[Scenario Seed] The Great Exhibition

[Catsmate]

While the Tenth Doctor may have considered 1851 "a bit dull" many others would have disagreed. From the 1st of May to the 11th of October in London ran "The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations", one of the wonders of the age.
While this type of World's Fair event was becoming fairly common, the Parisian exhibition of 1844 being partly the inspiration for the London one, the 1851 one was both huge in scope and immensely popular. One quarter of the British population may have attended to look at more than a hundred thousand exhibits, dozens of countries were represented (though China refused and Japan was still closed to outsiders).

Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, is often credited with pushing the idea of such an event to fruition and he was an enthusiastic promoter of the exhibition; helping persuade British government to form the Royal Commission to organise the exhibition. It was at least partly inspired by the rather turbulent previous decade; Victoria was initially unpopular with her subjects, the Famine in Ireland (1845-9) had killed more than a million and a quarter people, and even Britain had been effected by the revolutionary rumblings of 1848.

• While Britain did not see the violent revolutions other countries saw, there was the Chartist Movement and the authorities feared the peaceful protest of April 10th 1848 might result in violence. Some Time Meddler might want it to do so and  could intervene to agitate matters and send Britain down the path of violent revolution. This would also be an opportunity for someone like the Rani to operate amongst the disorder.
• Why did 1848 see so many revolutions? Well remember that Famine in Ireland, caused by the failure of the potato crop due to a fungal blight? The potato crop was important in many countries (especially in northern Europe) to feed the new industrial urban workers and it's failure was a triggering factor. But was it a natural event? A deliberate act of biological warfare some group? Or an accident, perhaps borne on a meteorite form Mars (the Ice Warriors used fungal weapons in the run up to the Thousand Day War) or inadvertently introduced by a time traveller.
• Stopping the blight might be the goal of a Time Meddler, a difficult goal if it was a natural phenomena. Spraying fungicide, introducing a geneered resistant potato strain or tampering with the weather might work.
  

Although the Great Exhibition was a theoretically a platform for all nations to display their achievements, it was also designed to promote the idea British superiority. British goods were described as holding "the lead in almost every field where strength, durability, utility and quality were concerned, whether in iron and steel, machinery or textiles".

The exhibition was housed in a purpose built structure located in Hyde Park in central London. The "Crystal Palace" was huge, 535m long, 136m wide and 39m high, composed of nearly three hundred thousand glass panes and four thousand tonnes of iron. It's nine hectares of space enclosed several full sized trees, complete with birds.
After the exhibition closed it was disassembled and moved to a new site on Penge Common where it stood from 1854 until it was destroyed by fire in 1936. It's destruction was described as  "the end of an age" by Winston Churchill.

• A rather mysterious fire which was supposedly started in a ladies cloakroom by an explosion of unknown origin. Deliberate arson? Insurance fraud? Not very likely as the structure was underinsured. An attempt to stop Baird's fiddlings with "television"? He did use the southern tower for his experiments. Or was there a battle with Daleks/Cybermen/Sontarens and the palace merely collateral damage? Or deliberately started to cover up events.
  

The official opening of the Great Exhibition was on May Day, with Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and many others. There were some hundred thousand objects, displayed along about eighteen kilometres of walks, from over 15,000 contributors. Some examples:

• the massive hydraulic press that had
  lifted the metal tubes of the new Bangor bridge at Bangor, devised by Stevenson; each
  tube weighed over 1,100 tonnes but the press required only one operator
• a steam-hammer that could with equal accuracy forge the
  main bearing of a steamship or gently crack an egg (this was demonstrated)
• mechanical adding machines and coin counting machines that competed with selected bank clerks
  
• a number of "defensive umbrellas", featuring pop-out knife blades or a detachable sword (Leela would love one)
  
• various "sportsmen' knives" the precursor to the Swiss Army knife; one model had eighty attachments
  
• the "tempest prognosticator" which used leaches to predict changes in the weather
• stained glass, along with ribbons, fabric and carpets coloured using the new dyes
• a steam powered printing press that could turn out 5,000 copies of the Illustrated London News
  in an hour,
  
• another machine that would automatically print and fold envelopes, 
• an expanding hearse
  
• a machine
  for making those new-fangled cigarettes
• folding pianos, intended for yachts
  
• for the deaf, a pulpit incorporating a system of rubber tubes connected to pews, to aid in hearing the sermon
• for the blind, "tangible ink" that left a solid residue,  producing raised characters on paper
• some early "velocipedes", precursor to the bicycle
• demonstration of Samuel Colt's new repeating pistols
• another American exhibit was McCormick’s
  reaping machine
• a stunning display of French textiles, considered far superior to the British in terms of colour and quality
  
• one of the more controversial exhibits was also American; Hiram Power’s statue in white marble, of a Greek Slave, wearing nothing but a small piece of chain; it was housed in its own little red velvet tent and was the most visited exhibit
  
• many examples of the use of steam power, printing presses, textile machines, agricultural machinery, railway
  locomotives
• there was Eau de Cologne fountain in the Austrian Court 
• the 'Amputation Assistant", a portable steam powered saw designed for rapid amputation of limbs
  
• free samples of chocolate drops were available in the Saxony Court.
  
• at the centre of the building there was the famous fountain, eight metres high and made of four tons of pink glass
  
• Cat lovers might want to avoid the stuffed kitten dioramas; yes real (former) kittens
  

The exhibition introduced the phrase "spend a penny" to the English language, it included the first coin-operated private toilet cubicles.

• Which open up a few interesting possibilities for making people disappear, see the Cybermen below
  

Ticket prices varied. Season tickets cost three guineas for men, two for women, and allowed unlimited entry (they were used an average of thirty times). Individual day prices were:

• one pound for the 2nd and 3rd of May
  
• five shillings for the 5th through 23rd of May (the fifth was a Sunday)
  
• from May 24nd one shilling for Monday through Thursday, 2/6 (two shillings and six pence) on Fridays and five shillings on Saturdays
• The admission offices didn't give change. And tipping exhibition staff was prohibited; they could be dismissed for accepting gratuities so bribery for overlooking weirdness should be discreet.
  

There were over six million visitors, including some (like New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley) from the United States. He spent five days roaming the halls.

• For those unfamiliar with pre-decimalisation British currency the pound was made up of twenty shillings, each of twelve pence; a guinea was 21 shillings and, though no longer an actual coin, was often used for pricing, especially for goods and services aimed at the higher classes.
• Actual British currency of the period was complicated. There were copper coins worth one quarter penny (Farthing), one half penny, one penny, two pence (actually a half-Groat), and four pence (Groat). Silver coins were denominated in three pence, six pence, one shilling, two shillings (Florin, still rather new in 1851), two shillings and six pence (half Crown) and five shillings (the Crown, rare). Gold coins were the half Sovereign (ten shillings) and Sovereign (one pound). There were other, rarer, coins such as the old silver Groat, the double Sovereign, and half Farthing.
  
• Banknotes were available in £5, £10, £20, £100, £200, £500 and £1,000 denominations. With modern technology they would be trivially easy to forge, though those over £10 were rare. All were hand signed.
  

The catalogue of the exhibition can be obtained from here in various formats or from Google Books in PDF format. It's a fascinating read and a useful game aid.


So what has the Great Exhibition got for gamers? Well there seem to be two main groups of plots. Loosely the first group is tourism, with a side of intrigue.  The Great Exhibition was a momentous event, the sort of thing that would attract time travellers.

While there's no canonical visit by any Doctor to the exhibition, there was in deutero-canonical material:

• The Eighth Doctor took his companions Charley Pollard and C'rizz
• The Eleventh Doctor took Amy Pond and Rory Williams

Further the Fifth Doctor tried to take Nyssa and Tegan there without (on-screen) success.
 I could see the Sixth Doctor dragging Peri around (and not dressing for the era) or the Third taking Sarah-Jane. In fact pretty much any incarnation might pop along for a visit. Though if the Seventh is there with Ace he's probably got a plan, or several.

• The Tenth Doctor did visit London in December 1851 where he encountered Jackson Lake. By this time the Cybermen were established. Were they present for the exhibition? What were they up to? An awful lot of people passed though, did all of them leave or were some of them harvested?
• This is somewhat reminiscent of another World's Fair, in Chicago, and the mass murderer H. H. Holmes.
  

Of course if there are multiple time travellers wandering the halls they may encounter each other, what happens then? Polite nods? Chatting over tea? Barbed remarks? Disrupter fire and panicked bystanders? Quiet stalking and poisoned darts?
All of the previous?

And what's really in those free chocolate drops?


The second group of plot possibilities are, loosely, action.

• Assassination. While there was no recorded assassination attempt on Queen Victoria in 1851 you can change that. The opening ceremony is an excellent opportunity for someone with a pistol, grenade, sub-machine gun or blaster.
• If Victoria dies, her son Albert Edward (the future Edward VII) inherits the crown. However he's only ten so a Regency period will be required.
  
• Then there's the Duke of Wellington (rather elderly now), the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, Viscount Palmerston (a later PM), Thomas Babington Macaulay and many more
  
• Without Russell and/or Palmerston how would the "Eastern Question" have been decided? Would there have been a Crimean War?
• Pretty much every well known Briton either visited or might have visited; Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Alfred Tennyson and Lewis Caroll are known to have visited. Might there have been a Sinister Plot to hypnotise/mind control them, replace them with duplicates or simply kill them?

• Theft. There was a lot of very valuable stuff lying around, Koh-i-Noor diamond for example. Though it's still uncut.
  
• Along with a 50kg chunk of Chilean gold, a display of dozens of Swiss gold watches, a coat embroidered with pearls, emeralds and rubies from India and much more.
  
• All highly attractive to both local thieves and light fingered (and well equipped) time travellers. Like, say, a pre-Doctor Jack Harkness.?
  
• Then there's the traditional Who mysterious object plotline. It could be a Terileptil control bracelet, Sontaren blaster, Vortex Manipulator, power pack, spore pod, chunk of radioactive Hymetusite, a holo-projector......... It needs to be recovered, either because it's anachronistic or because it's started to influence people's minds/resurrect the dead/inspire an inventor/kill people et cetera.
• Or there could be an innocent inventor in one corner, already demonstrating an anachronistic device such as a Mutoscope or self-propelled carriage. Is he a lone genius, ahead of his time? Or influenced by someone or something?
  

Thoughts? Comments?

[jezmiller]

A third possibility just occurred to me. In 1852, the third great cholera pandemic begins. With a quarter of the population of Britain passing through the exhibition (including, one would expect, a disproportionate number of Londoners, who accounted for almost half the casualties by themselves), it's an ideal place for a time traveler with access to advanced bioengineering techniques to infect them with some kind of immunity or resistance to the disease.

Why? Well, there could be a benevolent motive, albeit one that damages history. It's the sort of thing the Meddling Monk might come up with. On the other hand, the bio-agent might not be a "cure" as such, but something designed to activate when the cholera had brought the victim to the point of death, maybe putting them into a death-like coma that Victorian medical science couldn't distinguish from the real thing. Again, why? There are all kinds of possibilities, many of them gruesome. Time travelling Cybermen might be looking for humans to convert, and have some reason to want to avoid damaging the time line in the process. Time traveling - or alien - slave traders might want a discreet way to make a large number of people disappear. The Rani could extract large quantities of brain fluid without causing tell-tale riots.

The exhibition would also attract the Alexandrian Society's interest. Maybe the 1936 fire was cover for a heist.

[Catsmate]

I like that! Excellent ideas. I knew there was something sinister about the free chocolates.

[jezmiller]

Nov 15, 2014 21:10:53 GMT Catsmate said:

I like that! Excellent ideas. I knew there was something sinister about the free chocolates.

Maybe it's only the first one that's free...

[soultaker666212]

Interesting idea I had about the Great Exhibition, after looking into the lore of the Men In Black franchise and such, was what if the event was part of a migration of extra terrestrials into London, like how in the MiB universe the 1964 world's fair was a cover-up of an alien migration and to display alien tech as new marvels of the time. Interesting idea to have hidden alien technology buried beneath the objects and tech of the time with well aliens hear and there disguised as mid-Victorians.

[Catsmate]

May 10, 2023 8:20:23 GMT soultaker666212 said:

Interesting idea I had about the Great Exhibition, after looking into the lore of the Men In Black franchise and such, was what if the event was part of a migration of extra terrestrials into London, like how in the MiB universe the 1964 world's fair was a cover-up of an alien migration and to display alien tech as new marvels of the time. Interesting idea to have hidden alien technology buried beneath the objects and tech of the time with well aliens hear and there disguised as mid-Victorians.

Holy thread necromancy... It was nearly a decade ago.

You make an interesting point. Torchwood didn't exist but there are DC references to other such organisations and Ashildr's little social experiment did exist. I'm sure that aliens who would 'pass' would have dropped in to visit the Exhibition, as would many time travellers (Limelight Effect permitting). Or groups of tourists.
In fact it might be a good place for a stranded/displaced person to loiter and find a ride, or steal a time machine.

[soultaker666212]

May 10, 2023 13:38:16 GMT Catsmate said:

May 10, 2023 8:20:23 GMT soultaker666212 said:

Interesting idea I had about the Great Exhibition, after looking into the lore of the Men In Black franchise and such, was what if the event was part of a migration of extra terrestrials into London, like how in the MiB universe the 1964 world's fair was a cover-up of an alien migration and to display alien tech as new marvels of the time. Interesting idea to have hidden alien technology buried beneath the objects and tech of the time with well aliens hear and there disguised as mid-Victorians.

Holy thread necromancy... It was nearly a decade ago.

You make an interesting point. Torchwood didn't exist but there are DC references to other such organisations and Ashildr's little social experiment did exist. I'm sure that aliens who would 'pass' would have dropped in to visit the Exhibition, as would many time travellers (Limelight Effect permitting). Or groups of tourists.
In fact it might be a good place for a stranded/displaced person to loiter and find a ride, or steal a time machine.

My apologies, I had the idea whilst doing some reading and such felt like sharing as it is an interesting idea. 

[Catsmate]

May 10, 2023 13:44:37 GMT soultaker666212 said:

May 10, 2023 13:38:16 GMT Catsmate said:

Holy thread necromancy... It was nearly a decade ago.

You make an interesting point. Torchwood didn't exist but there are DC references to other such organisations and Ashildr's little social experiment did exist. I'm sure that aliens who would 'pass' would have dropped in to visit the Exhibition, as would many time travellers (Limelight Effect permitting). Or groups of tourists.
In fact it might be a good place for a stranded/displaced person to loiter and find a ride, or steal a time machine.

My apologies, I had the idea whilst doing some reading and such felt like sharing as it is an interesting idea. 

Don't be sorry, I was just surprised. Perhaps it's time I revisited done of my old ideas.