Author Archives: jfwknifton

by jfwknifton | August 7, 2019 · 8:13 am

Renegade Football at the High School (2)

Last time, I spoke of the actual end of High School football at Christmas 1914, and the reasons that brought it about. Basically, they were mostly connected with the idea of “other things to do”.

There were picture palaces and films. Exciting films about beautiful women such as Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford. Beautiful Lillian Gish was once the Number One star in Hollywood yet today she is forgotten. Years ago I bought her autograph for next to nothing on ebay. Mary Pickford was equally famous. She was a Canadian and my grandfather, Will Knifton and his brother, John Knifton, worked as bricklayers on her mansion, shortly after their arrival in Canada, before the First World War :

Some of the films were comedies about “bathing beauties” whatever they were:

The Boy Scouts attracted some of the boys:

Strangely enough, though, this unwillingness to give up their valuable time and participate in football did not seem initially to have a direct relationship with the success, or lack of it, of the School’s First Team.

Indeed, the football teams, both First and Second Teams, may actually have been too successful for their own good. Playing so many matches, both on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and occasionally after lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays, meant that the supply of younger talent was denied the facilities or the opportunities to train or to practice.

Match reports are incomplete for the 1911-1912 season, but those that do still exist show an impressive start to the year, which read:

Played 11 won 10 drew 1 lost 0

Even in the 1913-1914 season, things were far from disastrous:

Played 13 won 7 drew 0 lost 6

We know only a little about the social aspirations of the parents and staff but the School magazine provided some of their views, and they were certainly in favour of rugby, the upper class game. “Follow the money” as the Americans say:

“Rugger is the finer game and produces better all-round development.”

“Rugger is much superior”

Here’s an early rugby team:

A lot of the parents’ ideas were based on class prejudice. This is a rather unusual opinion below, but this parent would like to see the public schools and the amateur football players exert more influence on the professional game :

“I shall always be sorry to see the Public Schoolboy seceding from Soccer. For good or ill, it has taken a hold upon the working classes of the Kingdom, and the more the game is leavened by pure amateurism, the better. There is a field of real social reform in the Association of Public School football with the professional and League variety.”

At least one other parent thought along similar lines:

“Soccer is England’s game at present, and the more Schoolboys drafted into it the better ; we do not want the national game to drift into the hands of professionals.”

Here is an amateur boys’ team of the period:

Such comments in the “Rugger or Soccer ? ” debate make it abundantly clear that football was perceived as a sport where the professional players , and the working class, were taking over from the amateur player , and the upper class. Of the two Nottingham teams, Nottingham Forest, for example, indubitably represented the working class and wore red shirts. Notts County, on the other hand, had been founded by young men from the professional classes such as bankers, lawyers, and lacemakers, who, in 1862, after enjoying playing football in “The Hollow”, a piece of waste ground near the Cavalry Barracks in the exclusive Park Estate, had decided to form a club.

As we saw last time, the General Committee at the High School, presumably of School sport, and made up of Masters, had voted 2-1 in favour of adapting rugby as the new school sport. The boys in the Upper School were thought to favour very strongly the handling game “because of the novelty of the suggestion”, and the parents, had also voted for rugby by a 3-2 majority. The Old Boys favoured the same sport by a majority similar to that of the parents. The only group who seemed to favour football were the smaller boys, those who were not about to go off to university, but instead were in the First, Second and Third Years. I suspect that the Fourth and Fifth Years were probably divided in their opinions but I have no irrefutable evidence for that. Indeed, I did find at least one source that said that overall, the boys in the First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Forms would probably have opted to continue with football. What was certainly true is that hardly anybody, parents, boys, even the staff, had ever seen a game of rugby played.

By today’s standards, the voting procedure about the taking up of rugby was hardly carried out in a particularly unbiassed way. The envelope sent out to Old Boys and parents containing their voting slip also contained a short article summarising “the advantages claimed for Rugger.”

Even the article in “The Nottinghamian” was at pains to point out how many other schools would be available to play rugby fixtures, if the change was made. They included recent converts such as Trent College, Denstone, Newark, Grantham, Retford, Oakham, Leeds, Bradford and the Birmingham schools.

In many ways, therefore, the decision to adapt rugby would seem already to have been taken, long before any Old Boys or parents were asked to rubberstamp it in a postal ballot.

17 Comments

Filed under Canada, Football, History, Nottingham, The High School

by jfwknifton | August 2, 2019 · 7:41 am

The Great Flood of 1875 and the Fossilised Streets of Nottingham (2)

Recently, I wrote about the Great Flood of 1875, described by a person standing on the terrace at Nottingham Castle, looking across the valley of the River Trent. Here is an old oil painting of old Nottingham. It shows beautifully the castle on its cliff and, just in front of it, a brightly shining St Mary’s Church. You can also see the River Trent and the old Trent Bridge, just to the right of the tree trunk.

In 1499 Richard Mellers, the husband of Dame Agnes Mellers, founder of the High School, is known to have given twenty shillings to help repair this particular bridge which I believe was known back then as “The Bridge of Hethbeth”, although I’m not 100% certain of that.

In the centre of the picture, fairly distant, is the church at Wilford:

Last time I couldn’t stop myself looking at the streets of old Nottingham and how, in modern times, they have either disappeared, or have been made to disappear. I suppose really I was asking myself the question: “Would our journeys today be better if we could follow the same routes as Victorian roads did?

Here is one of the maps from last time. The orange arrow points to a thoroughfare no longer within our use. By a carefully planned coincidence, it is the road barely seen on the old oil painting of old Nottingham above, leading to distant Wilford Church (centre). The diagonal, all white, thoroughfare on the map, if continued to the north eastern, top right corner, would arrive at St Mary’s Church. In the other direction, that same straight road stretches southwards, straight as a die, to the River Trent and the Toll Bridge at Wilford on the left hand side. On the Ordnance Survey map, that very same route is highlighted by our trusty friend, the orange arrow. Nowadays, it would make a marvellous road into the city, especially for bicycles and even electric cars.

Personally, I do wonder if 130% of our traffic problems are down to planners who have completely disregarded those old streets which used to run, straight and wide, from one side of the city to the other. The worst obstruction to traffic flow in this area is the Broadmarsh Centre, a huge shopping mall which blocks so many of the old medieval and Victorian thoroughfares:

I do apologise for his absence, incidentally, but the orange arrow is currently on strike for better pay and more beautiful places to point to. Here is the 1970s car park for what was then the new shopping centre. It takes seven years or so to get a degree in architecture:

I had almost forgotten that I was writing about the Great Flood of 1875 as well as traffic flow. Well, nothing, including the Broadmarsh Centre if it had been there, could have stopped the vast floods of water from cascading through the city of Nottingham:

Wilford-road was the scene of a sad disaster, involving the loss of several lives. The flood was so deep that the only means of communication with Briar-street and the houses near it was by boats or vehicles; in the evening a man with a cart got about a dozen people into it in order to take them to places of less danger. They got out of Briar-street on to Wilford-road safely; but the posts on the road side being covered and only the street lamps to guide the driver, he got too near the edge of the road, which had been raised considerably, the cart was upset into the field on the east side, and six of the passengers were drowned. Next morning a man named Asher rode into the flood in the same neighbourhood in order to bring off a horse which was in an outlying shed, but was himself carried away and drowned. At Wilford the river overflowed the banks, washing down some of the cottages, and standing eight feet deep in many of the houses The traffic on the railway was much hindered, the trains from Trent having to be sent by the Derby, Codnor Park, and Mansfield lines.

Briar-street does not seem to exist any more. Wilford Road is the eventual continuation of Wilford Street towards the top left/centre of the map. It used to run southwards straight as an orange arrow to Wilford Ferry Bridge, at the bottom of the map. Most of that direct route is no longer there or is no longer usable. It has been interrupted, mostly by housing and parts of Robin Hood Way and Sheriff’s Way:

We already know Wilford and its famous ferry, replaced eventually by a bridge:

The Kannibal Killer Kaptain John Deane used to live just the other side of the bridge from Nottingham:

This was definitely THE flood in Nottingham. As the book says:

“This flood of 1875 was 5½ inches higher than that of 1852, 23½ inches higher than the floods of 1869 and July, 1875, 28 inches higher than the flood of January, 1877, 36 inches higher than the Floods of 1857 and 1872, and 39 inches higher than that of 1864”

The heights of those floods are recorded underneath present day Trent Bridge:

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23 Comments

Filed under History, Nottingham

Tagged as Broadmarsh Centre, Great Flood of 1875, John Deane, Nottingham Castle, St.Mary’s Church, Trent Bridge, Wilford, Wilford Road

by jfwknifton | July 27, 2019 · 7:32 am

Renegade Football at the High School (1)

The High School plays rugby nowadays. Before this, they used to play football, (or soccer) and were very, very successful. They provided nine England players, who were Frank Ernest Burton, Arthur William Cursham, Henry Alfred Cursham, John Auger Dixon, Arthur Cooper Goodyer, John Edward Leighton, Tinsley Lindley, Harold Morse and Frederick William Chapman who was an Amateur international. Many of these Victorian superstars are now long forgotten. Who would recognise Arthur Goodyer if he walked in through the High School’s front gate?

Three of these men captained England. One was Arthur William Cursham who captained his country on two occasions, namely against Scotland in 1878, when he scored a goal, and against Wales in 1879. His second goal for his country came against Wales in 1883.

The most famous captain of the three was Tinsley Lindley, the man who had a career total of fifteen goals in thirteen appearances for his country. He also held an England scoring record of having scored in nine consecutive games between March 1886 and April 1889. This record was eventually beaten by Ian Wright of Arsenal, more than a century later.

The High School also provided the highest scorer in the history of the FA Cup, Harry Cursham:

The High School also gave us Frederick William Chapman, who appeared in the Great Britain team which competed in the Olympic Football Tournament in 1908. Great Britain won the final 2-0 against Denmark, and Chapman scored the opening goal. Always called simply “Fred”, he is the only Old Nottinghamian ever to win an Olympic gold medal, and, given the limited number of countries who were playing football at this time, he had good reason to consider himself a champion of the world. Chapman went on to play for the England amateur team on twenty occasions, captaining them at least once, thereby becoming the third captain of England to be provided by the High School.

Here is a picture of the Nottingham High School 1st XI in 1897. Frederick William Chapman, the winner of an Olympic Gold Medal, stands at the right hand end of the back row. A determined detective could make a code out of the bricks in the wall behind the team, and discover where the picture was taken. A large clue is that the team were standing in the modern Dining Room, at the end opposite the area where the meals are served:

And here are his international caps:

The High School switched to rugby after Christmas 1914. Ironically, this was shortly after football was seen to be an amazing peace maker during the First World War with the Christmas Truce which brought much of the Western Front to a temporary stop for a few days. Even so, it was well worth it, insofar as British casualties were running at the time at an average of 4,000 men a day killed or wounded:

The two prime movers in the High School’s change to rugby were Mr Leggett of the Preparatory School and Mr Lloyd Morgan. When they volunteered to go to the war, Mr Kennard took over. He had captained the Lancashire XV and played for the North of England in an England trial. Here is Joseph Kennard with four of the First XV in 1929:

Mr Kennard could be a hard man sometimes, and occasionally he could justifiably be described as rather strange.

Around 1935 he was living at 58 Ebers Road in Mapperley, a small semi-detached house. By 1936, he had moved to No 41, a very much larger detached house with a larger garden. For some reason he was violently opposed to the Salvation Army and continually expressed his disgust that they would come and play outside his house in Ebers Road on a Sunday morning. By now he was seen as, in the words of Geoffrey Tompkin, as “exceedingly fierce with a bald head, a black military moustache and spectacles”.

We’ll have a more detailed look at the reasons why the change from football to rugby was made next time.

12 Comments

Filed under Football, History, Nottingham, Personal, The High School

Tagged as Arsenal, Denmark, Fred Chapman, Frederick William Chapman, Harry Cursham, Ian Wright, Joseph Kennard, Mr Leggett, Mr Lloyd Morgan, Newark Magnus School, Olympic Gold Medal, School Prefects, Tinsley Lindley

by jfwknifton | July 22, 2019 · 8:17 am

“The Devil’s Doctors” by Dr Mark Felton (4)

Last time I was talking about “The Devil’s Doctors” by Dr Mark Felton which describes how, at Mukden POW Camp in Manchuria, Allied prisoners of war, primarily Americans, were used to test Japanese biological weapons developed at Pingfan, the nearby headquarters of Unit 731. Dr Felton also broadens the scope of his writing to include events after the war, when large numbers of Japanese doctors were found guilty of war crimes, in many cases on American personnel, but no sentences were ever carried out. “Why did this happen?” the author asks, but quickly reveals the real truth. The Americans were now thinking about war with their erstwhile allies, the Soviets:

To wage the next war and win, the American government wanted to know immediately everything about the Japanese biological weapons so that they could use the information for their own purposes. On August 13th 1945, before even the end of this war, in Operation Flamingo, the American government set up an OSS team to

“secure all Japanese documents and dossiers, and other information useful to the United States government”.

Indeed, fifteen military intelligence operatives were about to be parachuted into Pingfan to gather up scientists and data, when the Japanese, terrified by the thought of Stalin’s savage soldiers invading the sacred Japanese homeland, suddenly surrendered:

Shiro Ischii and his colleagues fled from Manchuria to Japan with all their data. According to the author, they eventually finished up talking to Columbia University’s Dr Murray Sanders to whom General MacArthur had personally given the job of investigating the Japanese biological warfare programme. Here’s Ischii again:

Everything that Dr Sanders found out was taken to MacArthur who decided that the Japanese data was “almost incalculable and incredibly valuable to the United States”. He wanted it “on an exclusive basis”. The Americans offered Ischii and his colleagues from Pingfan a “blanket immunity from prosecution in perpetuity”. The people who made this offer were well aware that living Allied prisoners had been experimented on. Both Pacific Stars and Stripes and the New York Times had published allegations in 1946 and in 1947 American Military Intelligence found 12 independent witnesses all giving the same details about the live vivisection of Allied POWs. Here’s MacArthur:

According to the author, when J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, tried to look into the affair, he was told by MacArthur’s investigating agent that “information of the type in question is closely controlled and regarded as highly sensitive”. In other words, he was told to get lost. Here’s Hoover, who does not seem to have pressed the point:

So Ishii and all of the rest got their lifelong immunity and were never put on trial. Had they appeared in court, the British and the Soviets would have acquired all of the data that only the Americans had at the time. Ishii went to live the American Dream in Maryland where he died in 1959. According to the author, the prominent Unit 731 vivisectionist, Masaji Kitano, went back to Japan and became the president of a large pharmaceutical firm. Here’s Kitano:

Sadly, the author, Dr Felton, does not name the vivisectionist who became Governor of Tokyo, nor the one who was President of the Japan Medical Association nor the one who headed the Japan Olympic Committee. Even so his research at this point could not be bettered, with some very dark and disgusting political stones being overturned.

As the war slipped away, the Japanese were keen to use their new Biological Weapons in the USA. Again, the author’s research into events at this point could not be bettered. A first feasibility trial consisted of a submarine launched spotter plane which dropped incendiary bombs in the forests of the West Coast. It was too wet and not a lot happened.

In August 1943, the Japanese Navy tested large paper balloons, again launched from submarines, and again with the intention of setting fire to the forests. That project was abandoned in favour of an Army project to use bigger balloons carrying incendiary and anti-personnel bombs. Sadly, six people were killed near Bly in Oregon, possibly because the powers-that-be did not release news of what the Japanese were doing, because it might have caused mass panic.

The final piece in this well researched jigsaw came when the Japanese Navy commissioned the huge I-400 submarines which would have carried three aircraft each, Aichi M6A1 Seiran torpedo bombers:

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These aircraft would have overflown San Francisco, Los Angeles and other American cities and then dropped canister type bombs or possible even crop sprayed them with Today’s Maniac Special… bubonic plague, typhoid, dysentery, perhaps even a nerve gas. Shiro Ishii would surely have had some ideas about what to do?

So why did it not happen? Well, the author’s persistent research has turned up a good few reasons. Firstly, Japan found it difficult to produce the huge I-400 submarines and the planes to go with them. Furthermore, a “morally bankrupt” Imperial Army still had one or two who remembered dimly how decent human beings led their lives. Quite simply, the Chief of the General Staff, Yoshijiro Umezu put a stop to it. He told his officers:

“If bacteriological war is conducted it will grow from the dimension of war between Japan and America to an endless battle of humanity against bacteria. Japan will earn the derision of the world”.

Overall, I would strongly recommend this book which lays bare the extremely dirty secrets of the Japanese and the Americans, and I suppose those of the Soviets too, because, although they never received any of the material scooped up and taken away by their American allies, they definitely wanted to have it. So too did the British, and there is a lengthy section about their activities with plagues and nerve gases, centred on the top secret centre at Porton Down in Wiltshire. The book is 198 pages and if you can buy yourself a copy, then you really should. It’s a fine tale about just where a Master Race complex can lead you.

26 Comments

Filed under Criminology, History, Politics, Russia, Science

Tagged as Aichi M6A1 Seiran, bubonic plague, Dr Murray Sanders, dysentery, General MacArthur, J Edgar Hoover, Los Angeles, Manchuria, Masaji Kitano, Mukden, New York Times, Operation Flamingo, Pacific Stars and Stripes, Pingfan, San Francisco, Shiro Ischii, Stalin, The Devil’s Doctors, typhoid, Unit 731

by jfwknifton | July 17, 2019 · 7:38 am

The Great Flood of 1875 and the Fossilised Streets of Nottingham (1)

I have always been fascinated by extreme weather, as many of you will have noticed. I recently came across an account of the Great Flood of Nottingham in 1875. It was in “The Date Book of Remarkable Memorable Events Connected With Nottingham and Its Neighbourhood” started by Mr John Frost Sutton and then continued by Henry Field.
The detailed account of the flood is particularly fascinating because it involves many streets which no longer exist. I was able to trace all of them on my Old Ordnance Survey Map for Nottingham (South) 1880. You can buy these on ebay or from a company run by Alan Godfrey .

The account begins with:

“October 22nd 1875
The greatest flood that has occurred in this century at Nottingham reached its height shortly before midnight, and, as viewed from the terrace of the Castle, was a scene never to be forgotten. Turn which way you would, the south side of town resembled a great sea, with here and there trees, factories, or blocks of houses standing out. The left portion had quite a Venetian aspect: people were moving to and fro, some on planks, some on hastily constructed rafts, fetching out their goods or those of some unfortunate neighbour, and floating them to higher parts.”

The castle has a tremendous view from the top of the cliff on which it stands:

Here’s the terrace and a very poor view of the view:

The description continues with particular reference to individual streets, using the peculiar way of writing them as “Downing-street” for example. Many of them are no longer there in their ancient form, such as Arkwright-street and Kirke White-street. We only have the fossilised fragments of what they once were: `

“The Queen’s-walk was rendered impassable, and many of the houses on the sides had at least six feet of water in them. In parts of Queen’s-road, Arkwright-street, and Kirke White-street people were conveyed to and fro in carts. The water stood in the cellars of many of the houses in Leen-side, Carrington-street, Greyfriars-gate, and several other streets.”

Let’s take a look at these more obscure Nottingham streets, because if a magic wand could be waved and they were reinstated, quite a few of Nottingham’s current traffic problems might be solved.

On the map below the orange arrow points to Queen’s Walk which I think is where the Manchester United footballer Andrew Cole originally came from. Queen’s Road, mentioned in the account of the flooding, is north east of the orange arrow and runs down the side of the station. Looking at the map, Queen’s Walk, still in white right next to the orange arrow, used to be a splendidly direct route out of the city to the south. Alas, it is now pedestrianized:

In the map below, Arkwright-street used to be a very big and important thoroughfare. It ran south of the station and curved gently but directly to Trent Bridge. It is there nowadays in a similar fossilised form. Find the red dot that marks the station at the top of the map below and follow it south eastwards towards the river in a long, long curve past the orange arrow and across to Trent Bridge, with the road number A60 on it. Nowadays, alas, this is not a continuous route for cars:

Kirke White-street was equally important. It ran from the canal on London Road straight as an (orange) arrow until it reached Wilford Road in the west. Kirke White-street crossed right through The Meadows, which were some of the most impressive slums in the whole British Empire. Even in 1970, children could be seen barefoot here, In the 19th century, its inhabitants provided the huge crowds that kept Notts County in the First Division and helped them to win the FA Cup:

After World War Two the inhabitants of the Meadows were moved en masse to Clifton Estate, some three or four miles outside the City.

Kirke White-street was a much used east to west route across the city and then out via Wilford Street and Wilford Road to Birmingham and the south west. On the map below, the long lost fossilised path of Kirke White-street is very roughly the red dotted line going east to west. Wilford Street and then Wilford Road is in the top left corner. It very quickly changes into the A453 which was the old main road to Birmingham:

Leen-side is the eastwards continuation of Canal-street to London Road where the BBC is now situated. It ran to the south of Narrow Marsh, where the Nottingham police never dared to go. It was an area generally reckoned to be the absolute very worst slums in the whole British Empire. People who lived there used to queue up to live in the old Meadows. I found a picture of them queuing on the Internet. It’s hard to believe that on the right that group is just one family, but that’s what slums are all about:

Here is Leen-side, marked with the orange arrow. Just to the north of Canal Street, it used to form an excellent east-west route through the city, and linked well with the route leading south via London Road and the other one going past the red dot of the modern station:

Carrington-street was exactly where it is now and you can see it to the west of the railway station on the map below. In Victorian times, though, it ran a lot further north to a junction with Greyfriars Gate and Broad Marsh, much of which is now covered by the Broad Marsh Centre. Only a small part of Greyfriars Gate remains, between Wilford Street and the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre. I suspect that it used to link up with Lister Gate. I have marked it with our old friend, the Orange Arrow:

There will be more pointed accusations of the slack jawed local planners of the 1960s, and their pathetic and repeated failures to use their brains next time, although I do promise not to mention the fact that they demolished this wonderful old coaching inn and World War II RAF knocking shop without hesitation:

They replaced it with one of the finest examples of sixties architecture in the city:

25 Comments

Filed under History, Nottingham

Tagged as Arkwright street, Broadmarsh Shopping Centre, Clifton Estate, Great Flood of Nottingham, Nottingham Castle, Notts County, Queen's road, Queen’s Walk, the British Empire, Trent Bridge

by jfwknifton | July 12, 2019 · 7:47 am

Vandalism in the School Archives? Or is it Art?

A few months ago, I went into the School Archives to photograph the School Lists. They are quite boring little booklets to be brutally honest, but they are very informative and record the names of all the members of all the forms in the School for every year. The oldest ones date from the late 1860s, but because I was researching the school’s casualties in World War II, I started my James Bond activities with 1892 and then went forwards as far as 1950. Just for the sake of argument, here’s one, with a particularly famous ex-pupil on it:

With all that information, it is actually a Victorian Excel Spreadsheet!

The only thing out of the ordinary that I found in 3.96 GB of School Lists was in the edition for 1941:

Once again, some young man was feeling the ‘Call of the Skies’:

Below the printers’ name, he had knocked out a couple of bombers;

Here’s the larger of the two bombers blown up as best I can:

It is called the 320 and has a range of 3,000 miles, with an endurance, I think he means, not ‘duration’, of 6 hours 8 minutes and a bomb load of 3,000lbs. It also has 8 machine guns. Looks a bit like a Blenheim with the nose of a Heinkel, the tail of an Airspeed Oxford perhaps and inline engines.

Here’s the smaller of the two bombers blown up as best I can:

It is called the 350 and has a range of 1,000 miles, with no armament. It looks a bit like a Blenheim with the nose of a Heinkel, the tail of an Airspeed Oxford perhaps and inline engines. Here’s one I prepared earlier:

I have also tried hard to blow up the first of the fighters:

It has one 1 inch cannon, in the propeller boss, by the look of it, and 8 machine guns.

The other fighter is rather Spitfire like:

It is called the 398 and has 4 cannon, 4 machine guns, an endurance of 5 hours and a range of 3,000 miles. I’m sorry to say that Maths was not necessarily this young man’s strong point! The German fighter has no names or specifications:

For me, it is mainly Focke Wulf Fw 190, but there is a little dash of Mitsubishi Zero in it as well perhaps.

I often think that we regret what we do not do far more than what we do do. When I was in the Sixth Form at Ashby-de-la-Zouch Boys’ Grammar School, we used to have French lessons in a smaller room because there were only 12 of us. One of the desks had a fantastic carving of a B-17 Flying Fortress, deep into the wood of the lid, with all the ailerons, all the machine guns and all the ventilation holes in the gun barrels. It was fabulous. This is the closest I can find on the Internet:Looking back at how much money the school had, I suspect it dated from 1943 rather than 1963 and the Airfix kit of that era:

My regret is that I did not find any way of preserving this work of art rather than it be thrown into a skip in the middle 70s.

Not much survives of the pupils in any school. And what does would have been classified as vandalism at the time. Such as this example from 1922:

or this one from 1942:

or this one from a young man who upset the High School more than he could ever imagine:

26 Comments

Filed under Aviation, Bomber Command, History, Nottingham, Personal, The High School

Tagged as 'Call of the Skies, Focke-Wulf Fw 190, Mitsubishi Zero, School List

by jfwknifton | July 7, 2019 · 8:17 am

“The Devil’s Doctors” by Dr Mark Felton (3)

The author then extends his account to some of the other atrocities carried out at other locations within the Japanese sphere of influence. In the last post I spoke of what happened to the crew of a B-29 Superfortress, brought down over Japan on May 5th 1945:

The crew were all murdered in the vilest fashion and 30 Japanese eventually stood trial in an American court. Dr Fumio Ishiyama, the university’s chief of surgery, committed suicide to avoid justice. Of the remaining 29 Japanese, 23 were found guilty. There were five death sentences, four life imprisonments and prison for all the rest. Sadly, the sentences, awarded for war crimes up to and including cannibalism, were never carried out.

The author then reveals that the American government, having realised that their erstwhile allies, the Russians, were in actual fact, total savages and vile people and worse than that, a bunch of Commies, decided to do very little indeed with the guilty Japanese defendants. After all, the Japanese people were a lovely lot who well might fight on our side against the Russians if we were very, very kind to them. Nobody was hanged and every single war criminal was free as a bird by 1958. Personally, I’m only surprised that the thirty Japanese weren’t asked to write a best selling recipe book.

One of the most striking things in the author’s research is that the 700 page Official History of Kyushu Imperial University devotes just one page to the vivisection experiments it carried out for years on hundreds of innocent people. It reminded me of one German company’s attitude to the 80,000 concentration camp slave labourers they used. They don’t even get a mention.

The doctor in charge at Pingfan was Shiro Ischii:

Ischii wanted to discover how diseases affected the human body, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese people paid the ultimate price to help him. Aerial sprays were used from aircraft and bombs made of ceramic material but full of germs were dropped on Chinese civilians. It must have been a little bit like spraying forest fires nowadays:

Poisoned food and water was frequently offered to Chinese victims. Fleas carrying bubonic plague were released by Japanese aircraft over the Chinese cities of Ningbo (1940) and Changde (1941). At least 400,000 people died as a result of this. Here are the two cities nowadays:

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In comparison, casualties at Hiroshima were 90,000–146,000 and at Nagasaki between 39,000–80,000.
Dr Felton has researched Pingfan in enormous detail. The centre was divided into various ‘Divisions’, all under the command of Shiro Ischii. Division 1 worked with anthrax, bubonic plague, cholera, tuberculosis and typhoid, frequently introducing it to live people. As test volunteers, between 300-400 Chinese were kept confined at a local camp and numbers were always maintained around that level. Division 2 worked on weapons to deliver the toxins, trying to invent radical new ways to contaminate the western USA. Division 3 constructed artillery shells for shorter range operations and Division 4 developed new biological agents.
The book tells exactly what kind of medical and surgical war crimes were committed by Unit 731 personnel but I will not inflict them upon you. You will need to buy the book! Suffice it to say that the treatment meted out to these poor Chinese people was vile, beyond contempt. It still affects Sino-Japanese relationships today, mainly because of the extreme reluctance on the part of the Japanese to accept their guilt and to apologise in a meaningful and sincere way.

10 Comments

Filed under Criminology, History, Politics, Science

Tagged as B-29 Superfortress, Changde, Kyushu Imperial University, Manchuria, Mukden, Ningbo, Pingfan, Shiro Ischii, Unit 731

by jfwknifton | July 2, 2019 · 8:06 am

My Book (3)

I am still quite proud of the fact that I have found out so much information about the vast majority of these young men. I feel that I have done them all justice and that I have done my very best to keep them in people’s memories, even as they seem to be receding further and further into the anonymous grey mists of time. Here is the School Rugby team in 1926-1927:

I have made great efforts to drag the complete ghost out of the past and to write not just about their fiery deaths but to try and unfold the full and energetic lives they led. It’s only too easy to see a name on a war memorial, to read that name and then to forget it, all in the same moment. For that reason I have tried to describe their families, their fathers, their mothers, their brothers and sisters. I have tried to find out what their father did as a job, where the family lived, in some cases occupying just one or two houses in their lifetime, in others half a dozen. What were their houses like? How might they have travelled to the High School? I have tracked their Forms, their teachers, what they did at School, how their exams went, what position they came in class and what prizes they won, all the things that would have been so important to them at the time. I have written about what their Form Masters were like and talked about their careers. This is Mr Kennard. He definitely took no prisoners:

I have tried to find out what sports our future heroes played:

What school plays they were in. The French farce of the 1920s, “Dr Knock”, perhaps? And which one of these boys became the war hero?:

Or perhaps a play with a chance to wear a lovely frock and a string of pearls? :

Which person collected stamps and who loved to make home movies? I have tried to identify other boys in their Forms who might have been their friends, even if that is just a case of saying who won the Form Prize and where they lived, what job their father did and so on. Here is a class of really small boys, eight and nine year olds, before the First World War:

The worst thing I could have done would have been to have written three thousand words about their death and thirty about their lives. So whatever I could find, I have included. Their sports, their hobbies, their jobs between school and the forces, and, if possible, what their abilities and talents were.
By doing this I revealed, even to myself, just how many different places have provided High School pupils over these years and just how many hundreds of different jobs their fathers have done, some of them long gone and requiring a search on the Internet.

At least one High School hero of Bomber Command had come straight from Waring & Gillow’s shop to fly his Lancaster. He apparently said one day in the shop that selling double beds and three piece suites was not a worthy job for a man when his country was at war, and off he went. Waring & Gillow sold luxury furniture of all kinds, and they appear to have made a lot themselves, because here is their factory. :

And when I have written about the boys’ streets and houses, some simple directions are usually included. Without them, which of us could ever locate Balfour Road or Conway Avenue or Derby Terrace or Florence Road? And many old streets have completely disappeared. This is a very different Forest Recreation Ground, only a few decades before the first of the World War Two casualties was born. Look at the windmills, and the race course for horses. It was one of the very few ever to be a figure-of-eight, in the hope of some juicy crashes:

It is, of course, the young readers who are my ultimate target audience. It would be a tragedy indeed if they were never to realise who died for their right not to be brainwashed, not to speak German as their first language, not to be slave labourers in a foreign land and to have the right to make their own decisions at all the different stages of their young lives. Freedom does not come cheap, and I’m not talking about money. The situation is perhaps best summed up by what one Old Nottinghamian war hero has inscribed on his grave:

HE GAVE THE GREATEST GIFT OF ALL
HIS UNFINISHED LIFE.

18 Comments

Filed under Aviation, Bomber Command, History, Nottingham, Politics, The High School, Writing

by jfwknifton | June 27, 2019 · 7:16 am

“The Devil’s Doctors” by Dr Mark Felton (2)

The events at Mukden were not a unique series of atrocities, however. By no means:

The author relates the dreadful events which took place on May 5th 1945 when a B-29 was rammed and brought down over Japan by a kamikaze fighter pilot. Of the crew, the first fatality had his parachute lines cut in mid-air by the wing of a second Japanese fighter aircraft. A second American was attacked by a mob of Japanese civilians who came running across a field to kill him. With the six bullets in his revolver he shot five of them and then himself. A third man was shot by civilians. A fourth man was never found. A fifth was sent to Tokyo to be questioned under torture. The rest were rounded up and taken to Kyushu Imperial University where they were murdered by the medical staff who dissected them alive in the post mortem room. The witness to all this was Dr Toshio Tono, a young medical assistant at the time.

In the 1980s he wrote a book about the event which named names, most of whom were, by then, in senior posts within the university. According to the author, the dissection of the prisoners paid particular attention to the brain, heart, liver and stomach. Times and places are given. On May 17th 1945, two Americans were dissected, on May 22nd two more, on the 25th a single man and on June 2nd, the last three men died. The horror is not over yet. On June 3rd the last victim’s liver was preserved for a party that evening in the Officers’ Hospital. More than one witness has come forward to say that the meat was chargrilled, seasoned with soy sauce and served as an hors-d’œuvre to the military and civilian guests, who knew what they were eating and enjoyed the meal.

I suspect that this incident may well have inspired Hannibal Lecter.

14 Comments

Filed under Criminology, Film & TV, History, Pacific Theatre, Politics, Science, the Japanese, war crimes

Tagged as B-29, Hannibal Lecter, Manchuria, Pingfan

by jfwknifton | June 22, 2019 · 7:37 am

Eagle Comic (5)

On the front cover, Eagle featured Dan Dare, the lantern jawed squeaky clean hero:

He could easily dominate the whole front page:

He was always helped, and occasionally hindered, by Digby, his rather podgy sidekick:

Presumably, he was named after an extremely obscure aircraft called the Digby, which was the name given to the Douglas B-18 Bolo in Canadian Air Force service. You can see this lost aircraft in action in the Powell and Pressburger film “49th Parallel” made in 1941 with Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier. It’s a thriller well worth keeping an eye out for, and a film which portrays perfectly the repulsive attitudes of the Nazis:

Here’s another picture of Digby:

And, yes, he is using an electric hairdryer as a weapon:

I shouldn’t poke fun, though. Some of the science was years ahead of its time. Who else had heard of nuclear fusion in 1950?:

Dan Dare and Digby had their nemesis in the extraterrestrial figure of “The Mekon”:

Dan, Digby and the Mekon caused a revolution in the unchanging comic world of Weary Willie and Tired Tim. Issue N0 2 of Eagle came out on April 21st and the comic was on its way. Here’s the top half of that second issue:

And the bottom half of the same page:

Sometimes the price of the comic was rather strange. This issue cost 4½ old pence which even in the days of a pound made up of 240 pence was an unusual price. I can’t get enough of that eagle personally: