England's Hours of Not Quite Greatest Need

[bunn]

When thinking about England*'s Hour of Greatest Need, I started considering previous Hours of Apparently Insufficient Need.  It must be admitted though, that my knowledge of anything that happened during the period between about 1485 and 1900 is pretty appalling, so I thought I'd ask for suggestions.

I thought of :
- The Viking Invasions
- The Norman Conquest
- Stephen v Matilda
-  The Wars of the Roses
- The Spanish Armada (but then dismissed that as a scary thing that basically just got blown away)
- The English Civil War
- 1916 (although if you argued that this is a lot more than England's, Britain's, or even the UK's Hour, I'd have to concede the point)
- Dunkirk

Then it occurred to me that we actually have a gadget that is supposed to specifically indicate Hours of Need just down the road at Buckland Abbey, so I looked up Drake's Drum to see what times of national emergency it had seen fit to signal.  But it seems to be a most erratic indicator, drumming for things like Lord Nelson being given the Freedom of  Plymouth, which doesn't really seem like an emergency, even in Plymouth.

Incidentally, there's an excellent list on Wikipedia of Sleeping Kings** In Mountains.   I knew there were quite a few of them, but I hadn't previously realised quite what a superb range of sleeping heroes was available in the event of emergency.

* I'm not being too picky about national definitions here, although I think 'Albion's Hour of Greatest Need' definitely has more of a ring to it than 'United Kingdom Maximum Necessity Moment' or similar.

**Although not all of them are kings.

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I'm now wondering if there should be a Hero Bank of heroes cross-referenced by skillset. Wellinghall seems to feel a cricket one is required, for example.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

That's a very good idea. Also a checklist for each hero listing his own personal definition of an Hour of Need. It would be quite embarrassing to carefully select your cricket-playing, seafaring, pure-at-heart warlord, only for him to say, "You call that an Hour of Need? Pah! That's only a Mild Difficulty. I'm going back to bed!"

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I've just thought of one completely obvious omission from the List of Sleeping Heroes : James Bond.

James Bond HAS to be an on-call Sleeping Hero with particularly low standards of Hour of Need. This explains a lot!

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

In which case, I think he misread the job description, and for "Sleeping Hero" read "Sleeping-Around Hero." :-D

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

There also needs to be some sort of indemnity arrangement, to be signed by those invoking the hero's assistance, to cover ancillary damage and unexpected side-effects.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

It's only safest *nods sagely*