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Forgotten History

Brilliant, Think the Jungle is now or was a caravan sales pitch, you can
run the whole length now a days and only see 4 or 5 other vehicle's,
A far cry from HGV's nose to tail struggling up in crawl with flames
2 ft long coming out of the exhaust, now and then with the driver
standing in the open door one hand on the wheel one foot flat on the
accelerator, peeing on the road.
Did wonder were the clock went.
 
This Thread started with a post regarding the Algerian War of Independence and now more light is shed on another dark chapter in that conflict.

France has admitted that a prominent Algerian nationalist was tortured and murdered by its army more than 60 years ago.

Ali Boumendjel was arrested during the Algerian War of Independence in 1957, and his death shortly after was covered-up as a suicide.

But, in a meeting with Boumendjel's grandchildren on Tuesday, President Emmanuel Macron reassessed the death. "[He] did not commit suicide. He was tortured and then killed," he said.

Algeria gained independence from France in 1962 after a bloody seven-year war. Boumendjel, a 37-year-old lawyer and nationalist, was active in the campaign against French colonial rule. He was detained during the Battle of Algiers and placed in solitary confinement by French troops. The activist was then killed and thrown from the sixth-floor of a building in an effort to disguise his death as a suicide.

The BBC's Ahmed Rouaba says that Algerian and French organisations have been campaigning for decades for the truth about Boumendjel's death.

In 2001 Gen Paul Aussaresses, who was at the time head of French intelligence in Algeria, confessed to ordering the killing of dozens of Algerian prisoners, including Boumendjel.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56262963
 
I was amused when an electronics firm sold "retro" dial telephones ... it had buttons in the place of the holes in the dial. So, the old dial technology is too complex to recreate digitally? (y'know what I mean). They're not retro dial 'phones - they are a new design of button 'phones.
 
I think this is "Forgotten History" rather than "Strange Deaths".

I came across this when following up links as I was reading about the Lochnagar Crater.

For full details of the incident, here is a sizeable extract from the official report.

The gist of it: 15th July 1944, 6 trucks arrived at USAAF Station 366, Metfield, Suffolk, England (later known as RAF Metfield) with a delivery of 500 Pound bombs. The explosive in the bombs was compacted with beeswax to make them roughly 50% more powerful.

The personnel who would have operated the hoist to unload them were on their break. The truck drivers were too impatient to wait, disobeyed instructions, and used an established technique to unload. This seems to have involved moving each bomb to the rear of the truck then reversing and stopping suddenly so that the bomb rolled off the back. (What could possibly go wrong?) This is still a common technique in some countries when delivering heavy loads where "cosmetic appearance" is not an issue, such as timber or rubble.

One bomb landed on another and set off a chain reaction of 1,200 tons of the beeswax-enhanced explosive.

As a result:
  • 6 people died, including 3 soldiers memorialised as "missing in action". (One driver ,who had nipped for a cigarette, survived: they don't mention that on the compulsory warnings on fag packets!)
  • 23 or 24 B24 aircraft were damaged beyond repair. That would have been a hard day's work for the Luftwaffe.
  • Sensitive instruments such as pressure gauges and altimeters were damaged on a further 54 aircraft, meaning around 78 aircraft were put out of action — although some of the instrument damage was not discovered until the planes were airborne on later missions.
  • 6 trucks were destroyed.
  • Buildings were damaged.
  • A civilian was reportedly blown off his feet 3.5 miles away. (5.6 km)
  • A crater 75 feet wide and 25 feet deep (23 metres x 7.5 metres) was created, and it was necessary to build a loop road to skirt around this.
  • Quite a lot of bombs were wasted!
ODNSzv.jpg
 
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A much less happy piece of American forgotten history.

The deadliest school massacre in American history? Not really a pub-quiz question, unless your pub was the Cemetery Inn, or something.

Try getting the decade right . . .

1920s? You watched the video first! Or live in Michigan.

Kehoe, the culprit - no question about it - was an ageing, disappointed politician, not the usual INCEL type. :(

An interesting article with details about Kehoe and his crime.

maximus otter
 
In the midst of an article about Roddy Doyle we discover an interesting chunk of history.

While the phone book may have helped Roddy Doyle, it did Thomas E Dewey no favours at all.

The twice-failed US presidential candidate was bedevilled by the telephone book, according to writer Ammon Shea. And Mr Shea knows more than most about this subject as he is author of The Phone Book – the Curious History of the Book that Everyone Uses but No One Reads. (He has a slight obsession with books that everyone uses but no one reads, having previously written a book on reading the Oxford English Dictionary. All 21,730 pages of it.)


In The Phone Book, Shea recalls that when Thomas Dewey first ran for election in 1944, Life magazine interviewed him. The Republican governor of New York state needed all the help he could get as he was running against incumbent Franklin D Roosevelt who was seeking his fourth term.


The Life feature was a favourable piece, accompanied by a photo spread in the governor’s mansion in Albany. However, the last photograph may have been his undoing. It showed him seated at a giant desk, with a caption explaining that he had to sit on two telephone books because the desk and chair were so large.

When it was published, The New Yorker speculated that the photo of “little Tom Dewey on two telephone books” probably put an end to his chances for the presidency. And indeed, he did not win the race.

Shea writes that Dewey was again betrayed by the telephone book, four years later. He was up against Harry Truman this time and throughout the campaign the polls and political analysts had consistently put him ahead of Truman. On election night, the Chicago Daily Tribune editorial team took a huge chance when they put the early edition to bed with the caption “Dewey Defeats Truman”. But he didn’t, and Truman secured 303 electoral college votes to Dewey’s 189.

According to Shea, while there were many reasons why everyone got the results wrong, one of them was due to an over-reliance on the phone book.

Pollsters called random numbers plucked from telephone books across the country, in what they thought was a representative sample.
But this was 1948 and telephones were mostly the preserve of the wealthy, so the results were skewed. Dewey was lulled into a false sense of security from early in the campaign and once again, the treacherous telephone book had an invisible hand in his undoing.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/i-m-in-the-book-alison-healy-on-the-phone-book-1.4508934
 
She deserves a plaque.

A plaque commemorating an Irish woman who came within inches of killing Benito Mussolini has been approved by a Dublin council committee.

One of the bullets fired by Violet Gibson grazed the Italian leader's nose.

The memorial is set to be erected at 12 Merrion Square, the site of her childhood home. Independent Mannix Flynn proposed the motion, and it was passed by the Commemoration and Naming Committee. The committee passed the motion unanimously.

Violet Gibson's assassination attempt was made on 7 April 1926, when she was 50 years old. She came from a privileged Anglo-Irish background, and had been a debutante in the court of Queen Victoria. Following the attempted shooting, she was returned to England, and spent the rest of her life in St Andrew's Hospital, a mental asylum in Northampton, until her death in 1956.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56527826
 
https://www.theguardian.com/society...ed-to-smallpox-vaccine-75-years-before-jenner

It was a daring and dangerous experiment that paved the way for the development of the first safe vaccine and saved countless lives. Yet when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu deliberately infected her own daughter with a tiny dose of smallpox – successfully inoculating the three-year-old child in 1721 – her ideas were dismissed and she was denounced by 18th-century society as an “ignorant woman” .

Three hundred years later, on the anniversary of that first groundbreaking inoculation on English soil, a new biography will aim to raise the profile of Wortley Montagu and reassert her rightful place in history as a trailblazing 18th-century scientist and early feminist.
 
She deserves a plaque.

A plaque commemorating an Irish woman who came within inches of killing Benito Mussolini has been approved by a Dublin council committee.

One of the bullets fired by Violet Gibson grazed the Italian leader's nose.

The memorial is set to be erected at 12 Merrion Square, the site of her childhood home. Independent Mannix Flynn proposed the motion, and it was passed by the Commemoration and Naming Committee. The committee passed the motion unanimously.

Violet Gibson's assassination attempt was made on 7 April 1926, when she was 50 years old. She came from a privileged Anglo-Irish background, and had been a debutante in the court of Queen Victoria. Following the attempted shooting, she was returned to England, and spent the rest of her life in St Andrew's Hospital, a mental asylum in Northampton, until her death in 1956.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56527826

l wouldn’t have thought that honouring insane people who attempt political assassinations established a great precedent, hindsight notwithstanding.

Are we to see blue plaques set up for Daniel M’Naghten or John Bellingham?

maximus otter
 
l wouldn’t have thought that honouring insane people who attempt political assassinations established a great precedent, hindsight notwithstanding.

Are we to see blue plaques set up for Daniel M’Naghten or John Bellingham?

maximus otter

She may not have been insane and she was attempting to assassinate a fascist dictator.
 
Reading that letter made me look up at the silver disk that was awarded to the management of The Motors on the sales success of "Airport". I used to have the one awarded at the same time to the band but financial constraints forced me to sell that one. It raised more money than the management's.
 
With the critique that the lead singer sounded like "Frankie Vaughan locked in a haunted house"? :hahazebs:
I didn't mean i agreed with the criticism. But Roxy Music were a bit of a shock to the system - at first. I don't think any of our rejection letters ran to more than a paragraph.
 
Reading that letter made me look up at the silver disk that was awarded to the management of The Motors on the sales success of "Airport". I used to have the one awarded at the same time to the band but financial constraints forced me to sell that one. It raised more money than the management's.
You managed The Motors?
They were good.
 
Nah. The closest I've ever been to the music business was I worked for a firm that supplied and fitted music studios and sound equipment (thus meeting a few celebs).
I actually purchased the two framed disks from a local (Fulham Road) second-hand shop for £5 each. :) I got 'em because I'm a fan of the group.
 
Nah. The closest I've ever been to the music business was I worked for a firm that supplied and fitted music studios and sound equipment (thus meeting a few celebs).
I actually purchased the two framed disks from a local (Fulham Road) second-hand shop for £5 each. :) I got 'em because I'm a fan of the group.
Wow, that was a bargain.
 
l wouldn’t have thought that honouring insane people who attempt political assassinations established a great precedent, hindsight notwithstanding.

do take your point. However, given the long history of locking people away under the label of insanity I think she may well not have been insane at the start of her incarceration.
 
I'm reading this great book and listening to the author's lectures:
Der Dreißigjährige Krieg: Europäische Katastrophe, deutsches Trauma 1618 – 1648: Amazon.de: Münkler, Herfried: Bücher

Münkler mentions here the small anecdote of the writer Franco Sacchetti from the 14th century: "Two Franciscans met (...) the English mercenary leader John Hawkwood (...). They greeted (him) according to their habit with a joyful "God give you peace, Monsignor!" and were all the more frightened when Hawkwood answered them with a dry "God take your alms!" Why he wished them this, they asked fearfully (...). "How can you believe," says the Condottiere, "to say something good that you come to me and say that God may starve me to death. Don't you know that I live from war and peace would ruin me?""
 
...the English mercenary leader John Hawkwood. “Don't you know that I live from war and peace would ruin me?""

Hawkwood was a hard man. l’m sure that it was he to whom a contemporary wished to speak after a savage day’s jousting. He found Hawkwood in the armourer’s tent, with his helmeted head resting on the anvil, while the artificer tried to beat the mangled helmet back into some sort of shape in order that Hawkwood could take it off!

maximus otter
 
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This morning I learned that Frederick the Great of Prussia was (almost openly ***) gay! Wow!

*** I guess that only seeing your wife at official ceremonies, never impregnating her and filling your gardens with statues of Greek male couples would not have gone unnoticed ...
 
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Not sure if this is the best place for this, altho' it certainly offers food for thought on the Human Condition, and I think will be of interest to anyone interested in obscure tragic histories, criminal and natural, of the Thames. I found it a fascinating series of accounts presented in a sensible, straightforward fashion:

"The River Thames flows for 215 miles from the Cotswolds to the Thames Estuary, and it’s one of England’s flagship sights. The name Thames comes from the old English word Temisis, meaning dark one, and this river's history is every bit as dark as that of the land it runs through."
 
'S a good episode. Scant on detail, mind, but that's only to be expected.
 
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