Word: somerset
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years before World War I, Mr. Harold Tucker, of No. 3, Somerset Street, was a wealthy and respected Bristol greengrocer. Many a Sunday afternoon his neighbors nodded in satisfaction at the sight of him and five handsome daughters driving out in a fine rig along the West Country roads. But much time has passed since then, and with it Mr. Tucker and all but one of the girls. Florence died in girlhood; Nancy married and died before middle-age; Clara and Rose followed in turn. Only Miss Louisa, the eldest, was left to live on in the old house...
...midnight last week, the quiet of Bristol was rent by piercing screams in Somerset Street. Neighbors looked up at No. 3 and saw 84-year-old Miss Louisa standing at a shattered window hurling money, clothes and old bottles into the garden. Behind her stood the gaunt, naked figure of a man calling plaintively for help. The horrified neighbors sent a hurry call to the police...
...during the Peninsular War, and later through a modest role at Waterloo and a quiet five years on garrison in the isles of Greece, Private William Wheeler of the 51st Regiment wrote long letters to his family back in Somerset. Such tales they told, and with such a wit and ardor, that the family kept and read them for a Sunday treat during more than a century after the old soldier's death (he contracted leprosy in Greece). In 1949 the letters came by chance to the eye of a British publisher, were printed, and promptly acclaimed...
Throughout his adventures, however, Private Wheeler kept a certain Somerset point of view. "What an ignorant, superstitious, priest-ridden, dirty, lousy set of poor Devils are the Portuguese," he snorts, after his first look at the people whose country he is fighting to save. "The filthiest pigs sty is a palace to the filthy houses in this dirty stinking City [Lisbon] ... In the middle of the day the sunny sides of the streets swarms with men and women picking the vermin from their bodies, and it is no uncommon sight to see two respectively [sic] dressed persons meet...
...entitled to an annual ground rent of one snowball from the Munros of Foulis, and a white rose from the Duke of Atholl. The royal real-estate holdings are enormous: estates in Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset, beaches in Cornwall and Devon, 100,000 acres of farmland, immensely valuable land in London (the south side of Piccadilly Circus, both sides of Regent Street, two theaters, three restaurants and the Carlton Hotel). But Elizabeth "owns" these properties only nominally. They are administered by Crown Commissioners for the benefit of Parliament, under a bargain struck with George III in 1760. In return, Parliament...