• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Forgotten History

Qinghai letter: following the steps of Bond author’s brother

... One of my favourite books about China, and about this offcut of Asia, is News from Tartary, by British writer Peter Fleming, a brilliant account of a journey from Beijing to Kashmir.
He was the elder brother of Ian Fleming, the James Bond author and now the more famous of the siblings but, for a time, Peter Fleming was the celebrity. Adventurer, Times correspondent, author and war hero, he was a huge figure.

He visited Qinghai Lake in April 1935. It was frozen and no one else was there.

“It gave me a feeling of forgotten magnificence, of beauty wasted,” he wrote. “Every year, unadmired, the waters hardened into crystal, carried snow, were swept by the winds. Every year they became once more blue and dancing. None regarded their majesty; none noted their moods, their rage or their tranquillity . . . The Koko Nor might just as well not have been there.”

Today, though the lakeside has interpretative centres, tourist shops and golf carts to cover some of the distances, the cold weather means I am basically alone by the lake, and I can get a sense of what Fleming is talking about. It’s still not hugely visited, weirdly remote even today.

Accompanied by Ella Maillart, whom he called Kini, one of the great travellers of the 20th century Fleming made his way across war-ravaged China, through incredibly remote Xinjiang and the Taklamakan desert.

Time capsule
Having visited many of the places in News from Tartary, reading about them 80 years after its publication is like opening a time capsule.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/worl...-the-steps-of-bond-author-s-brother-1.2450551
 
Locusts & Plague in Europe.

Finding a reference to locusts in London in 1748, I expected to find it was an exaggerated account of grasshoppers swarming. Not so. Incursions of the Biblical scourge into Europe seem to have been frequent and sometimes severe!

Maybe everyone knew this but me. o_O
 
I had no time to listen to the whole thing but while browsing I heard:
  • When the Soviet Army invaded Berlin in 1945 they were not completely mechanized. They still used a lot of horses <no surprise here, same thing with the Wehrmacht> but also a surprising amount of camels. <surprise!>
  • I have not had time to do fact checking but this probably is true.
 
uair01 said:
I had no time to listen to the whole thing but while browsing I heard:
  • When the Soviet Army invaded Berlin in 1945 they were not completely mechanized. They still used a lot of horses <no surprise here, same thing with the Wehrmacht> but also a surprising amount of camels. <surprise!>
  • I have not had time to do fact checking but this probably is true.
Click to expand...

Bactrian camels, presumably -- the shaggy kind with two humps. Common and widely used as beasts of burden in Central Asia -- Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc. With those areas then being republics of the USSR, camels would have been easily available to the Red Army -- they'd just have had to move them west. (I understand that while all camels are pretty foul-tempered, the Bactrian variety tends to be slightly more pleasant to deal with, than the one-humped dromedary sort.)
 
Ermintrude said:
WAR PLAN RED

600px-War_Plan_Red.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red

Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan Red was a war plan created by the United States Army and Navy in the late 1920s and early 1930s to estimate the requirements for a hypothetical war with the United Kingdom (the "Red" forces). War Plan Red discussed the potential for fighting a war with Britain and its Empire and outlined those steps necessary to defend the Atlantic coast against any attempted mainland invasion of the United States. It further discussed fighting a two-front war with both Japan and Britain simultaneously (as envisioned in War Plan Red-Orange). War Plan Red was not operationalized and did not have presidential or Congressional approval. The United States can only declare war in congress, and in this period of U.S. history, it made no war plans. President Herbert Hoover was known as a pacifist.

War Plan Red was developed by the United States Army following the 1927 Geneva Naval Conference and approved in May 1930 by the Secretary of War and the Secretary of Navyand updated in 1934–35. In 1939, on the outbreak of World War II and Britain's war against Nazi Germany, a decision was taken that no further planning was required but that the plan be retained. War Plan Red was not declassified until 1974.

The war plan outlined those actions that would be necessary to initiate war between Britain and the United States. The plan suggested that the British would initially have the upper hand by virtue of the strength of theRoyal Navy. The plan further assumed that Britain would probably use its Dominion in Canada as a springboard from which to initiate a retaliatory invasion of the United States. The assumption was taken that at first Britain would fight a defensive battle against invading American forces, but that the US would eventually defeat the British by blockading Britain and cutting off its food supplies.
Click to expand...
What a creepy combo of U.S. isolationism and pro-Facism aggression. Unfortunately, we still have such horrible mish-moshes begat by the insane here.
 
The Secret History of World War II-Era Drones

DRONES ARE THE hallmark of tech-y modern warfare, but weapons piloted from afar have been around for more than a century. These long-gone systems used servos, gyroscopes, motors, and rotary switches, and they’re all lovingly described in Unmanned Systems of World Wars I and II, an encyclopedic history of remotely controlled ships, planes, and tanks.

The first UAVs had unglamorous beginnings, says Bart Everett, director of the Navy’s robotics lab in San Diego and author of the book. The first “drones” were actually balloons, first deployed by Austria in 1849. They came equipped with long copper wires that operators used to remotely trigger bombs, which would fall and explode on impact. These didn’t quite catch on, for obvious reasons—they floated in any direction, including back towards the way they came. Other inventors drew up plans for remote-controlled dirigibles that never got off the ground (as it were).

But in the 1910s, the US began hooking up unused warplanes with autopilot systems that the military could control remotely. These systems relied on new tech that had just come online: The Kettering Bug, developed for the Army’s Air force just before World War I, used gyroscopes to keep itself stabilized. Pressure sensors kept the aircraft at a certain altitude, while its operator could calculate how far it traveled by keeping track of the rate its propellers were rotating. These “aerial torpedoes” were still fairly rudimentary, though—they could only travel in a straight line, which made them useless for more targeted strikes. “You’d launch them into some area, like a city, where they’re bound to hit something,” Everett says. They were never actually deployed.

http://www.wired.com/2015/12/the-secret-history-of-world-war-ii-era-drones/?mbid=social_twitter
 
The Nazi Collaborator Who Served Ice Cream in Tel Aviv

Dozens of Jews were arrested in Israel in the 1950s and faced charges of collaborating with the Nazis during the war. A new book details their extraordinary trials.

The historical episode in which Jews were put on trial in Israel for aiding the Nazis – the subject of a new book by Holocaust scholar Itamar Levin, called “Kapo on Allenby” – took place in the 1950s, between two other post-Holocaust events of great significance: the Nuremberg Trials, which took place in Germany in the late 1940s, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, in 1961.

The phenomenon of Jews standing trial in Israeli courts on charges of abetting the Nazi genocide was exceptional and, naturally, unprecedented.

In 1950, the Knesset passed a law allowing for the punishment of Nazis and Nazi collaborators. One section of the law related to placing Jews on trial for crimes they had committed against Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust.
At the end of that year, shortly after the law went into effect, the (now defunct) newspaper Herut reported that “120 individuals suspected of committing crimes against the Jewish people have been located in Israel,” and that while there were seven or eight Christians among them, most were Jewish. The newspaper reported that the suspects included a doctor from a clinic in Hadera and a waiter from Tel Aviv’s Café Pasaz. Most of this evidence never made it to court, and some of the accusations, it transpired, were linked to personal vendettas that had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Levin estimates that about 40 indictments were issued during the 1950s under the law against Nazis and Nazi collaborators. Documentation still exists for 23 of these indictments, with 9 ending in acquittals and 14 with convictions. The average sentence handed down to those found guilty was 17 months in prison. Official records regarding the rest of the cases no longer exist. Some of the files were simply lost over the years, others damaged in a flood at the court archives, while others were destroyed. Much of the material that did survive is now in poor condition.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.692721
 
Searched this thread, but no results so apologies if this has been brought up before, but I only just found out 42 Australians signed up to fight for the Confederate states in the US Civil war:


Link

Aussies in Civil War
Print

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 11/02/2011

Reporter: Cheryl Hall

In 1865, a Confederate Warship arrived in Melbourne and recruited 42 Australian soldiers to fight for the South in the American Civil War.

Its a long transcript so I wont copy it all here.
 
Last edited:
Matthew1034 said:
Searched this thread, but no results so apologies if this has been brought up before, but I only just found out 42 Australians signed up to fight for the Confederate states in the US Civil war:


Link

Aussies in Civil War
Print

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Broadcast: 11/02/2011

Reporter: Cheryl Hall

In 1865, a Confederate Warship arrived in Melbourne and recruited 42 Australian soldiers to fight for the South in the American Civil War.

Its a long transcript so I wont copy it all here.
Click to expand...




"Maybe as much as a quarter of the Union Army was made up of foreigners—men who had not been born in America. Of these, the largest group was the Germans, followed by the Irish, Canadians, and English. Other nationalities represented in the army included Scandinavians, Swiss, French, Italians, Mexicans, and Poles. Often, regiments would be formed consisting entirely of men from one of these countries."
 
ramonmercado said:
The Nazi Collaborator Who Served Ice Cream in Tel Aviv

Dozens of Jews were arrested in Israel in the 1950s and faced charges of collaborating with the Nazis during the war. A new book details their extraordinary trials.

The historical episode in which Jews were put on trial in Israel for aiding the Nazis – the subject of a new book by Holocaust scholar Itamar Levin, called “Kapo on Allenby” – took place in the 1950s, between two other post-Holocaust events of great significance: the Nuremberg Trials, which took place in Germany in the late 1940s, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, in 1961.

The phenomenon of Jews standing trial in Israeli courts on charges of abetting the Nazi genocide was exceptional and, naturally, unprecedented.

In 1950, the Knesset passed a law allowing for the punishment of Nazis and Nazi collaborators. One section of the law related to placing Jews on trial for crimes they had committed against Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust.
At the end of that year, shortly after the law went into effect, the (now defunct) newspaper Herut reported that “120 individuals suspected of committing crimes against the Jewish people have been located in Israel,” and that while there were seven or eight Christians among them, most were Jewish. The newspaper reported that the suspects included a doctor from a clinic in Hadera and a waiter from Tel Aviv’s Café Pasaz. Most of this evidence never made it to court, and some of the accusations, it transpired, were linked to personal vendettas that had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Levin estimates that about 40 indictments were issued during the 1950s under the law against Nazis and Nazi collaborators. Documentation still exists for 23 of these indictments, with 9 ending in acquittals and 14 with convictions. The average sentence handed down to those found guilty was 17 months in prison. Official records regarding the rest of the cases no longer exist. Some of the files were simply lost over the years, others damaged in a flood at the court archives, while others were destroyed. Much of the material that did survive is now in poor condition.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.692721
Click to expand...
Kapos. What a life of hell. Then a survival of hell. don't want to know.
 
It wasn't just gay men, but apparently Sikorsky was allowed to build private prison camps in Scotland and send whoever he didn't like there. I certainly didn't know about that.

In Britain during the 1930s and 1940s, gay men were certainly imprisoned for what was then classified as criminal behaviour, but few people know that there were also concentration camps operating in this country between 1940 and 1946, to which one special category of gay men were sent.
Click to expand...

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/01/18/feature-britains-concentration-camps-for-gay-men/
 
A fascinating sidelight on the war! Thanks for posting it.

I wonder if the following paragraph was meant to be quite as graphic as it reads:

"This led to the development of a sub-culture of gay prisoners, who tended to stick together; a situation which represented something of a scandal to those running the camp and it was decided that the ‘pathological’ types should be separated from the political prisoners." :oops:
 
5 of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire
A YouGov poll found 43 per cent of Brits thought the British Empire was a good thing, while 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism

A new YouGov poll has found the British public are generally proud of the British Empire and its colonial past.

YouGov found 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism, with 21 per cent regretting it happened and 23 per cent holding neither view.

The same poll also found 43 per cent believed the British Empire was a good thing, 19 per cent said it was bad and 25 per cent said it was "neither".

At its height in 1922, the British empire governed a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's total land area.

Although the proponents of Empire say it brought various economic developments to parts of the world it controlled, critics point to massacres, famines and the use of concentration camps by the British Empire.

1. Boer concentration camps

During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the British rounded up around a sixth of the Boer population - mainly women and children - and detained them in camps, which wereovercrowded and prone to outbreaks of disease, with scant food rations.

Of the 107,000 people interned in the camps, 27,927 Boers died, along with an unknown number of black Africans.

2. Amritsar massacre

When peaceful protesters defied a government order and demonstrated against British colonial rule in Amritsar, India, on 13 April 1919, they were blocked inside the walled Jallianwala Gardens and fired upon by Gurkha soldiers.

The soldiers, under the orders of Brigadier Reginald Dyer, kept firing until they ran out of ammunition, killing between 379 and 1,000 protesters and injuring another 1,100 within 10 minutes.

Brigadier Dyer was later lauded a hero by the British public, who raised £26,000 for him as a thank you. ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-war-concentration-camp-mau-mau-a6821756.html
 
All About History ‏@AboutHistoryMag 13m13 minutes ago
In the wake of Putin's alleged involvement, we look back at another political murder mystery. #Litvinenko http://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/murder-in-fascist-italy-did-mussolini-have-giacomo-matteotti-killed/…

Murder in Fascist Italy: Did Mussolini have Giacomo Matteotti killed?

The ascension of Mussolini from prime minister to dictator wasn’t as crystal clear as the likes of Hitler, Franco and Stalin. After the March on Rome in the autumn of 1922, Mussolini became the head of a new coalition government. The first years of his premiership were characterised by violence and oppression, with Mussolini having personal ambitions to clear the cabinet of all non-Fascists and install himself as dictator. Acerbo Law was then passed, and the power of Mussolini grew further still. The Fascist Squadristi were seemingly running the show but there was still discontent from the left wing, especially in the form of one man, Giacomo Matteotti. The head of the United Socialist Party (PSU) who stood up for everything Fascism was against, Matteotti took every opportunity to pour scorn over the government. He saw Fascism as ‘agricultural slavery’, and in 1922 interrupted one of Mussolini’s speeches with a cry of “Long live parliament!” The Fascist Blackshirts were aware of this and swiftly moved to dispose of this outspoken socialist.
 
Daughter of feared tyrant Joseph Stalin once lived in Redruth biography reveals
By wbchris | Posted: February 06, 2016

A RECENTLY published biography has revealed that the daughter of one of the world's most feared dictators once lived a quiet life in Redruth.

Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan details the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, from her time growing up in the Kremlin to the period of time she spent living in sheltered accommodation in West Cornwall in the late 1990s.

Her father Joseph Stalin was the feared leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953.
He was responsible from some of the worst human right violations ever recorded, with British historian Norman Davies counting 50 million killed in the USSR between 1924-53, excluding wartime casualties, as a result of forced resettlement, disease, famine and executions.

The author writes: "By the late 1990s Svetlana Alliluyeva was living in sheltered accommodation in Redruth.
"Few of the visiting tourists would have given this old woman walking the Cornish coastline a second glance. She had almost no money, almost no friends and had, in her own words, become 'an English derelict'."

Whilst in Cornwall she went by the name Lana Peters and also spent time living in Mullion, where she was a resident at the Abbeyfield Home in Nansmellyon Road.
Her secret identity was kept secret from neighbours with only the local GP knowing her remarkable story.

The biography documents her extraordinary life detailing the sudden and violent outbursts of her father, the disappearance of close friends and family members, Svetlana's nomadic existence, kissing her mother's lifeless body, a failed suicide attempt and a staunch loathing of communism.

Svetlana, the youngest and only daughter of Stalin, left her children behind in the USSR before heading to America where she eventually died of cancer in November 2011 ages 85.

She married three times, had three children, and originally worked as a translator and lecturer in Moscow following her father's death before setting off on her globetrotting adventure.

However, despite her string of failed relationships and attempts to integrate into various communities, she never succeeded in shaking off the ghosts of her father's past.
"Wherever I go, whether to Australia or some island, I will always be the political prisoner of my father's name," she said shortly before her death.

http://www.westbriton.co.uk/Daughte...alin-lived/story-28677808-detail/story.html#1

Bizarre to think that I've lived within a few miles of Svetlana, and may even have seen her or passed her on the street or on the coast on my travels. How little we know of the surrounding sea of strangers...

The book seems to be available in all the usual outlets. There's a podcast review of it here:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/book-review-podcast-stalins-daughter/?_r=0

Edit: There's also a Wiki page, but it doesn't mention Cornwall:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetlana_Alliluyeva
 
Last edited:
Nelson's Caribbean Hell-hole: An Eighteenth Century Navy Graveyard Uncovered
As archaeologists excavate a mass grave of British sailors, Sam Willis explores Antigua's ruins and sees how the Caribbean's sugar islands were a kind of hell in Nelson's time.

Human bones found on an idyllic beach in Antigua trigger an investigation by naval historian Sam Willis into one of the darkest chapters of Britain's imperial past. As archaeologists excavate a mass grave of British sailors, Willis explores Antigua's ruins and discovers how the sugar islands of the Caribbean were a kind of hell in the age of Nelson.

Sun, sea, war, tropical diseases and poisoned rum.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod...n-eighteenth-century-navy-graveyard-uncovered

This is of particular interest to me, as I spent a few months on Antigua in the winter of 1989-90, looking for sailing work. (Mostly unsuccessfully.) I knew of the connection with Nelson (the name Nelson's Dockyard is a bit of a giveaway!), but nothing of the idea that it was regarded as a hell-hole at that time by the British Navy.

The next harbour to the west in Antigua is called Falmouth Harbour, and later in 1990, coincidence or not, I found myself living in Falmouth, UK, which is where I remain beached to this day...
 
A City for Poets and Pirates
Reinaldo Laddaga

fiume06.jpg

A group of arditi, Fiume, 2 October 1919. Holding daggers between their teeth, a practice these soldiers favored on the battlefield, became a symbol of their fighting spirit.

I’ve always found it intriguing that canonical histories of early twentieth-century art and literature, usually so generous in their treatment of the emergence of the historical avant-garde, never mention its most spectacular development: the creation, and ultimate failure, of the so-called Italian Regency of Carnaro. In a certain way, this omission is understandable. What happened between 1919 and 1920 in the contested city of Fiume, when—under the leadership of writer Gabriele D’Annunzio—a peculiar alliance of soldiers, artists, and adventurers occupied the city with the initial intention of annexing it to Italy, complicates the most common narrative in which modern art and progressive politics by nature go together.1 But, as historian Roger Griffin’s excellent Modernism and Fascism observes, a number of avant-garde movements shared fascism’s aspiration to cure the world (or at least Europe) of anomie and a loss of vitality. These conditions were understood as by-products of modernity, and particularly so at the end of a war that made patent the failure of modernity’s promise of material and social progress. Both movements proposed a return, in the midst of crisis, to a primordial space where the envoys of a new humanity could gather the seeds for a future world. In Fiume, fascists and Dadaists, futurists and Bolsheviks, were, for a few months, in the same camp.

Let’s try to imagine Italy at the end of World War I. A constitutional monarchy the disparate regions of which had only very recently integrated, it had entered the war in 1915 on the side of the British-French alliance one year after the hostilities started, having received from France and England guarantees of territorial compensation. The ensuing three years of combat caused in this mostly traditionalist, agrarian society an even deeper upheaval than the one suffered by its allies. The massive mobilizations for the war, and the replacement of young men in the world of work by women, wrecked not only the basis of the economy but also the structures of prewar society. For some social groups, the expectations of political influence changed: the country’s government had promised new and unprecedented power to its disenfranchised lower classes (a promise that the political class would soon discover it never should have made). The war had been long, and there were young men who did not remember a way of life other than the tough but eminently exciting one they had experienced at the front, where they had died by the hundreds of thousands. The survivors still remembered the bare, dry skeletons in the rocky hills of the Carso, the scene of the most brutal battles, and now they identified their own dignity with the dignity of the nation.



fiume05.jpg

Three Fiumean arditi brandishing their weapons of choice, August 1920.

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/58/laddaga.php
 
ramonmercado said:
5 of the worst atrocities carried out by the British Empire
A YouGov poll found 43 per cent of Brits thought the British Empire was a good thing, while 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism

A new YouGov poll has found the British public are generally proud of the British Empire and its colonial past.

YouGov found 44 per cent were proud of Britain's history of colonialism, with 21 per cent regretting it happened and 23 per cent holding neither view.

The same poll also found 43 per cent believed the British Empire was a good thing, 19 per cent said it was bad and 25 per cent said it was "neither".

At its height in 1922, the British empire governed a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's total land area.

Although the proponents of Empire say it brought various economic developments to parts of the world it controlled, critics point to massacres, famines and the use of concentration camps by the British Empire.

1. Boer concentration camps

During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the British rounded up around a sixth of the Boer population - mainly women and children - and detained them in camps, which wereovercrowded and prone to outbreaks of disease, with scant food rations.

Of the 107,000 people interned in the camps, 27,927 Boers died, along with an unknown number of black Africans.

2. Amritsar massacre

When peaceful protesters defied a government order and demonstrated against British colonial rule in Amritsar, India, on 13 April 1919, they were blocked inside the walled Jallianwala Gardens and fired upon by Gurkha soldiers.

The soldiers, under the orders of Brigadier Reginald Dyer, kept firing until they ran out of ammunition, killing between 379 and 1,000 protesters and injuring another 1,100 within 10 minutes.

Brigadier Dyer was later lauded a hero by the British public, who raised £26,000 for him as a thank you. ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-war-concentration-camp-mau-mau-a6821756.html
Click to expand...
Somewhat ironic that while Churchill was championing democracy in the fight against Nazism and that his actions during the war resulted in the starvation of ~ 3 million Indians. India an ally by the way sending in 100 of thousands of Common Wealth troops to bolster the allied cause.

Also Churchill’s making racist remarks about the empires Indian subjects while fighting the worse racist regime known to history is a bit hypocritical. The Nazi’s killed – murdered ~ 25 million in 6 years, probably histories most proficient killers. According to the article Britain colonization of India resulted in the death of (12 to 29) million over the colonial period of 90 some years. Perhaps a difference was the Nazi’s were killing Europeans and not 3rd world peoples so it was easier to sweep it under the rug?
 
rynner2 said:
After Richard III, archaeologists set their sights on Alfred the Great
Following the discovery of Richard III’s skeleton under a Leicester car park, archaeologists are now turning their attentions to locating another lost king, Alfred the Great.
By Rosa Silverman
6:30AM GMT 05 Feb 2013

His remains are believed to lie in an unmarked grave in Winchester and a team is reportedly applying for permission to dig up the spot at St Bartholomew’s Church.
It is thought Alfred’s skeleton could be found among a collection of bones there.
But the job is expected to be much harder than the analysis on Richard III, as finding a living relative to provide a DNA sample would involve searching a much older family tree.

Katie Tucker, an archaeologist from Winchester University, told The Times: “As far as we’re aware there are five skulls plus other bones. The most simple part will be to work out ages, sexes, and put the bones back together.
“The problem is, where would we get a comparative sample from? It’s a hell of a lot further to go back to trace a living descendant.”

Alfred the Great, an Anglo-Saxon king who ruled from 871 to 899, is known for his social and educational reforms and his military successes against the Danes.

The Rev Canon Cliff Bannister, the Rector of St Bartholomew’s, and the archaeologists involved in the project, believe they have evidence showing, to a greater degree of probability than Richard III’s archaeologists had before their dig, that the remains might be Alfred’s.

First the team will radiocarbon date the bones, and any search for a living relative would only begin once it was confirmed that they dated from the right period.
The only people buried in the abbey were royals and monks, and the monks only arrived in the 12th century.
So if the bones date from the 10th century there will be a good chance they belong to the royals, Dr Tucker said.
The Rev Bannister said: “If it is Alfred, and we know it is a big if, it would be a huge find.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... Great.html
Click to expand...

This BBC documentary from 2014 follows up the work on the bones found in the 'unmarked grave'.

The Search for Alfred the Great

Neil Oliver is given exclusive access to a team of historians and scientists investigating the final resting place of Alfred the Great. Alfred's bones have been moved so many times over the centuries that many people concluded that they were lost forever. Following a trail that goes back over a thousand years, the team wants to unravel the mystery of Alfred's remains. Travelling from Winchester to Rome, Neil also tells the extraordinary story of Alfred's life - in the 9th century, he became one of England's most important kings by fighting off the Vikings, uniting the Anglo-Saxon people and launching a cultural renaissance. This was the man who forged a united language and identity and laid the foundations of the English nation. The film investigates the equally extraordinary story of what happened to Alfred's remains after his death in 899. They have been exhumed and re-buried on a number of occasions since his original brief burial in the Anglo-Saxon Old Minster in Winchester. The Saxons, the Normans, Henry VIII's religious reformers, 18th-century convicts, Victorian romantics and 20th-century archaeologists have all played a part in the story of Alfred's grave.

Neil joins the team as they exhume the contents of an unmarked grave, piece the bones together and have them dated. With the discovery of some unexpected new evidence, the film reveals the extraordinary outcome of an important investigation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03sbp73/the-search-for-alfred-the-great

A fascinating story which may not be finished yet. Also fascinating is the enthusiasm of a Scottish academic for the greatest Anglo-Saxon king and his creation of the English nation, language and laws! (Perhaps the Kingdom is not as disunited as a I feared!)



 
"In 1903, a Blackfoot Sioux chief, named Charging Thunder, came to Salford as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He and his horse wowed the crowds where the Lowry now stands, and later, after living for a while in London, he settled in Gorton.

"He married and has a child and changed his name to George Edward Williams, before becoming an elephant keeper at Belle Vue Zoo. After his death at the age of 52 he was buried in Gorton cemetery."

Part of the rather grim history of Gorton on this page.

I nearly bought a flat in a proposed development of Gorton Monastery in the early 1990s. I'm glad I didn't - the firm went bust! :eek:
 
When I was 8 my family moved to Guildford in Surrey. This wasn't far from Farnborough, Hampshire, and my grandfather and uncle worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment there. I probably went to a few Farnborough Air Shows, and soon became even more fascinated by aviation than I had been before.

So, much of this programme was about stuff I'd known about already:

Jet! When Britain Ruled the Skies - 2. The Shape of Things to Come

In the heady years following World War II, Britain was a nation in love with aviation. Having developed the jet engine in wartime, British engineers were now harnessing its power to propel the world's first passenger jets. By 1960 the UK's passenger airline industry was the largest in the world, with routes stretching to the furthest-flung remnants of Empire.

And the aircraft carrying these New Elizabethans around the globe were also British - the Vickers Viscount, the Bristol Britannia and the world's first pure jet-liner, the sleek, silver De Havilland Comet, which could fly twice as high and twice as fast as its American competitors. It seemed the entire nation was reaching for the skies to create the shape of things to come for air travel worldwide. But would their reach exceed their grasp?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod...ruled-the-skies-2-the-shape-of-things-to-come

Even so, there was stuff I hadn't appreciated back then, and to people 20 or 40 years younger than me, it may be stuff they've never learned rather than have since forgotten.

Good quality pictures too (probably because they were filmed as material for selling British products, or for national P.R. purposes). Interesting how a bankrupt country like Britain nearly pulled itself up by its bootstraps!
 
I studied at Farnborough Technical College, which was previously RAE! Our Halls were ex-RAF barracks on the edge of the airfield. My shack was called Lawrence Hall, named after TE Lawrence who was barracked in that very building.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top