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I hope my fellow Brits on the boards have been enjoying themselves celebrating the 91st anniversary of the May Revolution. The street parties here on Merseyside have been pretty wild; I mean, we don't like to brag, because the Clydesiders and the Geordies, not to forget the Welsh miners, all have at least an equal claim to have started the whole thing, but we did our bit.

My mum called earlier, and we got talking about her granddad, my great granddad. He died before I was born, but I grew up hearing the stories about him from my parents and grandparents; he fought all through WW1 and the Civil War afterwards, lost a leg in the final push on London. He was on one of the Navy ships that mutinied in Liverpool docks right at the start of the whole thing, and ended up fighting in the Workers' Militia, back when it was still the Liverpool Socialist Republic, before the Provisional Government took over the Red parts of the country. He saw some hard fighting; the Unionist forces were determined to recapture Liverpool. And later he marched with the William Morris Brigade; he fought the German intervention corps at Coventry, which turned out to be the really decisive battle of the war, and really the end of Churchill's government. I remember my Nan used to tell us how they all cried when they realised the opposing troops they'd wiped out were all women; Mary Allen Battalion, I believe, or one of those rightist Suffragette units anyway.

So, I suppose my question on this auspicious day is this: Do any of my fellow Brits have any similar family stories about those days that changed this country forever? Or indeed any interesting anecdotes at all that you may have read about or seen on telly? And as for you non-Brits, well, they don't call them the Days That Shook the World for nothing, so a bit of an international perspective would be nice, considering that we really only learn the winners' version in school over here.

Anyway, I'm off out again; the party's still going on in town! :D
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