Perhaps during British colonial settlement they had been called tennis shoes. Before I was born in 1950 my parents had been wearing tackies as casual shoes for years, so their place in our culture is long and strong. As a child I would wonder at seeing shredded tackies regularly on the ...
Perhaps it comes from having been a boy scout (with the woggle to prove it), but I have always found the Siege of Mafeking stamps fascinating. For 217 days the poorly trained forces of Robert Baden-Powell resisted the much larger Boer army to hold Mafeking until relief troops arrived on ...