were some people suggested. Mary Seacole the nurse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge the composer and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I had always thought of her as a white Londoner, but that's from watching The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

maybe it's the browning that confused them

Here's a biography of Elizabeth: [www.cswnet.com]


Les

They described her as part Creole, but I've not seen any mention of it in the biographies I've looked at.

Maybe she was an ex-slave, or a Negro in a previous life: [www.poets.org]


Les

people are either in or ex cluded depending on the situation

Ted Williams and Reggie Jackson were not allowed to be on the Latin Legends team ballot.
Blood was not the issue, they didn't "act" Latino enough



Edited 1 times. Last edit at 12/21/05 09:32PM by JohnnySansCulo.

>Blood was not the issue

Not to worry, Reggie, Freddie Prinze could not play baseball.


Les

Being abroad for two hundred years doesn't count as "for centuries" to me. But it does explain the creole connection. Thanks, Les.

Portuguese. Her ethnicity was Portuguese. That's what Robert said anyway.

I don't know if that "counts"

I'd got the impression that was just a family joke, 'cos her family had been in Jamaica for a couple of centuries.

> Portuguese. Her ethnicity was Portuguese. That's what Robert said anyway.

Hugh, read the biography link I posted above, what he said was that she resembled the Portuguese because of her dark complexion. Probably the tan, people from Hawaii and the tropics always seem dark compared to those of us under the constant cloud cover of the northern latitudes.


Les

I think Hugh was succesfully clouding the issue with some tongue in cheek here.

Sitting in an english garden waiting for the sun.
If the sun don’t come, you get a tan
From standing in the english rain.

The Beatles

The English don't tan, they just get rusty.

When I'm out walkin'
I strut my stuff
man, I'm so strung out
I'm high as a kite
I just might
stop to check you out
let me go on
like I blister in the sun
let me go on
big hands I know you're the one

Violent Femmes