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Forgotten History

uair01 said:
Snopes says this is probably an urban legend:

Lunching with English friends at the time of her husband's retirement, Madame de Gaulle was asked what she was looking forward to in the years ahead. "A penis," she replied without hesitation. The embarrassed silence that followed was finally broken by the former president. "My dear," he murmured, "I think the English don't pronounce the word quite like that. It's 'appiness.'"
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Was Ken Dodd aware of that?

"Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I possess
I thank the Lord that I've been blessed
With more than my share of happiness."
 

The Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War​


During the English Civil War (1642 - 1651), the Dutch sided with the Parliamentarians. When the Royalist fleet was forced to retreat to the Scillies, Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp insisted that they pay reparations for the Dutch ships they had taken. They refused, and Tromp declared war on the Scilly Isles.

ln 1651, the Parliamentarian navy forced the Royalists to surrender, whereupon the Dutch navy left without having fired a shot. Or withdrawing their declaration of war…

Peace was finally declared only on 17th April 1986. The Dutch ambassador joked that it must have been horrifying to the Scillonians "to know we could have attacked at any moment."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Hundred_and_Thirty_Five_Years'_War

maximus otter
 
escargot said:
I can 100% guarantee that they don't miss YOU! :chuckle:
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I'm not so sure.
When they were banned, the girls said wtf? we do this because we want to - no one is pointing a gun at our heads - and now we've got to find other work.
 
Floyd1 said:
I'm not so sure.
When they were banned, the girls said wtf? we do this because we want to - no one is pointing a gun at our heads - and now we've got to find other work.
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Similar with the Darts walk-on women. And absurdly they still have cheer leader types on stage. So nothing really has changed except some women lost some fairly lucrative jobs that they were happy to do.
 
Willing or not, I imagine it was a 'career' like any other which relies on their physical attributes, even if 'only' their sexual ones.
"No exams, not book-smart, no training in anything else ... at least I have my tits to earn money from!"
Like any industry which relies on sexual image, such as pole dancing, working in Hooters etc. etc. Don't start banging on about how much skill and physical stamina they require ... all that might be true but the women aren't being employed for that - they're being employed to flash their body to appeal to men sexually.
And, like it or not, some professions disappear. The public perception, demands and appeal changes. They have to do what any other worker does ... retrain and move on.
 
Stormkhan said:
Willing or not, I imagine it was a 'career' like any other which relies on their physical attributes, even if 'only' their sexual ones.
"No exams, not book-smart, no training in anything else ... at least I have my tits to earn money from!"
Like any industry which relies on sexual image, such as pole dancing, working in Hooters etc. etc. Don't start banging on about how much skill and physical stamina they require ... all that might be true but the women aren't being employed for that - they're being employed to flash their body to appeal to men sexually.
And, like it or not, some professions disappear. The public perception, demands and appeal changes. They have to do what any other worker does ... retrain and move on.
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That's not fair. They also had their asses too.
And they require a lot of physical stamina.
 
Floyd1 said:
That's not fair. They also had their asses too.
And they require a lot of physical stamina.
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Let's me and you go into business and be totally objectified Floyd :) .. I'm well up for dancing around in my pants and getting paid for it!. Where do I sign?. I'll have to cut my toenails first though, we don't want anyone throwing up.
 
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Some heart-warming vintage photography by Bandele ‘Tex’ Ajetunmobi:

1704964916520.png


https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...us-bandele-tex-ajetunmobis-london-in-pictures
 
Floyd1 said:
I'm not so sure.
When they were banned, the girls said wtf? we do this because we want to - no one is pointing a gun at our heads - and now we've got to find other work.
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It was so much the attitudes of the women who did that work but what it represented, i.e women were to be gawped at and seen as sexulised objects for the pleasure of men and it's an idea that is slow to die out but it's not as bad as it was
 
Robbrent said:
It was so much the attitudes of the women who did that work but what it represented, i.e women were to be gawped at and seen as sexulised objects for the pleasure of men and it's an idea that is slow to die out but it's not as bad as it was
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The Mrs is off to watch The Dream Boys with some co workers on the 24th of March on our pier so naturally I'll be waiting at the back door to beat them all up because I'm a real man. They're showing her their willies. £29 per ticket she tells me! bargain! :twothumbs:
 
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Robbrent said:
It was so much the attitudes of the women who did that work but what it represented, i.e women were to be gawped at and seen as sexulised objects for the pleasure of men and it's an idea that is slow to die out but it's not as bad as it was
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Not as bad as it was?
There's no porn or lap-dancing clubs around then? (I don't partake in either of those).

It will never die out.
Men like looking at hot women.

You've only got to look at say a nightclub.
If no women went, I'd guess 99% of straight guys wouldn't bother going either- and the women in those places dress (and act) far more provocatively than the pit-girls ever did.

The pit-girls liked being looked at.

There seems to be a lot of people in the world who consider themselves 'liberal' and 'open minded' but only when it suits them!
 
Cecco became Charles of Calabria’s court astrologer until he injudiciously predicted that one of Charles’s daughters would “sell her honor.”

Janine Larmon Peterson - Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics_ Disputed Sanctity and Communal Identity in Late Medieval Italy-Cornell University Press (2019)
 
This is Armenia in 405!

Mesrop didn’t give up. He saddled his donkey and travelled the country, listening to the way people spoke and cataloguing the various phonemes they used. He engaged the services of a calligrapher, who took the Greek alphabet as his base and adapted it to represent Mesrop’s phonemes. They ended up with a thirty-six letter, exclusively Armenian, alphabet.
Once they were satisfied that the alphabet they had devised was fit for the task, Mesrop and Shahak began the most innovative part of their project. They persuaded the country’s rulers to help them create a national network of schools. The plan was to build a literate, cultured population, with a strong enough sense of national identity to resist the pressures of assimilation that were already buffeting them from the neighbouring Persians and Byzantines. Once the schools were up and running, Mesrop and his students were finally able to get on with translating the Bible.

Murderous History of Bible Translations, The - Harry Freedman
 
Can't find a previous mention of this wartime incident. Could've sworn I'd described it at some point as I know the area well.
(Used to walk my dogs there and one cocked his leg up on the memorial, ooer.)

All I can see are references to memorials in commemoration of the self-sacrifice of pilots to save civilian life, so it's going here.

This incident was probably reported nationally at the time. It has certainly never been forgotten locally.

In 1944 a young American military pilot bravely steered his failing plane away from the town and crashed it in fields.
Tomorrow Lt Brown will be posthumously awarded the Freedom of Nantwich.

Second World War pilot who gave his life to avert disaster to be given posthumous award

An heroic pilot who lost his life to avert what could easily have been a major disaster in Nantwich during the Second World War is to be honoured with a posthumous award. The bravery of 23-year-old American airman, Arthur Brown has never been forgotten in the town, after he diverted his Thunderbolt plane away from Nantwich's schools and houses when it developed a fault on Friday, January 14, 1944.
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Here's the local parish church announcement -

A three hour peal will be attempted on the bells on Sunday 14th January, starting at 1pm, in memoriam Lieutenant Arthur Lesley Brown of the USAAF on the eightieth anniversary of his death which occurred when, on a training flight, his P47 Thunderbolt failed and he steered it away from a school and the town and crashed by the riverside. The peal will follow the method Yorkshire Surprise Major (Lt Brown was from New York).

This will follow a service at 10.45am to be attended by relatives of Lt Brown, the Mayor of Nantwich, representatives of the USAF and RAF, and representatives of the RBL and other organisations in the town, when the Freedom of Nantwich will be posthumously awarded to Lt Brown, and then a parade, led by the Cheshire Police Band, will march from Love Lane car park to the memorial off Shrewbridge Rd, for an act of remembrance and the laying of wreaths.
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Until 1811 in The Netherlands, surnames amongst the common populace were rare. People would usually employ patronymic names, so Jansen meant son of Jan etc. Under French occupation in 1811, a census was undertaken and Napoleon insisted on every person's record having a given name and family name. Under duress, or possibly as a sign of resistance/civil disobedience, many Dutch would make up nonsense names to satisfy the census-takers. Examples were Niemand (nobody), Zondervan (not from anywhere), Van der Hoek (from around the corner), Zonderkop (headless), Dodeman (dead man), Van de Graf (from the grave), Gekkehuis (mad house), Donderwinkel (thunder store). The French census-takers duly noted these names down and, over time, they became rooted in Dutch family history. The patronymic system (and French occupation) have long since disappeared, but those weird-sounding surnames are now common in The Netherlands.
 
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blessmycottonsocks said:
Until 1811 in The Netherlands, surnames amongst the common populace were rare. People would usually employ patronymic names, so Jansen meant son of Jan etc. Under French occupation in 1811, a census was undertaken and Napoleon insisted on every person's record having a given name and family name. Under duress, or possibly as a sign of resistance/civil disobedience, many Dutch would make up nonsense names to satisfy the census-takers. Examples were "Niemand (nobody), Zondervan (not from anywhere), Van der Hoek (from around the corner), Zonderkop (headless), Dodeman (dead man), Van de Graf (from the grave), Gekkehuis (mad house), Donderwinkel (thunder store). The French census-takers duly noted these names down and, over time, they became rooted in Dutch family history. The patronymic system (and French occupation) have long since disappeared, but those weird-sounding surnames are now common in The Netherlands.
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True!
The one that you still find today is Naaktgeboren. Born naked :)
 
High Adventure and Derring-Do! Time for a new generation to learn about this expedition.

World War Two raid on Japanese boats compared to Dambusters​

The Krait

A Welshman's singing was used to keep morale high on the mission

In one of World War Two's most daring raids, a captured Japanese fishing boat travelled 4,000 miles in 48 days to destroy seven enemy warships.

On board the vessel that left Western Australia for Singapore in autumn 1942 was Ronald "Taffy" Morris from Pentre, Rhondda Cynon Taf. He joined others from the UK, Australia and New Zealand in Operation Jaywick. The mission was so secretive that news of the Military Medal (MM) he received was not announced until 1946. It succeeded in sinking as many Japanese ships in one morning as the Royal Navy achieved in the entire war, and their story was retold in a 1989 mini-series starring Jason Donovan.

Ronald's honours are now expected to fetch up to £80,000 at auction, with his efforts compared to the Dambuster raids.

In his book The Tiger's Revenge, Ronald's son Evan described how his dad, who was born in 1918, left school at 14 to become a miner. He retired in 1972 as a major in the British Army.

"Dad got back from a day a mile underground, and as the youngest he'd be ninth into the tin bath at home, by then it was stone cold and more coal dust than water," he said. "I think he just thought there must be more to life than this, and the Army seemed like the logical way out."

In 1938, he utilised his St John training in the pits to sign up for the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Evan said: "He could have stayed in Pentre - mining was a reserved occupation - but he was desperate to see the world."

He was deployed to Singapore and awarded a British Empire Medal in 1942 after helping to evacuate civilians following the Japanese invasion.

His efforts stuck in the mind of commanding officer Lt Col Ivan Lyon, who called on his services a few months later. Lyon's vision was to attack the enemy with a captured 40ft (12.2m) wooden Japanese fishing vessel, the Krait - named after a venomous Asian snake. He planned to disguise the crew as locals, and sail up to the entrance of Singapore Harbour in order to attach magnetic mines to the hulls of the fleet moored there. ...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-67945025
 
A nice financial book makes this case that you must catch fraudsters using fraudsters. Like Elisabeth used Drake:

In Kennedy’s life, he contributed to his massive fortune by manipulating Wall Street—he was a master manipulator and proud of it. He boasted of it, like a pirate! He famously told a friend, “It’s easy to make money in this market. We’d better get in before they pass a law against it.” He’d regularly use his influence to hype a stock—advertise it by trading it, he called it. When folks flooded to his stock, he’d start shorting it as it fell back to a more reasonable valuation. Did it all the time!
And, like a pirate, he had miserable ethics by almost anyone’s standards. For example, he had been holed up for seven weeks in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, interspersing manipulation of Yellow Cab stock with drunken binges with one of his many mistresses, when by his own admission he realized that he had forgotten his wife must have given birth to their child by then. Having not seen his wife Rose the whole time, he sobered up, shut up his hotel suite, bid the mistress away, and went to meet his newly born daughter Pat—by then fully a month old. Pat wouldn’t have noticed the absence of her father. One presumes Rose was pretty self-sufficient, but she must have had a pretty clear idea who her husband was, too. And this drink-addled binge, of course, was while Prohibition was in full swing. Not that he ever let Prohibition stop him from getting boatloads of Scotch into the country—sealing his image as a bootlegger. He was a known bad boy and not politically correct. He also increasingly over time wanted social respect, which led him to court and contribute to FDR’s presidential campaign. Many say it was this desire for respectability that motivated him to push his sons into politics.

Kenneth L. Fisher, Lara Hoffmans - How to Smell a Rat_ The Five Signs of Financial Fraud-Wiley (2009)
 
There were other famed short sellers of the crash—“Sell ‘em” Ben Smith and the president of Chase Bank, Albert Wiggen, who bet against his own bank using money he borrowed from it.

:)

Richard Teitelbaum
The Most Dangerous Trade: How Short Sellers Uncover Fraud, Keep Markets Honest, and Make and Lose Billions (Bloomberg)
 
Remember Russian Bill, Louosa Gould and those others who helped escaped POWs.

Slave's WWII Occupation artwork goes on display​

Painting

A piece of art drawn by an escaped Russian slave known as 'Russian Bill' has gone on display in Jersey.

Feodor Polykarpivitch Burriy used pencils to draw the still-life bowl of fruit while he was being sheltered by islander Dorothy Huelin.
He had previously been staying at the house of Louisa Gould, who was arrested and killed by the Germans.

Mr Burriy gave the picture to Mrs Huelin in gratitude for looking after him and her family has donated it to Jersey Heritage.

Three men

Feodor Polykarpovitch Burriy, 'Russian Bill', centre, with René Franoux and Bob Le Sueur
The artwork is now on display at the Occupation Tapestry Museum.

Jersey Heritage's senior registrar Helena Kergozou said Mrs Huelin "risked everything by allowing Bill into her home".

She said: "She took him in and he stayed there for a few weeks… She kept him occupied, she supplied him with art materials so that he could pass the time and stay busy… She would play games with him and really let him be part of her family for a time.”

Mr Burriy was an air force officer who had been captured by the Germans as they advanced across Russia in 1942. Ms Kergozou said he and hundreds of his comrades were herded into freight trains and taken across occupied Europe to St Malo and then on a boat to Jersey. They were put to work as slaves, building walls, bunkers and defences across the island. Mr Burriy was sent to the quarry and stone crushing plant at the bottom of Mont Pinel in St Ouen, but he escaped. Quickly recaptured, he was beaten and made to stand in a tank of freezing water overnight.

But that made him even more determined and he escaped again, this time for good. Helped by farmer René Le Mottée, he stayed hidden until he was taken in by widow Louisa Gould, who ran a shop at Millais.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2l2g13y3wo
 
Student Nurses was followed almost immediately by 1971’s Private Duty Nurses because Corman received a letter of complaint about the movie from an organisation calling itself the Private Duty Nurses Association saying that Rothman’s film demeaned and denigrated the nursing profession.

Corman had never heard of Private Duty nurses, but it sounded wonderfully provocative and illicit, and into production it went. Consequently, the Association’s letter complaining that the first film misrepresented and embarrassed the profession inspired, and named, the sequel!

Sadly, Private Duty Nurses did not live up to its wonderful origin story. It’s the poorest of the four follow-ups, a disorganised shambles with the weakest of the four ensemble casts (TV guest regular Kathy Cannon, set decoration Joyce Williams, and supporting player Pegi Boucher), and the lamest storylines.

From this quite serious, deeply researched and witty book:

Jon Abbott - Strange New World_ Sex Films of the 1970s-CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (2015)
 
Around noon on the 5 September 1936, a pair of fisherman came across a woman floundering her way through a bog in Cape Breton, on the eastern shores of Nova Scotia. In the background was her single-engined Percival Vega Gull aircraft, its nose buried deep in the moss and the peat and its tail sticking in the air. Blood streamed down the woman’s face and black peat smeared her formerly white overalls: ‘I’m Mrs Markham,’ she told them. ‘I’ve just flown from England.’

Taken to a local farmhouse, the aviatrix asked for a cup of tea and for a phone. She was directed to ‘a little cubicle that housed an ancient telephone’ built on the rocks, ‘put there in case of shipwrecks,’ she recalled. Over the line she told the operator: ‘I would like the airport notified and could you also ask someone to send a taxi for me?’
Beryl Markham, 33, had just succeeded in becoming the first person to fly non-stop, solo, from Europe to North America.
Whilst not as famous as Amelia Earhart, Markham's life was a remarkable one.
A wild non-conformist, she married 3 times and scandalised English society with a number of high-profile affairs, including with Prince Henry (son of George V,) and his elder brother Edward, Prince of Wales. There were reports of her riding a horse, barefoot, through the corridors of Buckingham Palace.
In her later life, she retired to Kenya, where she died on 3 August 1986.
That's quite some life!

Beryl-Markham-1936.jpg


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl_Markham
 

Carry On films: The star who helped World War II prisoners escape​



Peter Butterworth and his son, Tyler.

Peter Butterworth and his son, Tyler, who knew nothing about his father's war history when he was younger


The Great Escape and The Wooden Horse are two classic British World War II escape films, but what is perhaps less well known is that one of the team involved in both of the escapes that inspired them would go on to become a star of the Carry On movies.

Now, 80 years on, Peter Butterworth's recently discovered German prison identity card is going on display as part of an exhibition telling the story of his life as a prisoner of war.

Butterworth served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm during the war but was shot down in 1940, spending the rest of it as a prisoner of war.
Butterworth, who appeared in 16 Carry On films, helped hide the sand for the escape tunnels featured in the Great Escape and was on the organising committee for the tunnels featured in The Wooden Horse, but it has taken decades for the full story to emerge.

It was his wartime role - working alongside Carry On screenwriter Talbot Rothwell whose plane was also shot down - that helped birth the Carry On humour Butterworth later became famous for.


A cache of prisoner of war documents recently released from a German archive is now going on display at the National Archives in London, which adds new detail to the gradually unfolding story.

The documents arrived from Germany and have been catalogued by a team of volunteers.

For his son Tyler Butterworth, it has been a revelation.
"They keep declassifying things and more seems to bubble up. It's remarkable."

Peter Butterworth's ID card from Stalag Luft 3

Peter Butterworth was an officer and a code writer

In Carry on Camping, Peter Butterworth played the avaricious campsite owner, Josh Fiddler. In Carry On Up The Khyber, he was the libidinous preacher, Brother Belcher, and in Carry on Don't Lose Your Head, he was Citizen Bidet.

However, in Stalag Luft 3, he was an officer and code writer in MI9, the military intelligence agency responsible for organising escapes from prison camps. It was a mystery to even his own son until long after his death in 1979.

"He did suffer from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He never said this to my sister and I, but my mother (the impressionist Janet Brown) told me about things that happened, especially right at the start of their marriage, after the war, where he'd suddenly leap out of bed at night and throw himself on the floor and start hiding. She had to barricade the bedroom door because the staircase was outside."

Peter Butterworth (standing at the back) with the theatre company at Stalag Luft 3


Peter Butterworth (standing at the back) with the theatre company at Stalag Luft 3

In the escape immortalised in the classic film The Great Escape, Butterworth helped hide the soil from the tunnels in the camp theatre. Inmates would be encouraged to smoke pipes near where the soil was stored to mask the smell.

In the Wooden Horse escape, in which a tunnel was dug underneath a vaulting horse, he was one of the organising committee. When the story was adapted in 1950 for the big screen, he auditioned for a role but was turned down for not looking sufficiently like a prisoner.

Carry On beginnings​

Alongside him in Stalag Luft 3 was another prisoner, Talbot Rothwell, who would go on to write many of the best Carry On films. He and Rothwell convinced the camp commandant to allow them to build a theatre, with the sounds from the performances helping drown out the noise of digging the tunnels.

"It's where the (Carry On) humour kind of had its start, in this place surrounded by watchtowers and guard dogs," Tyler Butterworth explains.
"They worked out what made guys laugh. And that was the funny thing, he played these bumbling characters, always getting things wrong.

And there's this complete flip side of this man that was totally focused writing code, working with his friends who were tunnelling on the other side of the compound."

However, all of this was never discussed within his family and it was only years later that the younger Butterworth began to understand some of his father's actions.

"He had all this going on in his mind in his life. My mother told me that when they first bought the house that we grew up in, dad would religiously put on a dressing gown and walk around the garden in the morning, every morning, because he could, because there (in the camp) he couldn't. And those are the sort of things he brought back. But I didn't know about this until after he was dead."

As the bewildered Brother Belcher in the shell-torn dining room scene in Carry On Up the Khyber proves, Peter Butterworth was a marvellous comic actor. However, given that he escaped from one camp near Frankfurt and helped two of the most celebrated escapes in World War Two, we should be perhaps remembering him for more than just Carry On.

The Great Escapes: Remarkable Second World War Captives is on at the National Archives in London from 2 February until 21 July.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68209738
 
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