Another ‘Churchill’s Spaniards’ Talk

The author, Séan Scullion, is doing another talk on his book. This time at the Royal Engineers Museum on Saturday 14th September.

If you’re within reach of Gillingham, I would recommend it:

https://www.re-museum.co.uk/

Finnish Costal Defences

Ever get the feeling you’ve been out-geeked?

http://www.alternativefinland.com/kuivasaari-coastal-artillery-fortress/

A show, a game, a walk and a bench

It's been a strained couple of weeks which I might elaborate on at some point. However, I finally got down to some wargaming. After two weeks of the game being set up and ready on the table, I got down to running through Kesselsdorf with my rusty understanding of the Twilight of the Soldier Kings rules. More of that anon. The weekend before I had a trip up to north London for SELWG and met the Two Davids of The Ragged Soldier and St Cyr on Wheels blogs.

I enjoyed my day out (I'll gloss over the hordes of maskless NFL fans on the Tube) and it was nice to put faces to names from the blogosphere. Stand out displays for me were the 1930s Thai civil war game, the 1950s French Indo-China game, and the 2mm Ancients game which seemed to have a fully-engaged group of participants. No damage was done to my credit rating on impulse buys either.

The intriguing venue for SELWG

View down the length of the Thai game

Close-up of the Thai game. Government forces moving up to confront the rebels. I was taken by the 'mule train' (If I remember correctly, they were actually donkeys).

More action from the Thai game

French Indo-China

From a great looking Sikh War game

Ditto

The aforesaid ancients game

More recently we had a family trip to my home town. Most of the branch down here and the Liverpool branch. We all assembled (6 in total) in Cleethorpes and had some good quality family time together, and some good quality fish and chips too. Forget everywhere else as far as the national dish is concerned, as it is a pale imitation. On the Sunday we walked along the south promenade and after deciding not to wait for the next departure on the miniature railway, we continued walking down the coast towards Humberston. I then remembered something I'd read about in a recent Grauniad [sic] article and suggested we head there.

This is the overly alliterative, but fabulous Buck Beck Beach Bench. Originally it was a makeshift bench made out of driftwood on the seaward side of salt marshes and dunes. Over time it has been built up, swept away, re-built and swept away again, only to be built up afresh. Nine or ten times. More can be read on it here. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Blimey%2C+Buck+Beck+Beach+Bench%27s+blossomed!+the+origins+behind...-a0650673599

Looking like the last stand of a British column in some far flung part of the  Empire

With random dog walker

Nundanket Junior and paramour inspecting the installation. Random dog walker guarding the premises

Some of the flotsam and jetsam used 

Not so random wife-type person contemplating the enormity of the sky

Back in old Cleethorpes town, the old post office. There are some other architectural gems around this part of town. Sadly I didn't capture any of them on the camera. This is fairly close to the site of a Zeppelin raid in WWI where several members of the Manchester Regiment were killed and wounded. The building destroyed in the raid is now the site of a 1960s built Baptist chapel. The town was big on Non-Conformism and had several Baptist and Methodist chapels.

Close to where the bench is located, last year a walker discovered the remains of an aircraft believed to be a Bristol Beaufighter. I have no idea what happened to the remains after the bomb disposal squad attended the site.

Just offshore from here is one of a pair of WWI coastal forts guarding the mouth of the Humber.

Haile Sand Fort, close to Humberston, Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire

Bull Sand Fort, behind which is Spurn Head in Yorkshire.

I'll be back soon with a post on the re-fought Battle of Kesselsdorf.

Guess where I’ve been

Just a selection of the photos from my trip down to Bovington with Lincolnshire Tom. Lots of stuff built in that fair county to swell the heart of a Yellowbelly like Tom. It’s fair to say we had a full day!

We didn’t get a proper chance to explore it fully. There were a few sections we glossed over. The museum now has lots of exhibits based on interviews with veterans. We didn’t do this justice. A return trip is in order.

Google has messed up the order of the pictures. The information board is below. Captured T34/76 on loan from the Sotamuseo, Helsinki.

Munitions have gone full circle it seems. Smoothbores and canister.

Back of the 251 (below)

Italian tankette next to a Sdkfz 251 (itself not a large vehicle). Apologies to river counters if I got the number of the half-track wrong).

Inter-War tankette. 

Stug III. Deadly little bugger.

Not sure what this soft toy is for

‘Cute’little Italian tankette. I say cute but that flamethrower isn’t very friendly 

These cutaways are very enlightening, showing both the cramped conditions and thickness of armour. There’s a couple of WWI AFVs that you can climb in. Impossible conditions!

Anyone remember or have this?

This is a big beast. The Jagdtiger, not him. Only 85 built.

The real thing (this should be with the Action Man picture). Old School Tony’s Uncle Alf (a former trooper in the 17/21 Lancers) will tell you, this is not a tank, it’s an armoured reconnaissance vehicle.

Insides of a Buffalo

Ooooh!

I was a lucky little boy and got this the Christmas it came out.

This should be with the T34 picture. I don’t remember seeing this at the Sotamuseo in Helsinki when I went about 19 years ago.

Early Centurian. Very successful development.

Der König!

Post Script: JBM’s ‘lidl tenk’

Was this the Hetzer of Herr Leutnant J. Brümann fame? It is small at just over 7feet high. 

Naples ‘44

Just seen this for the first time. It’s hard to describe it. Incredible. Moving. Shocking. Humane.

For those who have never heard of it (like me until tonight) it is a film of the memoirs of Norman Lewis in 1943-44. Described on IMDB as a documentary, but that doesn’t really cover it.

Highly recommended.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3886508/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naples_'44

Harry’s War

I finished this last night. A gripping read. Very informative of day-to-day life on the Western Front in WWI. And very well written by Drinkwater. Useful explanatory notes by the editors.

Only one quibble is that Harry served until 1920 including a spell in Egypt after the Great War finished, but the diary extracts stop in November 1918.  Maybe he stopped the diary then but I don’t get that impression.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-24745574

Now to get back to my ECW reading.

Historical Accents

Just have to share this link with my loyal readers. I'm sure you'll both find it interesting. A friend sent me this earlier. It's a BBC programme from 13 years ago about hundreds of recordings of British (and other) POWs made by the Germans in WWI. To be clear, we're not talking about the 'Great and the Good' (although a couple of such exalted types are played) but the ordinary folk of this island.

The project was led by an Austrian academic with a genuine interest in the subject, and a sound recordist who had the aspiration of creating a museum of sound. The state funded the project, and whilst it wasn't explicitly stated, I assume it meant the army. I know from other programmes and reading that the Germans were meticulous, and very clever in the way they interrogated prisoners, over a long period, and mined the resulting records for all manner of useful intelligence. I couldn't help thinking of the two Vulgarian spies in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang trying to mimic Britisher eccents*.

This introduced me to the very methodical and intelligent way British troops were interrogated. WWI is not one of my periods but when Dr Duffy covers something, I just have to read it.

It's no longer on BBC iPlayer (though the link below still has some blurb on it) so you'll have to make do with YouTube. The presenter has a great talent for mimicking accents, and I was astonished to discover she is an Aberdonian. She makes some interesting comments about landscape/environment and accent. Her remark about the tight upper lip of the Aberdonian being possibly a result of bitingly cold North Sea winds, rings true. My dad who worked down** Grimsby dock had a similar mannerism.

There's also a lot about how accents and dialects have changed (and stayed the same in some cases), and there's a clip where members one close modern family in the Macclesfield*** area have three different ways of saying 'here'.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007gltc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywg03b574oQ&feature=youtu.be

* I also cannot help thinking that the reason the upper class (and royal) Briton used pronounce short As as Es, was because so many of them had German families. Oddly the programme also showed how in some parts of the south, rural folk pronounced 'S' as a Zed (not just in 'Zomerset') and F as V ('I'm a varmer'). Pretty German no?

** 'down dock' seemed more usual than 'on the docks' if I remember correctly.

*** In Cheshire, but only 15 miles to the south of Manchester.

The First World War - PBS America

I've just watched an episode of a 10 part series on PBS America on Freeview in the UK. The episode concentrated on the early part of the war for the Ottoman Empire up to victory over Townshend at Kut on the Tigris.

Information on the series here

It's a good old fashioned blend of news reel footage, stills and quotations from prominent figures and more junior officers and rankers on both sides. Not a dramadoc scene in sight.  Also, there was an absence of that other bugbear of mine - the re-capping of what we saw just a few minutes before after every damned advert break.

Watching the whole series is a bit of a time commitment I cannot make since they are rattling through the 10 episodes in a few days. The one I saw ('Jihad') was episode 4. However, it gets the thumbs up from this corner of the metropolis.

Episode 4 covers the early attempts to 'set the East ablaze*'; the failed campaign against the Russsians in the Transcaucasian region and the subsequent appalling treatment of the Armenians; the German version of the Great Game and their mission to Afghanistan; the Allied failure in the Dardenelles; and finally British humiliation at Kut. Lots of scope in there for wargamers for both real and imaginary campaigns.

* i.e. the strategy of raising the muslim populations of the British and Russian empires, and neighbouring countries against their overlords. Shades of John Buchan's 'Greenmantle' (a rip-roaring story involving John Hannay, he of the 39 Steps).


Update: I saw episode 6 tonight: 'Breaking the Deadlock'. One of the themes was about the development of tactics on the Western Front. It stopped short of the German Sping offernsive of 1918 and the Allied follow-up. Interesting stuff, but obviously only a brief overview. Another theme was how soldiers on inactive sectors of the line would collaborate by avoiding unnecessary bloodshed, even sharing food. It quoted comments from British soldiers about the perceived differences between Prussian and units from other German states, notably Saxons. Of course Saxons, aren't they our cousins, us being Anglo-Saxons? Personally, I suspect things were far from as distinct as this, especially given the geographical spread and the different populations covered by the Prussian state by this point, where there was bound to be different levels of commitment and enthusiasm for the war. 

However, it reminded me of one of the war stories told to my O-Level* history teacher by his father who was in the Manchester Regiment in WWI. Mr Taylor senior told his son that they were well supplied with Tickler's Apple Jam, but there was such an abundance that they got bored with it and used to swap it with the Germans in the trench across No-Man's-Land. Each day they would throw over their tins of Tickler's Apple Jam (talk about product placement!) to the German trenches and in return the Saxons (let's call them Saxons) would throw over their sausages in return. No stereotyping there ;-) This went on for some time but unbeknownst to our brave boys, one night the Saxons had been replaced by a unit of Prussians. I'll let Mr T Jnr continue from here. 

"My dad said, 'one morning we threw over our tins of jam but in return we got a barrage of tater mashers**'. 
'What did you do then dad?'. 
'We filled our pants lad. We filled our pants.'"

Good old Mr Taylor told us this story enough times, I'm sure he probably slipped it in to a lesson on the rise of the Nazis, that we would fill in the punchline for him. He had a fund of stories which he would punctuate lessons with. The man had a stern reputation, he wouldn't accept nonsense but over time we came to appreciate his care that we should learn, first, the syllabus, but then importantly, something of history. So over 40 years since we heard those stories, and over a hundred since the events in them, they're still in the collective memory. Mr T helped cement not only facts in my head (History O-Level exams then were basically about regurgitating facts in essay form) but also helped cement my love of History. If I ever see the term 'Dreikaiserbund', or hear of the 'Treaty of Locarno' his face pops up. Can't say better than that for a history teacher.

* That's grades C-A* GCSEs for any relatively young folk, or grades 5-9 for even younger ones. I don't know what that equates to in the New World but these are public exams taken when you are 16 (generally). 

** Stick grenades.