title: Osu!

text: Aside from "Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan", the game has been inspired by titles such as "Taiko no Tatsujin", "Beatmania IIDX", "EZ2DJ (EZ2CATCH)", "Elite Beat Agents", "O2Jam", "StepMania" and "DJMax". All beatmaps in the game are community-made through the in-game map editor or through external tools. Four different game modes exist, offering various ways to play a beatmap. These modes can also be combined with optional modifiers which can increase or decrease the difficulty.


title: Osu!

text: There are four official game modes: "osu!" (called "osu!standard"), "osu!taiko", "osu!catch", and "osu!mania". The original osu!standard mode remains the most popular to date and as of March 2022, the game has over 19.3 million monthly active users according to the game's global country leaderboards.


title: Osu!

text: Each mode offers a variety of "beatmaps", which are game levels that are played to songs of different lengths, ranging from "TV size" anime openings to "marathons" surpassing 7 minutes. In osu!standard, beatmaps consist of three items – hit circles, sliders, and spinners. The goal of the game is for the player to click on these items in time to the music. These items are collectively known as "hit objects" or "circles", and are arranged in different positions on the screen (except for the spinner) at different points of time during a song. Taiko beatmaps have drumbeats and spinners. Catch beatmaps have fruits and spinners, which are arranged in a horizontally falling manner. Mania beatmaps consist of keys (depicted as a small bar) and holds. The beatmap is then played with accompanying music, simulating a sense of rhythm as the player interacts with the objects to the beat of the music. Each beatmap is accompanied by music and a background. The game can be played using various peripherals: the most common setup is a graphics tablet or computer mouse to control cursor movement, paired with a keyboard or a mini keyboard with only two keys, and only the keyboard for osu!taiko, osu!catch, and osu!mania beatmaps.


title: Osu!

text: The game offers a buyable service called osu!supporter, which grants extra features to the user. osu!supporter does not affect the ranking system, or provide any in-game advantage. While osu!supporter itself is not a recurring service (meaning it is a one-off payment), it has a limited time validity ranging from 1 month to 2 years; however, multiple purchases of osu!supporter service time can be entitled to one user, allowing for longer uninterrupted service.


title: Osu!

text: "Osu!" and its players have organized different events, such as fanart and beatmapping contests, and conventions. The biggest unofficial event held in the community is "cavoe's osu! event" (usually referred to as ""osu!" event" or "COE"), held at The Brabanthallen in 's Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. The event has been arranged three times since 2017 yearly. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 and 2021 editions of the event were cancelled. "COE 2022", the most recent event, took place from 1 to 7 August. There were also official stands at TwitchCon and Anime Expo.


title: Osu!

text: "Osu!" contains three main facets of competition between players. In multiplayer lobbies, up to 16 users play a map simultaneously. On individual maps, players compete for highscores on global leaderboards or against highscores set by themselves and friends. Players also compete with their ranks, which are calculated by accumulating "performance points" (pp). pp is based on a map's difficulty and the player's performance on it. In July 2019, a player, Vaxei, exceeded 1,000pp in a single play for the first time, followed by another player, idke, less than twenty-four hours later.


title: Osu!

text: Starting in 2011, there have been twelve annual "Osu!" World Cups (usually abbreviated as OWC), one for each game mode (osu!mania having two for four key and seven key). Teams for World Cups are country-based, with up to eight players per team. There are also very many different community-hosted tournaments, differing in rank range, types of maps played, and how the teams are composed. Winners of larger official tournaments typically receive prizes such as cash, merchandise, profile badges and/or osu!supporter subscriptions. For this reason, large tournaments often attract high skill level players as well as large audiences on Twitch, this is in contrast to the smaller community tournaments which often have small or no prizes and are not watched by many people.


title: Osu!

text: These smaller tournaments comprise the vast majority of all "Osu!" tournaments, and through the usage of global rank entry restrictions where you may only compete against players in your own rank range, community tournaments provide a serious competitive environment for players who may not be highly skilled. Without these community tournaments, players would have to practice for years to have any shot at serious competitive play.


title: Osu!

text: In 2011, "Osu!stream" was released as an adaptation of "Osu!" for iOS devices running iOS 6 and later, also developed by Dean Herbert. The main difference between "Osu!" and "Osu!stream" is that "Osu!stream" beatmaps are not user-created and are instead made by the developers of "Osu!stream". The version also includes some new gameplay elements.


title: Osu!

text: On 26 February 2020, Herbert announced that he released the source code and plans to halt development of the game, releasing one final update that made all the levels free to download.


title: Osu!

text: "Osu!lazer" is an open source remake of the original game client under heavy development. It was originally projected for the stable version to come out in 2017. However, , not all features were working.


title: Osu!

text: The development of "Osu!lazer" started in 2015 and development versions of "Osu!lazer" are currently available for testing on Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. "Osu!lazer" is written entirely in .NET (formerly .NET Core).


title: Osu!

text: "Osu!framework" is an open source game framework developed with "Osu!lazer" in mind. The goal of "Osu!framework" development is to create a versatile and accessible game framework that goes further than most, providing things out-of-the-box such as graphics, advanced input processing, and text rendering.


title: Osu!

text: Jeuxvideo.com reviewed "Osu!" favorably with 18/20 points in 2015. In 2010, MMOGames.com reviewer Daniel Ball said that while the game was very similar to "Elite Beat Agents", it was differentiated by its community's large library of high-quality community made content and customization. The game has been used and recommended by esports players such as Ninja and EFFECT, as a way to warm-up and practice their aim.


title: All Creatures Great and Small (1978 TV series)

text: All Creatures Great and Small is a British television series made by the BBC and based on the books of the British veterinary surgeon Alf Wight, who wrote under the pseudonym James Herriot. The title aired over seven series, totalling 90 episodes, from 1978 to 1990. A remake premiered in 2020.


text: Set in the Yorkshire Dales and beginning in the mid-1930s, it stars Christopher Timothy as Herriot, Robert Hardy as Siegfried Farnon (based on Donald Sinclair), the proprietor of the Skeldale House surgery, and Peter Davison as Siegfried's "little brother", Tristan (based on Brian Sinclair). Herriot's wife, Helen (based on Joan Wight), was initially played by Carol Drinkwater and in the latter series by Lynda Bellingham.


text: The series was produced throughout its run by Bill Sellars. In early 1977, the BBC tasked him with the creation of a television series from Herriot's first two novels, "If Only They Could Talk" (1970) and "It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet" (1972), using the title of the 1975 film adaptation. It is part of a series of movies and television series based on Herriot's novels. The Herriot novels were written in an episodic style, with each chapter generally containing a short story within the ongoing narrative of Herriot's life. This format greatly facilitated their adaptation for a television series.


text: The series had two runs: the original (1978 to 1980, based directly on Herriot's books) was for three series; the second (1988 to 1990, filmed with original scripts but generally regarded as a continuation of the 1978 series) for four. A total of ninety episodes was broadcast. The supporting cast, both recurring and one-offs, numbers over 600, most of whom appear as farmers or clients of the surgery. In 2020, a remake, also titled "All Creatures Great and Small", was produced by Playground Entertainment for Channel 5 in the United Kingdom and PBS in the United States.


text: The leading role is played by Christopher Timothy. Bill Sellars had wanted to give the role to Timothy from the outset, but the powers that be wanted to cast the role. Sellars, instead, asked Timothy if he would accept the role of Tristan Farnon. "I had a wife, I had children, I had a mortgage to pay, and I wasn't working. So I said, 'No. It's Herriot or nothing.'" Timothy put everything on the line. "I got home one night, at about 9 o'clock. My wife was washing up in the kitchen. I walked into the kitchen and she said, without turning round, 'You've got the Herriot part.'" Timothy also stated that, after all of the roles had been cast except that of Herriot, one of the directors said, "Why don't we give [the Herriot part] to Christopher Timothy and "make" him a name?" In 2003, Timothy said that Alf Wight wrote him a letter after the series started, saying "You are the Herriot I wrote about".


text: Timothy played the lead role for the full 90 episodes. He later recalled meeting the author, Alf Wight, who had "a soft, lilting Scottish accent – though I was told to keep my speech neutral to retain the universality of the part. Which I thought was complete bollocks".


text: Siegfried Farnon, based on Wight's real-life partner Donald Sinclair, is played by Robert Hardy. Writer Michael Russell sums up the character's composition thus: "He is capricious, cantankerous, whimsical, arbitrary, unreasonable, unpredictable, ill-tempered, extravagant, effusive, contradictory, etc., yet in the midst of all that, the most loyal and caring of friends." According to Wight's son, James, the Siegfried character in the novels and TV series was considerably toned down, and that Sinclair was even more eccentric than the Herriot books portrayed. The "New York Times" also confirmed Sinclair's eccentric real-life behaviour: he once fired a shotgun during a dinner party, informing his guests that it was time to leave.


text: The cast met for the first time in June 1977. "We all had a meeting together in London," recalled Hardy, "and Bill Sellars said, 'Now, these characters are all based on real people. None of you are to meet these people until we have made at least three episodes.' So I immediately got into my car and fled up to Yorkshire to meet my man, Donald Sinclair. I was intrigued beyond measure by him. He was a true eccentric and, like all true eccentrics, he had no idea himself how odd he was! He absolutely hated what I did, because he had no idea he was at all like that, but when we'd really got into it and were producing them at high speed, his friends used to come to me and say, 'You've got him, that's him.'"


text: A bachelor at the time, Siegfried took over Skeldale House from another vet, named Grant. In the 1983 Christmas Special, Siegfried meets an old flame, Caroline Fisher, who has returned after living in America. They later marry and have children, as mentioned in the series 7 episode "Hampered".


text: "Some writers considered [Siegfried] an explosion, and all they needed to do was light the fuse and—"bang"—he would lose his temper, which was a great bore," explained Hardy. "So I ended up occasionally writing my own scenes. I did make a nuisance of myself, and I'm afraid I made enemies amongst some of the younger writers. But that's necessary. Out of these battles come, if you're lucky, quality. It needs steel and a stone to make a spark."


text: "He would simply say, 'This is nonsense, I'm not doing it,'" laughed Peter Davison, who plays Siegfried's boyish younger brother, Tristan (affectionately called "Mister Tristan" by housekeeper Edna Hall), whose character was based on Brian Sinclair. "I was to be what was described as a semi-regular," recalled Davison. "Tristan didn't appear in the opening show, and I was only booked for five episodes out of the thirteen, as the character was away at veterinary college."


text: "I ended up in more of the series because Robert Hardy really liked the way the two brothers worked," continued Davison. "It gave him more scope for what he wanted to do. I've never learned so much from anyone as I learned from Robert, because I've just never worked with anyone else like him. He is an extraordinary actor. He would never do the same thing twice. In two takes he would give an entirely different performance—he would bark where he had whispered before. I had to keep on my toes, but I managed to keep up with him, I think, though obviously I'm not on his level."


text: Tristan likes nothing more than slipping out to the Drovers Arms for a pint or two of Best Yorkshire Bitter whenever the opportunity presents itself, one of several "intensely irritating habits" that annoy his brother. Others include his penchant for sleeping late, failing his exams, and spending too much time chasing women. In the episode "The Prodigal Returns", when Siegfried mistakenly thinks "little brother" is impersonating a client on the other end of the telephone line, a few home truths come out: "Mr Biggins, if you've got it into your head that young Mr Farnon is a veterinary surgeon of any quality whatsoever, let me disabuse you of that idea immediately. He is nothing more than a slothful, drunken, incompetent lecher who will soon be seeking employment elsewhere."


text: Tristan's party piece is a rendition of "The Mad Conductor" (Benito Mussolini conducting the Neurasthenic Strings), which he performs in "Out of Practice" and "...The Healing Touch". In the former episode, he downs a pint of beer. "That was real beer!" Davison said. "I don't think coloured water would have worked for some reason, and I don't know if they had the alcohol-free beer then?" As for "The Mad Conductor", Davison continued: "I have no idea what I was doing! I just went a bit nuts really."


text: "Meeting [Brian Sinclair] was useful because I'd been worried about how to make my Tristan endearing, even though he behaved appallingly, and now, shaking his hand, I could see how Brian could have managed it."


text: "Peter was so good. We worked well together, " said Hardy of his on-screen sibling. "In the early filming days, I realised he was watching me. He watched and watched, and I said, 'Why are you looking at me all the time?' and he said, 'Because we're brothers, and I want to catch some sort of family thing that I can use so that it's obvious we are of the same family.' I was very impressed by that. He was very, "very" good."


text: Helen Herriot (née Alderson) is played by Carol Drinkwater in the first three series and two specials, then by Lynda Bellingham in the final four series. (Bellingham became pregnant with her youngest son, Robert, during series 5, so she was confined to bed scenes for several episodes, with a hole cut out of the mattress to hide her bump.) Mary Hignett plays housekeeper Edna Hall in the first three series, with Mrs Hubbard (Marjorie Suddell, 1983 Christmas Special), Mrs Greenlaw (Judy Wilson, 1985 special and series 4, episodes 1–5) and Mrs Alton (Jean Heywood) (series 7) inheriting the roles. (A housekeeper by the name of Mary preceded Mrs Hall, who is a widow after the death of her husband, Arthur.)


text: With the amount of screen time to fill, the series quickly became much more of an ensemble show, developing all the characters considerably. In particular, the role of Tristan was significantly increased. This was partly because Christopher Timothy was injured in a car accident on Boxing Day 1977 during a fortnight break between the recording of "Out of Practice" and "Nothing Like Experience" in the first series. As a result, the actor was largely restricted to studio scenes, which meant that all the scenes involving location filming be rewritten and include Davison. "I remember Christopher's accident vividly," recalled Robert Hardy. "It was a ghastly shock, and one thought, 'Well, that's the end of that. We shan't be going on.'" Timothy remembers: "The news from the hierarchy was: 'Tragic news about Christopher. Glad he's okay. Send his wife some flowers and re-cast.'"


text: "One of the plans was to make "me" James Herriot," said Peter Davison, "and then re-cast Tristan." Bill Sellars refused this option: "I said, 'I'm not doing that. It's an awful waste. We'll find another way around it.' We took the rest of the series apart, scene by scene, and all the scenes that [Peter Davison] was involved in, I extracted and took them down to the hospital, threw them on the hospital bed, and said, 'Learn those.'" This accounts for the three-week break in transmission dates between episodes 11 ("Bulldog Breed") and 12 ("Practice Makes Perfect") of the first series.


text: "I was plated and screwed instead of plastered," recalled Timothy, "and I was back at work in nine weeks—which was insane, in retrospect: I could barely walk, I was terrified, I'd lost a lot of weight and everybody worked round me."


text: "They would prop him up against a surgery table," said Peter Davison. "Then he'd start having a conversation with me. And then, at some point in the scene, I would have to move my eyes slowly across the room while two people would come in and literally carry him across to the next position."


text: "As [series 2] started filming, Chris had managed to find a way of walking that concealed his limp, as long as he affected a kind of John Wayne swagger, something he grew more attached to over the next couple of years," added Davison.


text: Margaretta Scott appears as the rich dog-owner Mrs Pumphrey. One of her staff, irked at having to look after his employer's pampered Pekingese, Tricki Woo, is William Hodgekin (Teddy Turner). He longs for it to "have its chips" and succumb to illness, which is why he grumbles whenever the vets pay a visit.


text: In series 4, new vet Calum Buchanan (John McGlynn), based on Herriot's real-life assistant Brian Nettleton, is introduced. He and Tristan know each other from veterinary school in Edinburgh. He marries fellow Scot Deirdre McEwan (Andrea Gibb) early in series 6, and the pair emigrate to Nova Scotia.


text: The Herriot children, Jimmy and Rosie, are played by several actors in their various stints. Jimmy is portrayed by Harry Brayne in the 1983 special. Oliver Wilson takes over the role from the 1985 special until the end of series 5. Paul Lyon plays him in the final series. Rosie, meanwhile, is played by Rebecca Smith from the 1985 special until the end of series 5. Alison Lewis takes over for the final series.


text: James's early rival for Helen's affections, the well-off Richard Edmundson, was played by Norman Mann.


text: Several farmers make recurring appearances throughout the series. Mr Biggins (John Sharp) is a notorious payment-dodger who regularly attempts to procure free service out of the practice, as well as decrying the cost of the vets' visits. In one episode he calls Herriot out to question a bill charge from 18 months earlier. On another occasion, in exchange for Herriot's assistance with a puncture on his car, Biggins agrees to settle his account. Little does Herriot know that Biggins post-dated the cheque. Biggins' first name is revealed to be Ezra in the series 7 episode "If Music Be the Food of Love". "John Sharp was just like you see him," recalled Peter Davison. "He was a wonderful raconteur and would tell you these long stories." Christopher Timothy added: "I found myself getting quite moved when I watched an episode recently, not because of what we were doing, but because all those lovely people are no longer with us. John Sharp was a lovely, lovely man."


text: Bill Hartley (Peter Martin, who also plays Arthur Handshaw in series 1 and 2), meanwhile, is a relatively good-natured client, compared to the perpetually disgruntled Ted Grimsdale (Bryan Pringle). "Peter Martin was fantastic," remembered Peter Davison. "He was mainly known then for the Jewson commercials. He was just very funny. He played two parts for us over the years."


text: Knackerman Jeff Mallock (Frank Birch from series 1 to 3 and Fred Feast from series 4 to 7) is regularly waiting in the wings to take ailing livestock to his knacker's yard. Whatever the vets' diagnosis, Mallock always thinks the real reason is "stagnation o' t'lung".


text: Fellow vet Granville Bennett (James Grout), a cat and dog specialist, is often on hand to help out with the more severe small animal cases. His enjoyment of alcohol is always of a concern for James, however, who regularly ends up inebriated and making a fool of himself in front of Bennett's wife, Zoe (Pamela Salem), whom he always thought considered him a dipsomaniac. "One of the guest characters we both adored was Granville Bennett, from whom James never escaped without being utterly plastered," recalled Sandy Byrne, the widow of writer Johnny Byrne. "He was played by James Grout, who was wonderful! He very much enjoyed writing for Mrs Pumphrey and Hodgekin too."


text: As evidenced by Peter Martin above, several actors played more than one character throughout the course of the series; none more so than Bill Lund, who played four people: Mr Sykes in "Fair Means and Fowl", a farmhand in "Pups, Pigs and Pickle", Mr Edgeworth in the 1985 Christmas Special and Mr Bushell in "Hail Caesar!".


text: Geoffrey Bayldon played three characters: Roland Partridge in "Pride of Possession", Mr Mason in the 1983 Christmas Special and confectioner Geoff Hatfield in "Where Sheep May Safely Graze".


text: Anna Turner also played three characters: Miss Thompson in "Big Steps and Little 'Uns", a stall holder in the 1983 Christmas Special and Mrs Pettinger in "A Cat in Hull's Chance".


text: Jack Watson played two cantankerous characters: farmer Isaac Cranford in "Nothing Like Experience" and vet Hilary Mottram in "One of Nature's Little Miracles". He reprised the role of Cranford in the 1990 Christmas Special.


text: "They used some genuine Yorkshire characters to play the farmers," recalled Sandy Byrne, "so [Johnny] relished writing for them because they were so quirky and funny." Robert Hardy concurs: "What I think made the thing a success was those Yorkshire and Lancashire actors we had playing the farmers. They were wonderful. They lent a real authenticity to their stuff, farmers complaining about their bills and all that."


text: Ted Moult, who played Harold Carter, was a real farmer in the 1940s but became a radio and television personality in the mid-1960s. He committed suicide in 1986, aged 60, after a period of depression after several weeks of wet weather that worried arable farmers.


text: Aside from the human characters, Siegfried's four dogs make regular appearances at Skeldale House. One of them—a whippet named Christie—was Robert Hardy's own. "A lovely dog whose only failing was the inability to remain in the same room as Robert once he'd started acting," explained Peter Davison. Two dogs belonged to Bill Sellars and a mutt belonged to production unit manager John Nathan-Turner.


text: After a meet-and-greet for the cast in June 1977, filming began the following month. "The first thing we did was a filming block on location in North Yorkshire," explained Peter Davison. "I just remember driving up and seeing this beautiful countryside that I'd never seen before. It was untouched. Initially we stayed in a little place called West Witton in Wensleydale, in between Leyburn and Askrigg." Robert Hardy, meanwhile, stayed fifteen miles by road to the northeast, at the Punch Bowl Inn in Low Row, near Reeth. "He'd found this rather grand little bed and breakfast place," confirmed Davison. "He would invite us around for dinner and would normally be sat there working on the script and would go in the next day, bang it on the table and say, 'I've rewritten this, here it is!' It was usually better."


text: Norman Mann, who played Richard Edmundson, recalled: "When we were up in Yorkshire, most of us stayed at the Heifer Hotel in Wensleydale, whilst Robert Hardy stayed in a different hotel. But he used to send a car over to pick us all up and we'd have dinner with him. He was the established name and he always made everybody feel so welcome."


text: "The filming block lasted about five weeks and was a social whirlwind. I drank too much and stayed up too late," continued Davison. There were no rehearsals for location filming. "I had to learn my lines in the make-up chair the following morning."


text: "Looking back at those early episodes, it's interesting to see what was accepted—or, rather, what "isn't" now. Every living-room scene involved glass after glass of whisky being poured and knocked back, and I was barely ever without a cigarette. Of course, the whisky was really only water with drops of burnt sugar, and I never inhaled the Woodbines. The beer, for some reason, was real, which in the drunken pub scenes caused problems."


text: "Our routine in the beginning was that we would rehearse for a week [at BBC Park Western] in North Acton," explained Carol Drinkwater. "Then we would have Saturday off. Then we would have to be in Birmingham on the Sunday night and Pebble Mill on Monday morning to do the interior studio scenes there. If there was filming, we would do a six-week block where we would all go north. That's how it started, until eventually Robert Hardy said he wanted it all to be on film, so for the specials we shot the interiors in Yorkshire on a sound stage on film and made it pretty much identical to the studios that we had at Pebble Mill."


text: Peter Davison's memories of the recording process: "We had this weird process where we would rehearse for ten days in London, and you'd go up for two or three days to the studio at Pebble Mill. In those days they weren't done in the rehearse-record system. We did it in the old-style way that they used to do when they were doing live television. So we would rehearse all day, and then from 7:30pm you would record, theoretically, as if it were live: sequentially and with no gaps. It never used to work out like that, but that was the idea behind it! But there was no recording in the day, which meant there was always this blind panic at night."


text: "Normally after the seventh and final day of rehearsal, the cast and production team would travel to Birmingham to check into their hotel and digs," recalled assistant floor manager David Tilley. "The production team would meet in the studio that evening to see what state the studio was in. We'd need to check that the set building had been completed and if the sets were dressed ready for camera rehearsals to start the next day. The good thing about using the Birmingham studio was that they were excellent in design and set building. I liked working there, and they had terrific pride in "All Creatures". The first day—in this case the Sunday—the cameras, sound, lighting, designers, scenery changes and action properties, costume and makeup rehearsed all the scenes technically. On the second day, camera rehearsal continued in the morning. After lunch, all five cameras were synchronised and the recording commenced on scenes that had already been rehearsed. We also allowed for discontinuous recording with breaks between scenes. Earlier in the 1970s, programmes were recorded continuously with very few breaks, but by this time two-machine editing had been established using two-inch-wide tapes. All the 16mm film inserts had also been transferred to videotape. The sequences could be seen on monitors in the studio during breaks in recording, which allowed the cast, designers and production team to check for continuity from scenes filmed months before so that they could match the studio scenes."


text: "Continuity pictures became so important," explained make-up artist Maggie Thomas. "For instance, we would always see the vets leaving and arriving at [Skeldale House], although we never ever went inside the real house on location and the costume and make-up had to match up exactly several weeks later when we saw them arrive back in the studio set of [Skeldale House] hall." "Continuity is one of the greatest challenges for a costume designer," added June Hudson. "It is one of the hardest things to get right. I would take Polaroids and stick them in my script, next to the scenes, so that when you came to do the studio, you just look at that photograph. It was the only way to do it, otherwise you were never, ever going to get it right. The smallest details, whether a top button was done up, if they wore rings on a different hand, if they had a watch on... the viewer notices, so it is a very tough job."


text: The series 5 episode "Two of a Kind" was the last episode to be filmed at Television Centre. "We moved "All Creatures" back to Pebble Mill for the sixth series because we found Pebble Mill a bit more flexible and amenable, whereas Television Centre was quite hard lined in terms of union regulations, so trying to just squeeze that extra bit of time out, or change the lunch hours, and get people to agree to that was a lot more achievable in Birmingham," explained production associate Tony Redston. "We also moved from film to 'lightweight' video cameras for the location filming of the sixth series, so for the first time we'd have monitors for instant playback on location. This was double-sided, because whilst it meant you could immediately check what you'd been shooting, the downside was everyone then wanted to stand around the monitor and check every take."


text: Peter Davison concurred about the feel of Pebble Mill. "Unlike Television Centre, Pebble Mill had an intimate family atmosphere. Everyone was on first-name terms, and even though I had a dressing room, I would still spend most of my time loitering in the make-up department."


text: "The studio recording took place between 2:30 and 6:00pm, and then again in the evening, 7:30 to 10:00," continued David Tilley. "The recording had to end at precisely 10:00 and all scenes had to be completed. No overruns were allowed as the cost of overtime with such a large cast, technicians, designers and production staff would have been tremendous, so it was very disciplined. At the end of the studio [recording], the recording and film inserts were then laid onto a master videotape."


text: Soundman Alex Christison reminisced about getting the sound right on the show: "The main problem with "All Creatures" was that we are talking about the days before multi-mic radio microphones were available, so you couldn't just scatter personal mics around each actor and mix accordingly. We were also recording in mono audio, so I didn't even have another track to play with like the dramas do these days with split track. Basically I relied on my boom swinger to get my sound. We'd done away with the old sync lead by then, thank God, which meant I wasn't joined up to the camera; the boom mic would be connected to my Nagra mixer and would be recorded separately to picture. The clapperboard really did concentrate the minds in those days because it was quite a costly process if you got it wrong. Because the cast were so good, they would see the boom in the corner of their eye and know when it was going to be over their head—then they would start speaking." Separate crews were used for studio recording and exteriors.


text: In early 1978, news came from London: "The BBC, planning all their schedules and choosing their programmes, were pestering me after the first series," remembered Bill Sellars. "'We want thirteen more episodes now!' I'd say, 'Where are we going to get all this from, Ted?'" "They commissioned a second series," explained Peter Davison. "This time they wanted the show to go out in the autumn slot, which meant we would barely finish the first series before starting the next. Chris's leg was improving all the time, but we had lost six or seven weeks, and so had a three-week break in transmission in March to allow post-production to catch up."


text: The programme initially ran for three series, with each episode adapting one or two of the Herriot stories—usually a story thread centred on James, and a second centred on Siegfried or Tristan. The continuity of the show followed the general arc of the books: James's arrival at Darrowby in 1937, his growing experience as a vet, his humorous attempts at romance with Helen, and their eventual marriage. The programme ended in 1980 at the stage where the characters were drawn into the Second World War, the final exterior shots broadcast filmed during the winter of 1979. This completed the adaptation of all the novels which Alf Wight had written up to that point. Two 90-minute Christmas Specials were subsequently made, in 1983 and 1985, set after the war and based on his 1981 book "The Lord God Made Them All". At the end of the filming of the 1985 special, Christopher Timothy and Carol Drinkwater were asked if they thought that was the end of the series. "I'm fairly certain it is, yes," said Timothy. "There's very, very little material left." But surely there is another animal story every day? "It's a case of what James Herriot has written, though," replied Drinkwater. "He will, indeed, only allow us to use what is written. Which, I think, is fair."


text: "By the end of 1986, it was agreed that the original cast, minus Carol Drinkwater, would re-assemble to film another series," said Davison.


text: Three years later, the programme was, indeed, revived, after Sellars was able to persuade Alf Wight to allow new scripts to be written around the existing characters, but not directly based on the Herriot books, with some story lines repeated from the first run. The revived series was a co-production with the BBC in partnership with A&E and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Robert Hardy, though, had one stipulation about his returning to his role: he wanted Roger Davenport to write some of the scripts.


text: The revival, set beginning in 1949, ran for four more series, taking the characters up to Christmas 1953. Peter Davison was busy with other projects and was seen far less frequently in these newer series, with the character of Tristan leaving for Ireland at one point before returning after several episodes. He left again after that (he is only seen in one episode of the sixth series), before returning for the majority of the final series.


text: Regarding Carol Drinkwater's decision not to return to the series: "Bill Sellars was very, very cross with me for leaving. I think he thought I had been ungrateful. I'd given everything I could and I couldn't think where else I could take the role, because there was no more material. I wasn't leaving in any kind of spiteful thing; it had nothing to do with Chris and I, which is, of course, what everyone thought. Our split was all very amicable. Chris and I, and his wife Annie, are still good friends—there is no problem there. The BBC was so angry with me, they put a ban on using me. So they re-cast and another actress got the role. I was terribly upset because it was a wonderful role and would have been very good for me. I must say now, looking back on my career, it's one of the few things in my life I would do differently, and I wouldn't have left."


text: The revived series gradually became more based around the development of the central characters—particularly after the introduction of Calum and Deirdre, with their romance and subsequent marriage—and it mainly focused on the activities inside Skeldale House, rather than being a series about a veterinary practice. For the final series, all of the new characters were dropped (including Calum and Deirdre), and the series returned to its 1970s roots, focusing once more on the animals. The final broadcast was another Christmas Special, in 1990.


text: "I was glad when we stopped," said Robert Hardy. "I'd had enough. But I did love playing the character. There was some wonderful writing in the early stories, but later there was some which I always tried to change and, in the end, I made up a lot of my own stuff. I had been longing to leave because the filming conditions were so bad, but each time I eventually made up my mind to carry on. I don't know whether I was right or wrong."


text: The script editor for 42 of the 90 episodes was Ted Rhodes. Rhodes was killed during a confrontation with a cyclist in Wimbledon in 2003. He was 69. "I couldn't have done any of it without Ted Rhodes. He was marvellous," said Bill Sellars. "He was a brilliant script editor. He spent his lifetime as a script editor and he had so many ideas. He knew how to put a script together. He knew what the beginning was, he knew the middle and he knew the end, and he could really weave those together to create one whole. They were never disjointed."


text: In 2007, an unfilmed script by the show's script editor Johnny Byrne was recovered and presented to the BBC as a possible Christmas reunion episode, but the BBC did not commission it. Peter Davison joked, "Maybe they just thought we were too decrepit, I don't know!"


text: Over 18–20 December 2011, the BBC screened a three-episode prequel, "Young James Herriot", about Herriot's time at university, with Iain De Caestecker in the title role. Co-stars included Amy Manson and Tony Curran.


text: All exterior scenes were filmed in North Yorkshire, mostly in the village of Askrigg, which doubled for the fictional Darrowby, and Bainbridge. Addlebrough, a fell to the south of both villages, is seen prominently in several scenes. Other locations included Swaledale, Arkengarthdale and Wensleydale, as well as Langthwaite; "the Red Lion pub was used for some scenes". "We would take over Askrigg and drive the very few motorists crazy by stopping the traffic," remembered Peter Davison. Indeed, three quarters of the way through the second run the crew was banned from filming in the village due to the disruption it was causing to the lives of the residents.


text: Filming also took place at some of the Dales' countless farmsteads—the same ones that Alf Wight visited in the 1960s and 1970s, although the names of villages, farms and people were changed. Exterior shots were originally to be filmed in Derbyshire's Peak District, but Robert Hardy took offence to the plan and threatened to walk out of the producer's office. Some indoor scenes (including all those of the interior of Skeldale House) were shot at the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham, a few months after the on-location portions. This is demonstrated in the first series, when Christopher Timothy is seen walking normally during the scenes filmed in Yorkshire during the latter part of 1977, but by the time the studio shots take place, after his accident, his immobility is quite obvious.


text: "Most of the locations were around Leyburn, where the unit had been based at the Golden Lion Hotel and Eastfield Lodge Hotel, respectively," recalled assistant floor manager David Tilley. "All the timings have to be scheduled in advance. It would be a blank sheet of paper when you started. The only thing that was pre-scheduled was the studio recording dates, which were organised by the BBC's Planning department, in conjunction with all the other series using the studios. We would then have to work out everything for each individual episode. We would always do the location filming first, so we assembled in Yorkshire to record the film inserts for 'Pig in the Middle' in the same block as 'Every Dog His Day...' I would have to make sure everyone arrived on time, either by car or bus, and that we had everything we needed to complete the scenes in time."


text: For the first three series, up until the two Christmas specials of 1983 and 1985, most interior scenes were recorded on video at Pebble Mill and edited together with exterior shots. This provided hardships in December 1977, when filming briefly returned to the Dales, after a block of studio recording, to capture the look of winter. The temperatures dropped well below freezing. "The snow was high and the ice was solid," explained Robert Hardy in 2003. "I remember two occasions when we were so cold, from the wind on the <nowiki>[</nowiki>moorland<nowiki>]</nowiki> tops, that we couldn't speak. We had to stop." Peter Davison recalled: "People would hand me a cup of tea and I would stick my hand in it, rather than drink it, because my fingers were so cold." For the final four series, much of the filming other than at Skeldale House was done wholly on location at the farms. "Studios aren't really like cow byres or horse stables or country farm houses," explained Hardy, "so one had to make believe a great deal in those early episodes. I mean, they made good sets, but it was better later when we stopped using the studio and did all the filming in real locations in Yorkshire. That was when it really started coming alive, because the cameras were in real situations."


text: "In the first series, we had large animals in the studio, with sets for farm barns and cow sheds, which were later filmed on location," explains designer David Crozier. "There were all sorts of things you had to take into consideration, not least of which was how you are going to dispose of the animal's waste, so we were effectively building these stables and cow sheds in the studio for real."


text: "I was first scheduled to "All Creatures" in 1989," explained wardrobe member Helen Scarsbrook. "An average day's filming would often start around 6am at the unit base in Leyburn, which was an old empty school where we kept all the costumes and equipment. The actors would arrive and we would dress everybody. Then we would load up the unit cars—which in Yorkshire were a couple of Ford Sierra estates—so we could pile up the costumes for all the changes. Then we would drive out to location, which was quite often Bainbridge, so quite a long journey." (Bainbridge is thirteen miles directly west of Leyburn by car.)


text: Maggie Thomas was one of the three make-up personnel in the original run. She recalled: "The actual make-up job seemed pretty minimal, until we realised that every storyline had an injured animal in it, and that my designer and I would, as far as possible, be doing them! What we didn't know was that every animal injury in the storyline would require a lot of attention from the make-up department. It soon became very clear that we were going to have our work cut out to achieve some believable-looking animal injuries. Mostly we always knew in advance what would be needed from reading the script; otherwise, we wouldn't be ready when it came to that part of the day's shoot. We always had a gallon of artificial blood with us, but there were occasions when we couldn't foresee an event that would require our 'expertise'."


text: "James Herriot's Yorkshire", written by the vet and published in 1979, mentions several of his favourite locations in "his" Yorkshire, many of which were used in the television series but with different names. These include Bedale, Keld, Gunnerside, West Witton, West Burton, Muker, Semerwater, Countersett, Coverdale, West Scrafton (where the Herriots holidayed), Middleham, Sutton Bank and Oughtershaw, which is "some of Yorkshire's bleakest country".


text: When it came to the oft-joked-about insertion of an arm into a cow's rear end, Davison said: "People think we cheated, or something. I tell them that the BBC are not going to pay for a stunt cow that I can put my arm up." Robert Hardy added: "It's enchanting, because once you've got your hand inside you can understand how the interior works." Davison first had to perform this examination in the series-one closer "Breath of Life", which was filmed in November 1977. "I had not [yet] been called upon. Now here in black and white: "Interior Barn: Tristan is stripped to the waist with his arm up a cow." I spent so many days worrying about it, I didn't even give much thought to the cold weather. The series was set in 1937, when vets didn't have the luxury of modern 1977 rubber gloves, so therefore neither did the actors portraying them. All we had was a bar of soap, a bucket of warm water, and Jack Watkinson, our veterinary adviser, to show us what to do. 'It's very simple,' he said. 'A quick up and down the arm with the bar of soap, and in you go.' So on a cold November day with the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls of the wooden barn, in I went. Of course, when I got on with it, it wasn't so bad, and even the cow seemed to quite enjoy it. All I remember is thinking the only warm part of my body was my arm. Afterwards, with a real sense of achievement, I made my way back to get cleaned up, and even the sparks seemed to look at me with new respect, although I felt sorry for them, having to clean the cow shit off the cables after filming."


text: What is now Skeldale Guest House, a bed and breakfast named for obvious reasons, provided the exterior shots of the surgery building. "It was actually called Cringley House," explained Peter Davison, "and owned by Olive Turner and her husband Charles, who welcomed us with open arms from the first day of filming. Although we never shot any interior scenes there, it was often used for make-up and costume and, while relaxing between takes, they would make us tea and coffee and show us pictures of their children. The couple even appeared as extras in a couple of scenes."


text: The Kings Arms Hotel, which became the Drovers Arms during filming of the later series, features photographs on its interior walls of the cast drinking at the establishment during downtime. The Drovers was made out to be located beside the church in the early series, as evidenced in the episode "The Name of the Game". "It was fun to design the Drovers, which later on they did on location in Askrigg," explained designer David Crozier. "But in the early days these scenes were all done at Pebble Mill."


text: A house directly across the street from the front exterior of Cringley House was used for location for the back garden of Skeldale in several episodes, including both 1983 and 1985 Christmas specials and in scenes in the series' second run.


text: For the 1985 Christmas Special, filming was based in Richmond. The gymnasium of the barracks of the Green Howards regiment became Skeldale's surgery. The King's Head Hotel, meanwhile, was the scene of James and Helen's anniversary dinner. It was in Richmond that Peter Davison decided to leave the role of "Doctor Who". "I made the decision to leave the series after sitting on my bed in a hotel room in Richmond. John Nathan-Turner had been pushing me to do a fourth year (I was yet to start my third), and my agent had called me for the second time that day. It would have meant better money (within reason—this was the BBC, after all), and a chance to have more say in story development, but it also broke my unwritten 'three series and out' rule, and the similar advice Patrick Troughton had given me. We were in the middle of filming the first "All Creatures Great and Small" Christmas Special, and the previous night, over a thick gammon steak and eggs, in a pub in Middleham, I'd discussed my future choices with Chris Timothy. I'd already had a similar talk with Robert Hardy, and both agreed it was time for me to move on. That's what I told my agent. So I burned my bridges and tried to imagine life after "Doctor Who", never imagining that there wouldn't really be one."


text: Parts of the beginning title sequence—in particular, the car passing through the ford—were shot on a road called Peat Gate between Feetham in Swaledale and Langthwaite in Arkengarthdale.


text: "I used to love the old cars," explained Robert Hardy. "Except when they gave up. They were always giving up. We had a permanent mechanic up there and he was always deep inside the bonnet of this or that car. But I had some nice cars to drive, and when they worked they were great fun. And, of course, I was old enough to remember how to double declutch and all that sort of thing, so they weren't a shock to me."


text: Ninety episodes (including the three Christmas Specials) were broadcast over seven series. Each episode is 48 minutes in length.


text: What became the eponymous theme tune for "All Creatures Great and Small" was written as KPM library music in 1968 by Johnny Pearson. Titled "Piano Parchment", it was chosen by producer Bill Sellars, who had earlier selected Pearson's "Sleepy Shores" as the theme for the TV programme "Owen MD". Two versions of the theme were re-recorded for the opening titles of "All Creatures": that of the first run was flute-oriented; meanwhile, the version used for the second was more in line with the piano-based original.


text: Almost all of the incidental music used in the show was written by Pearson and performed by him and his orchestra. The exceptions are the two "gypsy songs" "Ditchling Beacon" and "English Pasture", written by John Leach, which appear in the episode "Out of Practice".


text: The LP, entitled "All Creatures Great and Small: The Original Music from the TV Series and Other Favourite Themes" and released on Rampage Records in 1978, was produced by Larry Page and Adrian Kerridge. ("Autumn Reverie", also known as "Heather", although featured several times throughout the series, is not on the soundtrack. It was originally featured on Pearson's 1968 "Gentle Sounds" album.)


text: New pieces written after the first run of the series appeared in the second run, but these have not been released as a soundtrack. A few of them appear on Pearson's 1988 two-part release, "KPM 1000 Series: Johnny Pearson Piano and Orchestra", including the notable trumpet piece "Country Fayre", the flute-driven "Fields and Hedgerows", the piano-based "A Ride in the Sun" and the orchestral "Thames Rhapsody", "Crystal Breeze", "Odd Moments", "Camelia Dance", "Lovers and Friends" and "Village Green". Also, on the first of the two editions, are two alternate versions of "Piano Parchment" (a 60-second edit and a 30-second edit).


text: All seven series and three Christmas Specials have been released on DVD in Region 1, Region 2 and Region 4. The 1990 Christmas Special (entitled "Brotherly Love") is regarded as being part of Series 7.


text: Although he has not always stayed there, instead living with Caroline later in the series, Siegfried owns Skeldale House, and while he is happy—within reason—to pay for its upkeep and renovation, he is rarely seen getting his hands dirty outside the surgery. Tristan, on the other hand, takes over the household duties from Mrs Hall in "Hair of the Dog" and "Home and Away", and James has to pick up the slack when Helen is out of action, on account of a slipped disc, in the first few episodes of series 5.


text: The Pebble Mill set was laid out to match Skeldale House as it appeared in exterior shots. A door on the right side of the building, for example, was used to represent the entrance to the waiting room. On a couple of occasions, the cast had to go inside the Askrigg building to accommodate exterior shots on its windows but, other than a view out of the surgery window in the 1990 Christmas Special, the camera never followed them inside. In the series 3 finalé "Big Steps and Little 'Uns", Helen is shown waving James off to war from an opened second-floor window.


text: On the ground floor there are four rooms (clockwise from front to back): unused dining room (see below), the sitting room (the front half being the sitting area; the rear half being the dining area), the kitchen, and the surgery. Aside from the back door, another door in the kitchen leads to the surgery's waiting room. The house's only phone is in the hallway, in a nook by the stairs which also contains a grandfather clock and, later in the series, the door to the basement, where coal and wine are kept. A coat rack originally also appeared here, but was later moved to the foyer. The window above the front door announces that you are at "Skeldale House", a feature that remains today. Regarding the clock: "That clock should have been taken out and burnt," joked director Roderick Graham. "When you are doing retakes, how do you sync the "tick-tock" from the previous take? It was a nightmare and would drown out the dialogue."


text: "The staircase went nowhere," revealed Peter Davison. "If you had to run downstairs to answer the phone, it meant perching yourself on a small platform just out of shot and launching yourself into the scene."


text: "For the studio, we changed the colours of the surgery in the second series to give it a bit of time progression," explained David Crozier, the designer. "I'd used the whitewashed look in the first series, because I'd found hundreds and hundreds of photos from that period in Yorkshire of house interiors painted in whitewash. But as we moved closer to wartime, we went with a darker look, which became the fashion at the time."


text: "The surgery was full of a wonderful selection of genuine veterinary implements from the thirties as well as shelves of dodgy-looking medicines," recalled Peter Davison. "For my own character of Tristan, I decided it would be fun if all I ever did in the surgery was clutch a mortar and pestle in case Siegfried appeared, aside from the usual smoking and reading 1937 copies of "Health and Efficiency"."


text: The first floor contains the bedrooms, while the second floor contains a small suite which Siegfried offers to James and Helen in the first episode of series 2. When the couple move to Rowangarth, Calum takes over the suite.


text: In "Merry Gentlemen", the final episode of the second series, we see behind the door immediately on the left as one enters the front door of Skeldale. The original, now-unused dining room, Siegfried uses it as overflow for storage of his reserve wine collection. Covered in dust, the room is brought back to life by Helen and Mrs Hall. The fire is lit, and the Christmas tree is put up in one of the corners.


text: In the early series, the back door opens into a narrow alley; later, the back garden becomes an expansive area of grass, shrubbery and stone walls. An aviary is seen in the episodes "Fair Means and Fowl" and, twelve years later, "A Cat in Hull's Chance".


text: The original set of the interior of the Skeldale House surgery is now located at the Richmondshire Museum in Richmond and is open to the public. Other extensive parts, including the living room and the dispensary, are on display at The World of James Herriot museum in Thirsk, which is also open to the public.


text: "There was something about the series. It had the right content," recalled producer Bill Sellars. "It became a world favourite, and at its height was actually watched by twenty million viewers."


text: The series occupied a slot in the TV week that helped solidify it as Sunday-evening fare. Robert Hardy remarked that: "It hit the right moment. There was a feeling still in the towns that the country was a glorious place inhabited by amazing people." TV historian Chris Diamond commented, "It's the perfect post-dinner, pre-bath time slot. You're going to be either hanging about in the living room trying to avoid dishes, or waiting to have a bath."


text: Hardy was also concerned that the series would be a brief affair. His worry was that it would "bore the townspeople and irritate the countryfolk". He put its success down to the fact that it featured "real people". Christopher Timothy, on the other hand, thought it had an excellent chance due to the popularity of Wight's books.


text: The cast became household names around the world. "I've had letters from vets, both male and female, who say they became vets because of the series," said Robert Hardy.


text: Christopher Timothy became the most famous vet on the planet, which became a mixed blessing. "After I did "All Creatures", it was eight years before I acted on television again," he recalled. "I remember once going to see my agent and, going up the stairs to his office, hearing him screaming down the phone: 'He's not a vet, he's a bloody actor!'" "I asked Pete [Davison] once, 'How is it that you go from one role to the other and I can't get arrested on television?' He said, 'Because I didn't play James Herriot...' I think there's an element of truth in that."


text: "It was a big slice of my career, for which I am very, very grateful," added Robert Hardy. "The series means a great deal to me as it took up such a large span of my life."


text: When Peter Davison was made the subject of "This Is Your Life" in 1982, Christopher Timothy, Robert Hardy and Carol Drinkwater all appeared as guests. Timothy, Davison and Jean Heywood attended Lynda Bellingham's appearance on the show in 1993. Timothy's time came in 2000, for which Hardy, Davison, Drinkwater and Bellingham were in attendance.


text: Christopher Timothy and Robert Hardy attended a service of thanksgiving for Alf Wight at York Minster on 20 October 1995, eight months after the author's death.


text: In 2003, Timothy, Hardy, Carol Drinkwater and Lynda Bellingham appeared together on "Stars Reunited". Due to having other commitments, Peter Davison could not be present. Also briefly joining them, and host Dale Winton, on the couch was Jack Watkinson, MRCVS, the Yorkshire vet with whom Timothy lived and worked for a week prior to the filming of the series. Timothy has stated that, for him, it was the best week of the whole series. "I did seriously feel, with all humility, that when I turned up to start filming: 'I'm sort of equipped for this.'" Carol Drinkwater later said of this appearance: "[Dale] did an interview with each of us on our own, and he asked if I had known what a sex symbol I was? I was completely stunned, I had no idea. I mean, I used to get boxes of marriage proposals... I used to bin them, I never read them. I was very naughty. Now I answer all my mail, though there is much less of it now, of course."


text: "None of us ever did anything that could harm an animal," explained Timothy in another interview. "The injections were all faked and arms up a cow's bum is not difficult to do—and the cows don't mind too much... in fact, some cows quite like it! Jack Watkinson wouldn't tolerate anything that he deemed as unethical. The directors at one point sent out a note about how animals should be treated in the furtherance of entertainment, but it was always left to the attending vet's discretion. If it had gone against any of his ethical code, Jack would have refused us to do it."


text: Watkinson died in May 2013 after suffering a stroke. He was 84. Watkinson was the "on-location" technical advisor; his studio-based counterpart was Eddie Straiton. "He was an incredible character, an absolutely astonishing man," remembered Robert Hardy. Along with Donald and Brian Sinclair, Alf Wight dedicated his 1972 book "All Creatures Great and Small" to Straiton.


text: As the 1983 Christmas Special had done, the interview included a tribute to Mary Hignett (Mrs Hall), who died shortly after the series' first run: "She was the warmest-hearted, most genial, most enchanting companion," said Hardy. "She was a total dear; I absolutely adored her, and it was tragic that she died far too soon and left us bereft." Timothy added: "A fabulous lady, and greatly, greatly missed."


text: Timothy, Hardy and Drinkwater reunited again in 2006 at The World of James Herriot museum in Thirsk. In October 2016, all four main actors from the original run reunited to mark the centenary of Alf Wight's birth.


title: Chandler Riggs

text: Chandler Carlton Riggs (born June 27, 1999) is an American actor and DJ, best known for his regular role as Carl Grimes on the AMC horror-drama television series "The Walking Dead" (based on the comic book series of the same name) from 2010 to 2018. For his work on the series, Riggs won three Saturn Awards from five nominations and a Young Artist Award from three nominations.


title: Chandler Riggs

text: Riggs has appeared in the films "Get Low" (2009), "Mercy" (2014), "Keep Watching" (2017), "Only" (2019), and "Inherit the Viper" (2019). In late 2017, Riggs started releasing electronic music under his stage name, Eclipse. In early 2019, he began recurring on the ABC drama series "A Million Little Things".


title: Chandler Riggs

text: Riggs was born on June 27, 1999 in Atlanta, Georgia to Gina Ann (née Carlton) and William Riggs. Riggs studied tap dancing for several years with "So You Think You Can Dance" finalist Zack Everhart.


title: Chandler Riggs

text: Riggs began acting at age four. His early work included stage productions of "The Wizard of Oz", where he played a Munchkin in his theater debut, and "Oklahoma" with Theater of the Stars at Atlanta's Fox Theatre. At age five, he starred in the indie horror film "Jesus H. Zombie". At age nine in 2009, he was cast in his first two feature film roles in "Get Low" as Tom and in the television film "The Wronged Man" as seven-year-old Ryan Gregory. The latter film, which aired on Lifetime in 2010, saw Riggs acting opposite Julia Ormond as her son.


title: Chandler Riggs

text: In 2010 at age 10, Riggs was cast as Carl Grimes, his biggest role to date, on the AMC horror-drama television series "The Walking Dead", which is based on the eponymous comic book series. Riggs had previously worked with the series' executive producer Gale Anne Hurd on "The Wronged Man". The series follows Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), the father of Riggs' character Carl, as he and his group of family, friends, and strangers fight to survive in a violent apocalyptic world populated with zombies and the few surviving humans, some of whom are even more dangerous than the zombies themselves. Proving to be a ratings success, the series became the #1 show in all of television among adults 18-49.


title: Chandler Riggs

text: Riggs and the other main cast members of "The Walking Dead" won the 2012 Satellite Award for Best Cast in a Television Series. For his performance in the series as Carl, Riggs was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Performance by a Younger Actor in a Television Series five consecutive times and won the award three times in 2014, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, Riggs also won a Young Artist Award for Best Performance in a TV Series - Leading Young Actor after previously being nominated for the award in 2012 and 2013. Along with several of his co-stars, Riggs lent his voice to a special episode of "Robot Chicken" titled "The Robot Chicken Walking Dead Special: Look Who’s Walking" in 2017, reprising his role as Carl.


title: Chandler Riggs

text: In late 2017, Riggs was let go from "The Walking Dead" when, in a drastic departure from the comic book source material, his character was controversially killed off midway through the series' eighth season. Riggs' 77th and final episode of the series aired on February 10, 2018.


title: Chandler Riggs

text: Riggs appeared in the Blumhouse Productions supernatural thriller film "Mercy" in 2014 and the Voltage Pictures horror film "Keep Watching" in 2017. In 2017, Riggs started DJing various events around the United States and released his first song "Hold Up" under his stage name "Eclipse" in December of that year. That same month, he was cast in the crime thriller film "Inherit the Viper". He played the role of Cooper in the film, which premiered in 2019. He also starred in the science fiction thriller film "Only" in 2019. In January 2019, Riggs was cast as PJ for a multi-episode arc on the ABC freshman drama series "A Million Little Things". Riggs, whose character's full name was revealed to be Patrick Nelson, returned for the series' second season.


title: Geordie

text: Geordie () is a nickname for a person from the Tyneside area of North East England, and the dialect used by its inhabitants, also known in linguistics as Tyneside English or Newcastle English. There are different definitions of what constitutes a Geordie. The term is used and has been historically used to refer to the people of the North East. A Geordie can also specifically be a native of Tyneside (especially Newcastle upon Tyne) and the surrounding areas. Not everyone from the North East of England identifies as a Geordie.


title: Geordie

text: Geordie is a continuation and development of the language spoken by Anglo-Saxon settlers, initially employed by the ancient Brythons to fight the Pictish invaders after the end of Roman rule in Britain in the 5th century. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes who arrived became ascendant politically and culturally over the native British through subsequent migration from tribal homelands along the North Sea coast of mainland Europe. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that emerged in the Dark Ages spoke largely mutually intelligible varieties of what is now called Old English, each varying somewhat in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. This linguistic conservatism means that poems by the Anglo-Saxon scholar the Venerable Bede translate more successfully into Geordie than into Standard English.


title: Geordie

text: In Northern England and the Scottish borders, then dominated by the kingdom of Northumbria, there developed a distinct Northumbrian Old English dialect. Later Irish migrants possibly influenced Geordie phonology from the early 19th century onwards.


title: Geordie

text: The British Library points out that the Norse, who primarily lived south of the River Tees, affected the language in Yorkshire but not in regions to the north. This source adds that "the border skirmishes that broke out sporadically during the Middle Ages meant the River Tweed established itself as a significant northern barrier against Scottish influence". Today, many who speak the Geordie dialect use words such as gan ('go' – modern German ) and bairn ('child' – modern Danish ) which "can still trace their roots right back to the Angles".


title: Geordie

text: The word "Geordie" can refer to a supporter of Newcastle United. The Geordie Schooner glass was traditionally used to serve Newcastle Brown Ale.


title: Geordie

text: The Geordie dialect and identity are primarily associated with those of a working-class background. A 2008 newspaper survey found the Geordie accent the "most attractive in England".


title: Geordie

text: When referring to the people, as opposed to the dialect, dictionary definitions of a Geordie typically refer to a native or inhabitant of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, or its environs, an area that encompasses North Tyneside, Newcastle, South Tyneside and Gateshead. This area has a combined population of around 700,000, based on 2011 census-data.


title: Geordie

text: The term itself, according to Brockett, originated from all the North East coal mines. The catchment area for the term "Geordie" can include Northumberland and County Durham or be confined to an area as small as the city of Newcastle upon Tyne and the metropolitan boroughs of Tyneside.


title: Geordie

text: Scott Dobson, the author of the book "Larn Yersel Geordie", once stated that his grandmother, who was brought up in Byker, thought the miners were the true Geordies. There is a theory the name comes from the Northumberland and Durham coal mines. Poems and songs written in this area in 1876 (according to the OED), speak of the "Geordie".


title: Geordie

text: According to the British Library, "Locals insist there are significant differences between Geordie and several other local dialects, such as Pitmatic and Mackem. Pitmatic is the dialect of the former mining areas in County Durham and around Ashington to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne, while Mackem is used locally to refer to the dialect of the city of Sunderland and the surrounding urban area of Wearside".


title: Geordie

text: A number of rival theories explain how the term "Geordie" came about, though all accept that it derives from a familiar diminutive form of the name George, "a very common name among the pitmen" (coal miners) in North East England; indeed, it was once the most popular name for eldest sons in the region.


title: Geordie

text: One account traces the name to the times of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. The Jacobites declared that the natives of Newcastle were staunch supporters of the Hanoverian kings, whose first representative George I reigned (1714–1727) at the time of the 1715 rebellion. Newcastle contrasted with rural Northumberland, which largely supported the Jacobite cause. In this case, the term "Geordie" may have derived from the popular anti-Hanoverian song "Cam Ye O'er Frae France?", which calls the first Hanoverian king "Geordie Whelps", a play on "George the Guelph".


title: Geordie

text: Another explanation for the name states that local miners in the northeast of England used Geordie safety lamps, designed by George Stephenson, known locally as "Geordie the engine-wright", in 1815 rather than the competing Davy lamps, designed about the same time by Humphry Davy and used in other mining communities. Using the chronological order of two John Trotter Brockett books, "Geordie" was given to North East pitmen; later he acknowledges that the pitmen also christened their Stephenson lamp "Geordie".


title: Geordie

text: Linguist Katie Wales also dates the term earlier than does the current "Oxford English Dictionary"; she observes that "Geordy" (or "Geordie") was a common name given to coal-mine pitmen in ballads and songs of the region, noting that such usage turns up as early as 1793. It occurs in the titles of two songs by songwriter Joe Wilson: "Geordy, Haud the Bairn" and "Keep your Feet Still, Geordie". Citing such examples as the song "Geordy Black", written by Rowland Harrison of Gateshead, she contends that, as a consequence of popular culture, the miner and the keelman had become icons of the region in the 19th century, and "Geordie" was a label that "affectionately and proudly reflected this," replacing the earlier ballad emblem, the figure of Bob Crankie.


title: Geordie

text: In the "English Dialect Dictionary" of 1900, Joseph Wright gave as his fourth definition of "Geordie": "A man from Tyneside; a miner; a north-country collier vessel", quoting two sources from Northumberland, one from East Durham and one from Australia. The source from Durham stated: "In South Tyneside even, this name was applied to the Lower Tyneside men."


title: Geordie

text: In Graham's many years of research, the earliest record he found of the term's use dated to 1823 by local comedian Billy Purvis. Purvis had set up a booth at the Newcastle Races on the Town Moor. In an angry tirade against a rival showman, who had hired a young pitman called Tom Johnson to dress as a clown, Billy cried out to the clown:


title: Geordie

text: John Camden Hotten wrote in 1869: "Geordie, general term in Northumberland and Durham for a pitman, or coal-miner. Origin not known; the term has been in use more than a century." Using Hotten as a chronological reference, Geordie has been documented for at least years as a term related to Northumberland and County Durham.


title: Geordie

text: Travel writer Scott Dobson used the term "Geordieland" in a 1973 guidebook to refer collectively to Northumberland and Durham.


title: Geordie

text: The Survey of English Dialects included Earsdon and Heddon-on-the-Wall in its fieldwork, administering more than 1000 questions to local informants.


title: Geordie

text: The Linguistic Survey of Scotland included Cumberland and Northumberland (using pre-1974 boundaries) in its scope, collecting words through postal questionnaires. Tyneside sites included Cullercoats, Earsdon, Forest Hall, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, Wallsend-on-Tyne and Whitley Bay.


title: Geordie

text: The phonemic notation used in this article is based on the set of symbols used by . Other scholars may use different transcriptions. Watt and Allen stated that there were approximately 800,000 people in the early 2000s who spoke this form of British English.


title: Geordie

text: Tyneside English (TE) is spoken in Newcastle upon Tyne, a city of around 260,000 inhabitants in the far north of England, and in the conurbation stretching east and south of Newcastle along the valley of the River Tyne as far as the North Sea. The total population of this conurbation, which also subsumes Gateshead, Jarrow, North and South Shields, Whitley Bay, and Tynemouth, exceeds 800,000.


title: Geordie

text: Geordie consonants generally follow those of Received Pronunciation, with these unique characteristics as follows:


title: Geordie

text: The Geordie dialect shares similarities with other Northern English dialects, as well as with the Scots language (See Rowe 2007, 2009).


title: Geordie

text: Dorfy, real name Dorothy Samuelson-Sandvid, was a noted Geordie dialect writer. In her column for the South Shields Gazette, Samuelson-Sandvid attests many samples of Geordie language usage, such as the nouns "bairn" ("child") and "clarts" ("mud"); the adjectives "canny" ("pleasant") and "clag" ("sticky"); and the imperative verb phrase "howay" ("hurry up!"; "come on!")


title: Geordie

text: "Howay" is broadly comparable to the invocation "Come on!" or the French "Allez-y!" ("Go on!"). Examples of common use include "Howay man!", meaning "come on" or "hurry up", "Howay the lads!" as a term of encouragement for a sports team for example (the players' tunnel at St James' Park has this phrase just above the entrance to the pitch), or "Ho'way!?" (with stress on the second syllable) expressing incredulity or disbelief. The literal opposite of this phrase is "haddaway" ("go away"); although not as common as "howay", it is perhaps most commonly used in the phrase "Haddaway an' shite" (Tom Hadaway, Figure 5.2 Haddaway an' shite; 'Cursing like sleet blackening the buds, raging at the monk of Jarrow scribbling his morality and judgement into a book.').


title: Geordie

text: Another word, "divvie" or "divvy" ("idiot"), seems to come from the Co-op dividend, or from the two Davy lamps (the more explosive Scotch Davy used in 1850, commission disapproved of its use in 1886 (inventor not known, nicknamed Scotch Davy probably given by miners after the Davy lamp was made perhaps by north east miners who used the Stephenson Lamp), and the later better designed Davy designed by Humphry Davy also called the Divvy.) As in a north east miner saying 'Marra, ye keep way from me if ye usin a divvy.' It seems the word divvie then translated to daft lad/lass. Perhaps coming from the fact one would be seen as foolish going down a mine with a Scotch Divvy when there are safer lamps available, like the Geordie, or the Davy.


title: Geordie

text: The Geordie word "netty", meaning a toilet and place of need and necessity for relief or bathroom, has an uncertain origin, though some have theorised that it may come from slang used by Roman soldiers on Hadrian's Wall, which may have later become "gabinetti" in the Romance language Italian (such as in the Westoe Netty, the subject of a famous painting from Bob Olley). However, "gabbinetto" is the Modern Italian diminutive of "gabbia", which actually derives from the Latin "cavea" ("hollow", "cavity", "enclosure"), the root of the loanwords that became the Modern English "cave", "cage", and "gaol". Thus, another explanation would be that it comes from a Modern Italian form of the word "gabinetti", though only a relatively small number of Italians have migrated to the North of England, mostly during the 19th century.


title: Geordie

text: Some etymologists connect the word "netty" to the Modern English word "needy". John Trotter Brockett, writing in 1829 in his "A glossary of north country words...", claims that the etymon of "netty" (and its related form "neddy") is the Modern English "needy" and "need".


title: Geordie

text: Bill Griffiths, in "A Dictionary of North East Dialect", points to the earlier form, the Old English "níd"; he writes: "MS locates a possible early ex. "Robert Hovyngham sall make... at the other end of his house a knyttyng" York 1419, in which case the root could be OE níd 'necessary'". Another related word, "nessy" is thought (by Griffiths) to derive from the Modern English "necessary".


title: Geordie

text: A poem called "Yam" narrated by author Douglas Kew, demonstrates the usage of a number of Geordie words.


title: The Testament of Sister New Devil

text: Basara Tojo is a high school student studying at Hijirigasaka Academy when his father Jin suddenly gets "remarried" and asks Basara if he wants to have sisters. Basara meets his two new, cute stepsisters, Mio Naruse and Maria Naruse. After his father departs overseas, Basara quickly finds that the two sisters are actually part of a demon clan, and he is meant to be with the hero clan. Mio, a Demon princess, forcibly attempts to make a master and servant contract with Basara, but Maria has it end up being the opposite, with Basara as the master. Basara then keeps getting into ecchi scenarios, largely to protect Mio from being pursued by other demons who are after her heritage, which is passed down from the former Demon Lord Wilbert.


title: The Testament of Sister New Devil

text: The first light novel volume was published on September 29, 2012, under Kadokawa Shoten's Kadokawa Sneaker Bunko imprint. The thirteenth and last volume has been published on March 31, 2021.


title: The Testament of Sister New Devil

text: A manga adaptation with art by Kashiwa Miyako began serialization in Kadokawa Shoten's "shōnen" manga magazine "Shōnen Ace" in the July 2013 issue, released on May 25, 2013. A second manga adaptation, titled , focusing on the antics of Maria with art by Fumihiro Kiso, began serialization in Hakusensha's "seinen" manga magazine "Young Animal Arashi" on February 7, 2014. Both series have been licensed for publication in North America by Seven Seas Entertainment.


title: The Testament of Sister New Devil

text: An anime television adaptation premiered on January 7, 2015. The opening theme is "Blade of Hope" by sweet ARMS and the ending theme is "Still Sis" by Kaori Sadohara. A second season titled "The Testament of Sister New Devil BURST" premiered on October 9, 2015. The anime is licensed in North America by Crunchyroll, with Funimation handling the home video release. Anime Limited released the series in the UK.


title: The Testament of Sister New Devil

text: The theme music of the anime is very similar to that of Fairy Tail, in fact, being an arrangement of it. Which in itself is not surprising, since these two anime have the same composer.


title: The Testament of Sister New Devil

text: On June 12, 2015, the Chinese Ministry of Culture listed "The Testament of Sister New Devil" among 38 anime and manga titles banned in China.


title: William Kidd

text: William Kidd, also known as Captain William Kidd or simply Captain Kidd ( – 23 May 1701), was a Scottish sea captain who was commissioned as a privateer and had experience as a pirate. He was tried and executed in London in 1701 for murder and piracy.


title: William Kidd

text: Kidd had captured a French ship, commanded by an English captain, as a prize. He had been commissioned by the Crown as a privateer for this expedition, but the political climate of England turned against him in this case. Some modern historians, for example Sir Cornelius Neale Dalton, deemed his piratical reputation unjust and said that he was acting as a privateer. Documents found in the early 20th century in London court papers supported Kidd's account of his actions.


title: William Kidd

text: Kidd was born in Dundee, Scotland prior to October 15, 1654. While claims have been made of alternate birthplaces, including Greenock and even Belfast, he said himself he came from Dundee in a testimony given by Kidd to the High Court of Admiralty in 1695. There have also been records of his baptism taking place in Dundee. A local society supported the family financially after the death of the father. The myth that his "father was thought to have been a Church of Scotland minister" has been discounted, insofar as there is no mention of the name in comprehensive Church of Scotland records for the period. Others still hold the contrary view.


title: William Kidd

text: As a young man, Kidd settled in New York City, which the English had taken over from the Dutch. There he befriended many prominent colonial citizens, including three governors. Some accounts suggest that he served as a seaman's apprentice on a pirate ship during this time, before beginning his more famous seagoing exploits as a privateer.


title: William Kidd

text: By 1689, Kidd was a member of a French–English pirate crew sailing the Caribbean under Captain Jean Fantin. During one of their voyages, Kidd and other crew members mutinied, ousting the captain and sailing to the British colony of Nevis. There they renamed the ship "Blessed William", and Kidd became captain either as a result of election by the ship's crew, or by appointment of Christopher Codrington, governor of the island of Nevis.


title: William Kidd

text: Kidd was an experienced leader and sailor by that time, and the "Blessed William" became part of Codrington's small fleet assembled to defend Nevis from the French, with whom the English were at war. The governor did not pay the sailors for their defensive service, telling them instead to take their pay from the French. Kidd and his men attacked the French island of Marie-Galante, destroying its only town and looting the area, and gathering around 2,000 pounds sterling.


title: William Kidd

text: Later, during the War of the Grand Alliance, on commissions from the provinces of New York and Massachusetts Bay, Kidd captured an enemy privateer off the New England coast. Shortly afterwards, he was awarded £150 for successful privateering in the Caribbean. One year later, Captain Robert Culliford, a notorious pirate, stole Kidd's ship while he was ashore at Antigua in the West Indies.


title: William Kidd

text: In New York City, Kidd was active in financially supporting the construction of Trinity Church, New York.


title: William Kidd

text: On 16 May 1691, Kidd married Sarah Bradley Cox Oort, who was still in her early twenties. She had already been twice widowed and was one of the wealthiest women in New York, based on an inheritance from her first husband.


title: William Kidd

text: On December 11, 1695, Richard Coote, 1st Earl of Bellomont, who was governing New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, asked the "trusty and well beloved Captain Kidd" to attack Thomas Tew, John Ireland, Thomas Wake, William Maze, and all others who associated themselves with pirates, along with any enemy French ships. His request had the weight of the Crown behind it, and Kidd would have been considered disloyal, carrying much social stigma, to refuse Bellomont. This request preceded the voyage that contributed to Kidd's reputation as a pirate and marked his image in history and folklore.


title: William Kidd

text: Four-fifths of the cost for the 1696 venture was paid by noble lords, who were among the most powerful men in England: the Earl of Orford, the Baron of Romney, the Duke of Shrewsbury, and Sir John Somers. Kidd was presented with a letter of marque, signed personally by King William III of England, which authorized him as a privateer. This letter reserved 10% of the loot for the Crown, and Henry Gilbert's "The Book of Pirates" suggests that the King fronted some of the money for the voyage himself. Kidd and his acquaintance Colonel Robert Livingston orchestrated the whole plan; they sought additional funding from merchant Sir Richard Blackham. Kidd also had to sell his ship "Antigua" to raise funds.


title: William Kidd

text: The new ship, "Adventure Galley", was well suited to the task of catching pirates, weighing over 284 tons burthen and equipped with 34 cannon, oars, and 150 men. The oars were a key advantage, as they enabled "Adventure Galley" to manoeuvre in a battle when the winds had calmed and other ships were dead in the water. Kidd took pride in personally selecting the crew, choosing only those whom he deemed to be the best and most loyal officers.


title: William Kidd

text: Because of Kidd's refusal to salute, the Navy vessel's captain retaliated by pressing much of Kidd's crew into naval service, despite the captain's strong protests and the general exclusion of privateer crew from such action. Short-handed, Kidd sailed for New York City, capturing a French vessel en route (which was legal under the terms of his commission). To make up for the lack of officers, Kidd picked up replacement crew in New York, the vast majority of whom were known and hardened criminals, some likely former pirates.


title: William Kidd

text: Among Kidd's officers was quartermaster Hendrick van der Heul. The quartermaster was considered "second in command" to the captain in pirate culture of this era. It is not clear, however, if Van der Heul exercised this degree of responsibility because Kidd was authorised as a privateer. Van der Heul is notable because he might have been African or of African descent. A contemporary source describes him as a "small black Man". If Van der Heul was of African ancestry, he would be considered the highest-ranking black pirate or privateer so far identified. Van der Heul later became a master's mate on a merchant vessel and was never convicted of piracy.


title: William Kidd

text: In September 1696, Kidd weighed anchor and set course for the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa. A third of his crew died on the Comoros due to an outbreak of cholera, the brand-new ship developed many leaks, and he failed to find the pirates whom he expected to encounter off Madagascar.


title: William Kidd

text: With his ambitious enterprise failing, Kidd became desperate to cover its costs. Yet he failed to attack several ships when given a chance, including a Dutchman and a New York privateer. Both were out of bounds of his commission. The latter would have been considered out of bounds because New York was part of the territories of the Crown, and Kidd was authorised in part by the New York governor. Some of the crew deserted Kidd the next time that "Adventure Galley" anchored offshore. Those who decided to stay on made constant open threats of mutiny.


title: William Kidd

text: Kidd killed one of his own crewmen on 30 October 1697. Kidd's gunner William Moore was on deck sharpening a chisel when a Dutch ship appeared. Moore urged Kidd to attack the Dutchman, an act that would have been considered piratical, since the nation was not at war with England, but also certain to anger Dutch-born King William. Kidd refused, calling Moore a lousy dog. Moore retorted, "If I am a lousy dog, you have made me so; you have brought me to ruin and many more." Kidd reportedly dropped an ironbound bucket on Moore, fracturing his skull. Moore died the following day.


title: William Kidd

text: Seventeenth-century English admiralty law allowed captains great leeway in using violence against their crew, but outright killing was not permitted. Kidd said to his ship's surgeon that he had "good friends in England, that will bring me off for that".


title: William Kidd

text: Escaped prisoners told stories of being hoisted up by the arms and "drubbed" (thrashed) with a drawn cutlass by Kidd. But on one occasion, crew members sacked the trading ship "Mary" and tortured several of its crew members while Kidd and the other captain, Thomas Parker, conversed privately in Kidd's cabin.


title: William Kidd

text: Kidd was declared a pirate very early in his voyage by a Royal Navy officer, to whom he had promised "thirty men or so". Kidd sailed away during the night to preserve his crew, rather than subject them to Royal Navy impressment. The letter of marque was intended to protect a privateer's crew from such impressment.


title: William Kidd

text: On 30 January 1698, Kidd raised French colours and took his greatest prize, the 400-ton "Quedagh Merchant", an Indian ship hired by Armenian merchants. It was loaded with satins, muslins, gold, silver, and a variety of East Indian merchandise, as well as extremely valuable silks. The captain of "Quedagh Merchant" was an Englishman named Wright, who had purchased passes from the French East India Company promising him the protection of the French Crown.


title: William Kidd

text: When news of his capture of this ship reached England, however, officials classified Kidd as a pirate. Various naval commanders were ordered to "pursue and seize the said Kidd and his accomplices" for the "notorious piracies" they had committed.


title: William Kidd

text: Kidd kept the French sea passes of the "Quedagh Merchant", as well as the vessel itself. British admiralty and vice-admiralty courts (especially in North America) previously had often winked at privateers' excesses amounting to piracy. Kidd might have hoped that the passes would provide the legal fig leaf that would allow him to keep "Quedagh Merchant" and her cargo. Renaming the seized merchantman as "Adventure Prize", he set sail for Madagascar.


title: William Kidd

text: On 1 April 1698, Kidd reached Madagascar. After meeting privately with trader Tempest Rogers (who would later be accused of trading and selling Kidd's looted East India goods), he found the first pirate of his voyage, Robert Culliford (the same man who had stolen Kidd's ship at Antigua years before) and his crew aboard "Mocha Frigate".


title: William Kidd

text: Two contradictory accounts exist of how Kidd proceeded. According to "A General History of the Pyrates", published more than 25 years after the event by an author whose identity is disputed by historians, Kidd made peaceful overtures to Culliford: he "drank their Captain's health", swearing that "he was in every respect their Brother", and gave Culliford "a Present of an Anchor and some Guns". This account appears to be based on the testimony of Kidd's crewmen Joseph Palmer and Robert Bradinham at his trial.


title: William Kidd

text: The other version was presented by Richard Zacks in his 2002 book "The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain Kidd". According to Zacks, Kidd was unaware that Culliford had only about 20 crew with him, and felt ill-manned and ill-equipped to take "Mocha Frigate" until his two prize ships and crews arrived. He decided to leave Culliford alone until these reinforcements arrived. After "Adventure Prize" and "Rouparelle" reached port, Kidd ordered his crew to attack Culliford's "Mocha Frigate". However, his crew refused to attack Culliford and threatened instead to shoot Kidd. Zacks does not refer to any source for his version of events.


title: William Kidd

text: Both accounts agree that most of Kidd's men abandoned him for Culliford. Only 13 remained with "Adventure Galley". Deciding to return home, Kidd left the "Adventure Galley" behind, ordering her to be burnt because she had become worm-eaten and leaky. Before burning the ship, he salvaged every last scrap of metal, such as hinges. With the loyal remnant of his crew, he returned to the Caribbean aboard the "Adventure Prize", stopping first at St. Augustine's Bay for repairs. Some of his crew later returned to North America on their own as passengers aboard Giles Shelley's ship "Nassau".


title: William Kidd

text: The 1698 Act of Grace, which offered a royal pardon to pirates in the Indian Ocean, specifically exempted Kidd (and Henry Every) from receiving a pardon, in Kidd's case due to his association with prominent Whig statesmen. Kidd became aware both that he was wanted and that he could not make use of the Act of Grace upon his arrival in Anguilla, his first port of call since St. Augustine's Bay.


title: William Kidd

text: Prior to returning to New York City, Kidd knew that he was wanted as a pirate and that several English men-of-war were searching for him. Realizing that "Adventure Prize" was a marked vessel, he cached it in the Caribbean Sea, sold off his remaining plundered goods through pirate and fence William Burke, and continued towards New York aboard a sloop. He deposited some of his treasure on Gardiners Island, hoping to use his knowledge of its location as a bargaining tool. Kidd landed in Oyster Bay to avoid mutinous crew who had gathered in New York City. To avoid them, Kidd sailed around the eastern tip of Long Island, and doubled back along the Sound to Oyster Bay. He felt this was a safer passage than the highly trafficked Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn.


title: William Kidd

text: New York Governor Bellomont, also an investor, was away in Boston, Massachusetts. Aware of the accusations against Kidd, Bellomont was afraid of being implicated in piracy himself and believed that presenting Kidd to England in chains was his best chance to survive. He lured Kidd into Boston with false promises of clemency, and ordered him arrested on 6 July 1699. Kidd was placed in Stone Prison, spending most of the time in solitary confinement. His wife, Sarah, was also arrested and imprisoned.


title: William Kidd

text: The conditions of Kidd's imprisonment were extremely harsh, and were said to have driven him at least temporarily insane. By then, Bellomont had turned against Kidd and other pirates, writing that the inhabitants of Long Island were "a lawless and unruly people" protecting pirates who had "settled among them".


title: William Kidd

text: The civil government had changed and the new Tory ministry hoped to use Kidd as a tool to discredit the Whigs who had backed him, but Kidd refused to name names, naively confident his patrons would reward his loyalty by interceding on his behalf. There is speculation that he could have been spared had he talked. Finding Kidd politically useless, the Tory leaders sent him to stand trial before the High Court of Admiralty in London, for the charges of piracy on high seas and the murder of William Moore. Whilst awaiting trial, Kidd was confined in the infamous Newgate Prison.


title: William Kidd

text: Kidd had two lawyers to assist in his defence. He was shocked to learn at his trial that he was charged with murder. He was found guilty on all charges (murder and five counts of piracy) and sentenced to death. He was hanged in a public execution on 23 May 1701, at Execution Dock, Wapping, in London. He had to be hanged twice. On the first attempt, the hangman's rope broke and Kidd survived. Although some in the crowd called for Kidd's release, claiming the breaking of the rope was a sign from God, Kidd was hanged again minutes later, and died. His body was gibbeted over the River Thames at Tilbury Point – as a warning to future would-be pirates – for three years.


title: William Kidd

text: Of Kidd's associates, Gabriel Loffe, Able Owens, and Hugh Parrot were also convicted of piracy. They were pardoned just prior to hanging at Execution Dock. Robert Lamley, William Jenkins and Richard Barleycorn were released.


title: William Kidd

text: Kidd's Whig backers were embarrassed by his trial. Far from rewarding his loyalty, they participated in the effort to convict him by depriving him of the money and information which might have provided him with some legal defence. In particular, the two sets of French passes he had kept were missing at his trial. These passes (and others dated 1700) resurfaced in the early 20th century, misfiled with other government papers in a London building. These passes confirm Kidd's version of events, and call the extent of his guilt as a pirate into question.


title: William Kidd

text: A broadside song, "Captain Kidd's Farewell to the Seas, or, the Famous Pirate's Lament", was printed shortly after his execution. It popularised the common belief that Kidd had confessed to the charges.


title: William Kidd

text: The belief that Kidd had left buried treasure contributed greatly to the growth of his legend. The 1701 broadside song "Captain Kid's Farewell to the Seas, or, the Famous Pirate's Lament" lists "Two hundred bars of gold, and rix dollars manifold, we seized uncontrolled".


title: William Kidd

text: It also inspired numerous treasure hunts conducted on Oak Island in Nova Scotia; in Suffolk County, Long Island in New York where Gardiner's Island is located; Charles Island in Milford, Connecticut; the Thimble Islands in Connecticut and Cockenoe Island in Westport, Connecticut.


title: William Kidd

text: Kidd was also alleged to have buried treasure on the Rahway River in New Jersey across the Arthur Kill from Staten Island.


title: William Kidd

text: Captain Kidd did bury a small cache of treasure on Gardiners Island off the eastern coast of Long Island, New York, in a spot known as Cherry Tree Field. Governor Bellomont reportedly had it found and sent to England to be used as evidence against Kidd in his trial.


title: William Kidd

text: Some time in the 1690s, Kidd visited Block Island where he was supplied with provisions by Mrs. Mercy (Sands) Raymond, daughter of the mariner James Sands. It was said that before he departed, Kidd asked Mrs. Raymond to hold out her apron, which he then filled with gold and jewels as payment for her hospitality. After her husband Joshua Raymond died, Mercy moved with her family to northern New London, Connecticut (later Montville), where she purchased much land. The Raymond family was said by family acquaintances to have been "enriched by the apron".


title: William Kidd

text: On Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy, as early as 1875, there were searches on the west side of the island for treasure allegedly buried by Kidd during his time as a privateer. For nearly 200 years, this remote area of the island has been called "Money Cove".


title: William Kidd

text: In 1983, Cork Graham and Richard Knight searched for Captain Kidd's buried treasure off the Vietnamese island of Phú Quốc. Knight and Graham were caught, convicted of illegally landing on Vietnamese territory, and each assessed a $10,000 fine. They were imprisoned for 11 months until they paid the fine.