Category Archives: Africa

by | October 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

Goose Fair (4)

Before the sudden advent of the huge electric amusement machines around 1900, exotic animals were a firm favourite of the Goose Fair hordes………

The big problem, of course, was the fact that, in the desire to exhibit the most unusual animals, the owners of the animals would often end up by going to an animal market and buying a creature that they themselves could not identify. So sit back and enjoy my own attempts to work out what the unknown animal really was………

Let’s start with……..

“Tiger Wolves direct from the Black Rocks of Abyssinia”. These were shown in Day’s “No 1 Royal Menagerie” in 1898 as a “Group of Wild and ferocious Tiger Wolves direct from the Black Rocks of Abyssinia”. Alongside them was a group of Baby Lions”.

There are wolves in Ethiopia, but they are red, so much so that they are also called “the Simien fox or Simien jackal or horse jackal”. Intriguingly, at this time, the name “Tiger-Wolf” was the accepted shortened form of “Tasmanian Tiger-Wolf”. This phrase was used to refer to the Thylacine, an unbelievably rare Australian animal to turn up in a fair in Nottingham. I really do wonder what these animals were!

A slightly less colourful one:

I think you’re getting the idea…..

Day’s “No 1 Royal Menagerie” also had “Blonko Bill, King of the Lion Tamers” working for them.” I have been unable to trace the meaning of “blonko”, although if ever a word sounded like Australian slang, this is it! The internet was no help. One site said it meant “kind, entertaining, handsome”, another said it meant “fat, fat, fat”.

In 1899, Bostock & Wombwell produced a special poster listing all of their animals, including the “Great Pongo Baboon, or Hairy Wild Man”. Intriguingly, “Pongo” is the scientific name for the orangutan, thought to be a close relative of Bigfoot, hence the “Hairy Wild Man” epithet:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

Another strange sounding animal on the Bostock & Wombwell poster was the “Hamadryas, or Sacred Baboon” although, ironically, it is very simple. The poster is referring to the Hamadryas Baboon from the Horn of Africa and the southwestern region of the Arabian Peninsula. You can just see the side of his bright scarlet posterior……

The same owners had a “Chiropottamus, or Vlacko-Vark” which is merely a sort of wild pig. It may be the Red River Hog, “a wild member of the pig family living in the Guinean and Congolian forests. Here’s the old Brooke Bond tea card from the “Wild Animals of Africa” collection….

Alternatively, it may be the warthog which is the “vlakvark” in Afrikaans…..

A “Leucoryx Antelope” sounds a very strange beast but it is also called the “Gemsboc” on the poster. And the “Gemsboc is the gemsbok, gemsbuck or South African oryx, native to the arid regions of Southern Africa, such as the Kalahari Desert. It is a very beautiful animal….

The “Brindled Gnu, or Horned Horse” is a lot easier, because we have all seen this strange word. Not totally unexpectedly, the Brindled Gnu is the blue wildebeest, also called the common wildebeest, the white-bearded wildebeest or the white-bearded gnu. It is one of the two species of wildebeest…..

The Bostock & Wombwell poster advertises a “White Silken Sacred Yak” which would have been a pure white yak. Nowadays, some 5% of the herds are white. They are regarded as an extremely auspicious animal since white represents light, a personification of the illumination of wisdom and the universal Buddha……

Some animals are very easy to sort out.

A “Puma or Silver Lion” was presumably a North American mountain lion, cougar or puma. Here’s a lovely picture of one of the first ever mountain lions to be found in North Dakota…..

A “Jaguar or Clouded Tiger” is nowadays called a “jaguar” or a “clouded leopard”……

A “Bison, or Wild Prairie Bull” is most probably the North American bison…..

A “Monstre Nennock” sounds incomprehensible, but the alternate names give it away, with “Arctic Sea Bear” making it the polar bear. It would be nice to know what a nennock is, though. Incidentally, I’ve just turned my slides into digital photographs, photoshopped them to make them a little lighter and got rid of the hairs and general dirt. So, here is a nennock or two at Basel Zoo in Switzerland in 1979….

Two final animals though, are most intriguing. Just what were the “Hideous Aswaila”, or “Himalayan Monsters”? Were they a family group of yetis? I bet they were, but the people of the time did not know what yeti was…….

And last of all. What on earth were “Lorenzo’s Performing and Talking Bears”? Were they a family group of Bigfoots? Using their famous “Samurai Chatter” to pass comment about Nottingham and its inhabitants? Here’s a youtube video, and if you move swiftly to 4 minutes exactly, you’ll hear what “Samurai Chatter” is. At 4.40, you can hear the Bigfoot walking around the cabin. It’s really scary!

17 Comments

Filed under Africa, Cryptozoology, History, Humour, Nottingham, Science, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | October 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Goose Fair (3)

Last time we finished with Mr Pat Collins’ “Giant Nottingham Geese, All Alive and Kicking” but some surprisingly exotic, and indeed, unusual, animals made their appearance at Goose Fair.

Smallest of them all were the performing fleas:

Look at what they could do:

And don’t worry:

“Each flea is Securely Chained”

In 1899, for their last visit to Goose Fair, Bostock & Wombwell produced a special poster, which listed all of their animals.

Their rivals, of course, boasted about their own animals which included “Novelties never owned or dreamt of by any other Menagerist.” There was the “Great Pongo Baboon”, the “Hamadryas, or Sacred Baboon”, the “Leucoryx Antelope or Gemsboc”, a “Brindled Gnu, or Horned Horse”, a “White Silken Sacred Yak”, a “Puma”, “Jaguar”, a “Bison, or Wild Prairie Bull” and the “Monstre Nennock”.

Here we are:

There was also a huge elephant christened “The Mighty Mastodon”. We still have photographs of him apparently pushing and shoving his way through the Goose Fair crowds, apparently unsupervised, making his way back home to his trailer. Don’t worry about safety, though. Only two years before the council were discussing whether it was dangerous to have brown bears in Upper Parliament Street. Talk about re-wilding!

Even more frightening, apparently, was “Madam Jumbo”, an elephant of, well, elephantine proportions. It could actually lift people down from the second floor of the Post Office in Queen Street. Just look at the size of it. Look at the baby elephant in comparison, or the horse:

Amazingly, in King Street, “The Royal Monster Whale” was on exhibition for Goose Fair week, and for the week after that. It cost only threepence, with children half price. A “Royal Monster Whale” must have caused a great many difficulties for everybody, not just when it was delivered on a handcart, but in providing thousands of gallons of seawater in a city more than fifty miles from the sea. However, that may have been the least of their problems. As Monty Python so rightly said:

“Where are we going to get forty-four tons of plankton from every morning?”

An insoluble problem, unless, of course, “The Royal Monster Whale” was stuffed.

At least one lion at Goose Fair was personally supplied by the great Cecil Rhodes, the diamond billionaire who established the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford University, the oldest graduate scholarships in the world. Every year, 102 full postgraduate scholarships are granted to students across the world. Here’s his lion, serving a life sentence by the look of it:

Sedgwick’s Menagerie had some baby lions, “Performing Elephants”, “Alphonso’s Group of Educated Lions”, “Lorenzo’s Performing and Talking Bears”, “Lorenzo’s Performing Wolves” and then you could see “Lorenzo performing with Nero and Brutus, the largest full-grown untameable African Forest Bred Lions”. Another threepence well spent, children half price.

One of Sedgewick’s chief attractions was “Blonko Bill”:

The first Goose Fair of the new twentieth century starred “the Mafeking Monkey”. During the Siege he had rung a bell every time the Boer artillery shelled the town:

I still don’t see what’s so smart about him, though. Every time the town is shelled, he rings a bell to tell people that they’re being shelled. How is that helpful?

Alongside “the Mafeking Monkey” were “Professor Burnett’s Fencing Booth and Military Tournament”, “Walls Electric Boer Warograph” and “Twigdon’s Electric Palace.” There was also a hairless or “rubber-skinned” mare from the Transvaal, a horse with a mane and tail 21 feet long, a giant horse over 20 hands high and a miniature horse and mule both only 24 inches high.  In addition, there was the “smartest boxing kangaroo” in the world and, sadly, allocated to the animal section,”the giant negro Aaron Moore who is 8 feet in height.” In actual fact, Aaron is known to have been more like 7 feet 3 inches. He was from North Carolina, and, from the photographs I have seen, seems to have worn nearly all the time, a 9 inch high pillar box hat:

13 Comments

Filed under Africa, History, Humour, military, Nottingham

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | September 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Newark Air Museum (1)

The original Newark, or Newark-on-Trent, is a market town in Nottinghamshire in England. It stands on three important routes, namely the River Trent, the ancient Great North Road or A1, which ran from London to Edinburgh and it is also on the main East Coast railway line:

Newark has an historic castle which was “slighted” or put beyond military use in 1648.

Outside the town, Newark also has an air museum.

Nowadays going out to visit anywhere is not really feasible for me, so my daughter went as my ambassador, accompanied by her boyfriend, urged to take photographs of whatever she thought was a warplane. And she is no aviation expert, but she certainly knows a hawk from a handsaw and a Halifax from a Hastings. She wouldn’t know a Hampden from a Hereford, though, or a Harrow from a Sparrow or a Bombay. Who would?

The majority of Newark’s aircraft are from the 1950s and the Cold War. Here’s an English Electric Canberra PR7, the photo-reconnaissance version. This one, WH 791, served at RAF Tengah in the western part of Singapore. Top speed : 580 mph

This is a Gloster Meteor two seat conversion trainer, the T7. This particular aircraft, VZ634, was in service from 1949-1958 with 247 Squadron, 609 Squadron, 141 Squadron and 41 Squadron. As a fighter, the Meteor was used by 16 foreign countries and Biafra. Top speed : 585 mph

Here’s another fighter, the Hawker Hunter. At Newark, it’s an F.1 interceptor fighter, waiting eagerly for those Bears, Bulls and Badgers to show their evil Commie faces over the North Sea. Hunters were used by 21 other countries and had a Top Speed of : 623 mph. Nowadays everybody seems to have forgotten “The Black Arrows” aerobatic team and their manœuvre with 22 aircraft, certainly a world record at the time. There’s a link here.

The de Havilland Sea Venom was a two seater shipboard strike fighter, one of the comparatively few aircraft to have been twin boom. At Newark there’s an “FAW.22” or “Fighter All Weather”, WW217, one of only 39 built. There’s a family tree here, starting with the de Havilland Vampire, then the Venom, the Sea Venom and finally the Sea Vixen which operated from carriers as late as 1972.

This is the Avro Shackleton, the last in the line which ran from the Avro Manchester to the Avro Lancaster to the Avro Lincoln and finally to the Avro Shackleton. It was a long-range maritime patrol aircraft, and was used by the British and the South Africans. Top speed : 302 mph

Here’s a closer view of some of those propeller blades:

The only American warplane here is the North American F-100D Super Sabre, a single-seat fighter-bomber. This individual was used by France’s Armée de l’Air, and served in France, Germany and the old French colony, Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, today’s Somalia. In total, it had a career of 4,459 hours in the air. Top speed : 924 mph, Mach 1·4.

I think it was an F-100 that dropped the napalm in “Apocalypse Now”:

Next time, a look at some of Newark Air Museum’s civilian aircraft, some more of its foreign aircraft and its various bits of aircraft.

20 Comments

Filed under Africa, Aviation, Bomber Command, Film & TV, France, History, military, Personal

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | December 11, 2022 · 6:16 am

Why no statue ? (10)

Last time, I revealed that, up to and including the Second Boer War…….

“in every war fought by British forces they lost more men to typhoid than to the enemy”.

That was easily true of the Crimean War where 4,602 were killed in battle and 17,580 by typhoid. It was certainly true too of the Second Boer War and it would have been true of World War One, but for Almroth Wright.

Once he had seen the efficacy of his vaccine, Almroth gradually convinced the people in charge of the British armed forces of two measures which they absolutely had to take. Firstly, all military personnel would have to be injected, whatever they personally thought about it. Secondly, from 1910 onwards, around 10,000,000 vaccine doses had to be made immediately available for the troops.

As a consequence, when World War One began, the British Army was the only one with 100% vaccination of its troops against typhoid. In the Boer War in South Africa, there were 105 cases of typhoid per 1,000 troops and the death rate was 14.6 per 1,000 troops. In World War One though, there were 2.35 cases of typhoid per 1,000 troops and the death rate was 0.139 per 1,000 troops.

The result was that the British Empire suffered an appalling total of 1,118,264 casualties but the vast majority of them were on the battlefield. If the war had taken place without Almroth’s vaccine then the number of men and women to die would have been 2,236,529, and that would have been the figure if typhoid deaths were only one man more than those killed in action (which was extremely unlikely).

Let’s imagine that World War One had been played by Boer War rules. In South Africa, 5,774 men died in combat, or of the wounds they received in combat and 14, 210 died of disease. That is a ratio of just about 2½ to one, disease and combat. I’m not sure that I can believe my own Maths, but that would give you a grand total of 3,354,792 dead by the end of World War One, if typhoid had killed soldiers at its usual rate.

Is that not enough to warrant a statue? A total of 2,236,528 lives saved if the calculations are done by Boer War rules.

Even after Almroth Wright’s work, typhoid did still break out here and there in Great Britain. Without really searching very hard, I found that there were outbreaks in Maidstone in Kent (1897), Southampton and Winchester (1902) and Lincoln, England (1905). There was one very famous outbreak in New York (1906), but the disease kept up its unhealthy average in Dublin (1908), Retford in Nottinghamshire (1912), Tideswell in Derbyshire (1915), Croydon (1937), Chatham (1938), Dundee (1938) and Aberdeen (1964). Presumably, the arrival of lorry loads of Almroth’s vaccine prevented these outbreaks from becoming really serious (with the exception of Typhoid Mary, of course, in New York in 1906). Here she is, nearest bed:

During his lifetime, Almroth received at least 28 medals, prizes and honorary degrees. There is no statue of him, though. He was nominated 14 times for the Nobel prize from 1906 till 1925 but he didn’t receive one. All he has is a ward named after him at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington in London…….

 

 

25 Comments

Filed under Africa, History, military, Science

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

by | November 29, 2022 · 6:16 am

Why no statue? (9)

Almroth Edward Wright was born on August 10th 1861 in Middleton Tyas, which is a small village near Richmond in the extremely picturesque countryside of North Yorkshire in England.

And here’s the village church, which dates back to the twelfth century:

Almroth’s family was of mixed Anglo-Irish and Swedish origin. His father was a rector in the Church of England but his mother was Ebba Johanna Dorothea Almroth, the daughter of Nils Wilhelm Almroth, who was a professor of chemistry in the Carolinska Medico-Surgical Institute and the Royal Artillery School in Stockholm. In later years he became the director of the Swedish Royal Mint.

Almroth does not seem to be particularly famous nowadays, but he changed the world. Even on the Wikipedia page for his village, though, he is not paid any real attention. The village’s “notable people” therefore, are listed as, in first place, the fraudster Sir Edmund Backhouse and his brother, the naval officer, Roger Backhouse. Then comes in third place, Lady Alicia Blackwood, and then Arthur Francis Pease. Then comes Almroth Wright and his brother, and finally Keith Hawkins, the poker player.

Almroth was a lot cleverer than any of those, though.

Almroth was, in actual fact, the man responsible for developing a system of inoculation against typhoid fever, a disease which, at the time, was killing literally millions of people across the world. In the late 1890s, he also pointed out to whoever cared to listen, that one day bacteria would develop a resistance to antibiotics and then we would really be in trouble. His other main idea was that preventive medicine was what doctors should really be aiming at developing. And lastly, in any spare time he had, he also managed to develop vaccines against enteric tuberculosis and pneumonia, the latter a disease which killed more people in England than any other at that time. Not for nothing was it called

“The Captain of the Men of Death”

In the 1890 census in the United States, 76,490 had died of it, a death rate per 100,000 of the population of 186.94.

Almroth graduated in 1882 from Trinity College, Dublin with first class honours in modern literature and modern languages. In 1883 he graduated in medicine, before studying and lecturing at Cambridge, London, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Marburg, and Straßburg as it then was. Back in England in 1891, he worked in the laboratories of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons and was then appointed Professor of Pathology at the Army Medical School in Netley, on the south coast of Hampshire in England.

Here is the hospital in black and white:And here it is in colour:

At Netley, he developed a method of immunising people against that mighty killer, typhoid fever. And then, in 1898, he went to India as a member of the Plague Commission and tested his vaccine on the 3,000 Indian soldiers who had all volunteered to try it out for him.

And it worked!

Not a single one of the vaccinated soldiers succumbed to the dreaded disease. And then, the vaccine was equally successful in the Boer War of 1899-1902, although a major mistake was made by continuing to make vaccination optional rather than compulsory.

There were 328,244 men in the British Army in the Boer War but sadly, only 14,626 men volunteered to be injected. None of that select group, though, were among the 57,684 cases of typhoid in South Africa or the 9,022 who died from the disease. Exactly as had been the case in India, the ones who had the vaccine all survived because of it.

Until Almroth came upon the scene, though, typhoid fever had always held the entire world in its grasp. It was a simple disease with lots of places to catch it. As Wikipedia says:

“Typhoid is spread by eating or drinking food or water contaminated with the fæces of an infected person”.

That scenario was easily arranged before a vaccine was developed.

In 430 BC in Greece, typhoid killed Pericles and a third of all Athenians. It killed off at least half of the inhabitants of the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia. Between 1607 and 1624 more than 6,000 of them perished and they may well have passed it to the rest, thereby eliminating the entire colony……

Typhoid went on to kill 80,000 soldiers in the American Civil War. And I have seen more than one source which said that in every war fought by British forces until the Boer War, more men were lost to typhoid than to the enemy.

Next time, we’ll look at the impact that Almroth’s vaccine had on the number of casualties in the British Empire forces in World War One. It’s giving nothing away to say that he prevented deaths from disease in unprecedented numbers.

17 Comments

Filed under Africa, History, Nottingham, Science, The High School, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | November 11, 2022 · 6:16 am

What would you do ? (16) The Solution

“What would you do ?” used to figure on the cover of a boys’ comic called “Boys’ World”. This was a publication, obviously, aimed at boys and first appeared on January 26th 1963. There were 89 issues before the comic was merged with Eagle in 1964. The last issue of “Boys’ World” came out on October 3rd 1964.

I used to buy “Boys’ World”, and this was mainly for the front cover which always featured a kind of puzzle. It was called “What would you do ?” and was based on somebody being in what Ned Flanders would call “A dilly of a pickle”. Here’s the situation:

And here’s the blue box:

And the correct solution given on page 2 of the comic is:

If you can’t quite read it, it boils down to not walking across the bridge, but easing oneself gently down and lying full length on the central rope. This will distribute his weight much more evenly than through two boots. Then, he inches himself back the way he came, because he knows that the rope there is probably of a better standard. This way, he may reach the bank before the bridge gives up the ghost. If he doesn’t he will stand more chance of swinging or climbing to safety than if he had continued across the rotting rope.

Why didn’t I think of that?

21 Comments

Filed under Africa, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as , , ,

by | November 5, 2022 · 6:16 am

What would you do ? (16) The Puzzle

“What would you do ?” used to figure on the cover of a boys’ comic called “Boys’ World”. This was a publication aimed, obviously, at boys, and first appeared on January 26th 1963. There were 89 issues before the comic was merged with Eagle in 1964. The last issue of “Boys’ World” came out on October 3rd 1964.

I used to buy “Boys’ World”, and this was mainly for the front cover which always featured a kind of puzzle. It was called “What would you do ?” and was based on somebody being in what Ned Flanders would call “A dilly of a pickle”. Here’s the situation:

The blue box sets the scene, and the task is for you to solve the situation. Perhaps you might like to write your idea in the “Comments” section.

Here’s the blue box enlarged:

So……it’s a photographic safari and a deep, crocodile infested river must be crossed. Midway across, he realises that he is on an inadequate and primitive rope bridge. Indeed, suddenly, the rotting ropes begin to break apart, one strand after another. Death seems just seconds away. Is there anything he can do to save himself?

26 Comments

Filed under Africa, Wildlife and Nature

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

by | August 29, 2022 · 6:16 am

What would you do ? (15) The Solution

“What would you do ?” used to figure on the cover of a boys’ comic called “Boys’ World”. This was a publication, obviously, aimed at boys, and first appeared on January 26th 1963. There were 89 issues before the comic was merged with Eagle in 1964. The last issue of “Boys’ World” came out on October 3rd 1964.

I used to buy the comic every week, mainly for its front cover which always featured a kind of puzzle. It was called “What would you do ?” and was based on somebody being in what Ned Flanders would call “A dilly of a pickle”. Here’s the situation:

The blue square carries the following text:

“Shoulder to shoulder the Roman soldiers stand tensed to face the thundering might of Hannibal’s elephants. But the Romans’ spears are of little use against the living battering-ram that sweeps down on them. Great gaps are torn in the tightly packed Roman ranks. Now Hannibal’s soldiers can follow through and rout the enemy. The Roman general, Scipio, knows that if he is to win future battles he must stop the elephants breaking his shield wall. What can he do?”

And the correct solution given on page 9 of the comic is:

And in case you are reading the extract from “Boys’ World” on a 1962 b/w television set, here is the text given above:

“In future battles, Scipio formed his ranks not as a solid mass, but with a soldier in every other space. When the elephants charged, the soldiers had room to move aside. This left clear lanes through which the elephants stormed harmlessly. When they had passed, the soldiers merely returned to their original positions.”

And as a very brief trip down memory lane, here is the advertisement right next to the problem solution on page 9. It is for the two latest Matchbox toys :

Nowadays, even the 24 page Matchbox catalogue is valuable, and certainly worth more than the original threepence, which was, theoretically, two pence in today’s money.

19 Comments

Filed under Africa, History, Humour

Tagged as , , , , ,

by | May 27, 2022 · 6:17 am

Shaka Zulu (3)

Last time, I finished by mentioning how the regiments of the Zulu army were distinguished by differently coloured shields and the number of marks on them. Shields might be brown, white or black and might have black spots, brown spots, white spots or no spots at all. Here’s a display in a South African museum:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

It occurred quite frequently that the Zulus would use the captured shields of their enemies as a ruse, causing confusion or even panic among the ranks of their adversaries. Chaka actually owned his own army’s warshields, the isihlangu, and they were handed out only in times of war. Men were punished for losing them.

Years later, when the Zulus were fighting the Boers,  Bongoza, a General in the Zulu army of King Dingane, even showed his men how to hide behind their shields and pretend to be grazing cattle.

Funnily enough, that was actually the only innovative idea that I came across that did not come from Chaka, the most brilliant military thinker ever in  sub-Saharan Africa. I found this coloured version of what is usually a black and white illustration of him on the internet:

Chaka was the one, for example, who changed his men’s diet, having them consume a fairly constant mixture of beef and cereal porridge. The existence of a new, fitter, stronger, army, would, of course, ultimately create more wars, but at the same time it would allow free access to further supplies of beef and cereals from the territories of the conquered tribes.

I don’t know if this dietary régime really did keep the Zulus leaner, fitter and more able to march long distances but that was the widely held belief among non-Zulus in Natal and Zululand in the 19th century. The problem, of course, was that the Zulus themselves left no written accounts and that all we have to go on are the accounts of one or two white traders such as Francis Farewell and Henry Fynn. And any books written by men who merely want to make money, of course, tend to exaggerate, just to make even more money.

For that reason, we shall never know for certain just how bloodthirsty and crazy Chaka was after his mother, Nandi, died on October 10th 1827. Did he really order every Zulu mother-to-be to be executed? Did he really seek out more than 7,000 people who were not sufficiently grief stricken and have them all killed? And even more crazily, did he really have every cow with a calf to be killed so that their offspring would all know exactly what it felt like when your mother died?

Only written records from an unbiased source can tell us such things. We are, for the same reason, still unsure about how far a Zulu regiment, an impi, could  run in a day. In 1879 the whites firmly believed that the answer to that question was FIFTY miles. It is even quoted in the film “Zulu”.

South African historian, John Laband, however, thought the idea was ridiculous. He gave 12 miles per day as the absolute maximum with only nine miles per day as the normal distance.
A very similar example would be the use of sandals by Zulu warriors. In the absence of written records, it has been handed down over the years that in order to toughen his warriors’ feet, Chaka had them stop wearing sandals and then any who refused were executed. Nowadays, we just don’t know if that is true or false.

Modern Zulus, especially the politicians, wear spotless, bright, white trainers. Their followers  frequently wear very brightly coloured jeans and carry golf umbrellas :

Some other aspects of bygone Zulu life we do know about through photographs. Across the world, many kings wear crowns. Zulu kings were slightly different and we have photographs from the nineteenth century to prove it. Here is King Cetshwayo:

He is wearing an “isiCoco”, an emblem of rank in pre-colonial days, meaning variously “the king”, “married man” or “warrior”, depending on the person wearing it. It was originally made from a mixture of beeswax, charcoal and snake skin, the latter being a symbol of African royalty and kingship. Warriors would wear leopard skin, because that was the animal they usually hunted. Nowadays, the isiCoco is made more easily, perhaps, by twisting a fibre ring into the hair. The ring has been covered in charcoal and gum and then polished with beeswax.

One final Zulu speciality weapon was the “knobkerrie”, a type of club with a large knob at one end. It can be thrown at the enemy like a javelin, or at animals while out hunting, or it can be used to club an enemy at close quarters. Sometimes it was used in stick fights as young boys practiced their combat techniques. In the Zulu language, it is called an “iwisa” and nowadays is not considered a weapon.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I have always been fascinated by the Zulus. As a little boy, I was an avid reader of books by H Rider Haggard. It began when “Allan Quartermain” was given to me as a Christmas present, and then I bought “King Solomon’s Mines” and “She” with my pocket money. I was entranced by the heroic Zulu warrior, Umslopogaas, who appears in “Allan Quartermain” and in its sequel “Nada the Lily” a book unique in the nineteenth century in that all of its characters are black. Absolutely remarkable for that era.

I even tried to learn some Zulu phrases, but I never really had the chance to use the phrase “Kill the white wizards” so I soon forgot it. In actual fact, the only one I do still remember is “Amba gachlé ” which means “Go in peace”. Not a bad phrase to be the only one you know.

Here’s Umslopogaas :

 

25 Comments

Filed under Africa, History, Humour, Literature, military, Politics

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by | May 22, 2022 · 6:17 am

In the Footsteps of the Valiant (Volume Five) Finished at last !!!

Well, it has finally happened. After something like eight years of research and writing up, the fifth and final volume of “In the Footsteps of the Valiant” is complete and published and ready to be purchased…….

I have always said that my main intention was to get away from a list of war casualties which was just a surname and a set of initials displayed on a wall. I wanted to portray the High School’s war dead as young men with, perhaps, wives, families, houses, jobs, and, above all, their own lives to lead. Lives which they were prepared to sacrifice in the cause of freedom, to stop a madman whose crazed ideas would have transformed the entire world into his very own vale of tears.

No less an intention was the idea of trying to establish, once and for all, just how many war casualties the High School had. From around eighty, I have now pushed the number up to around 120.  Volume Five contains the detailed story of 22 High School casualties of World War Two, along with two men who gave their lives for their country during the following decade. And don’t forget, incidentally, that all five volumes have been deliberately constructed to contain the same amount of material as all of the others. Furthermore, that material is, overall, of the same quality as all the other volumes. No single book is full of exciting stories of derring-do, at the expense of another volume devoid of all excitement. I took great care to make that the case.

The men concerned in Volume 5 are :

Thomas Arthur Bird, Douglas Arthur Burgass, John Stuart Burnside, George Vernon Carlin, Frank Leonard Corner, George Edward Dance, John Arthur Finking, Bernard William Grocock, George Norman Hancock, Lewis Alan Hofton, John Mayo, Arthur Mellows, Roy Faulkner Newell, Herbert Temple Nidd, John Ebblewhite Paling, William Palmer, Peter Frederick Paulson, Ivan Roy James Perkins, Kenneth Walter Sansom, William Henry Shaw, John Aubrey Starkey, Leslie Hambleton Taylor, Peter Vernon and Ian Leslie Wilkinson.

Here are Messrs Frank Corner, the First XI cricket team scorer, John Mayo, First XV player, Arthur Mellows, First XI cricketer, and Peter Paulson, of 277 Battery (City of Nottingham) 68 Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment, killed by enemy fire as the Germans captured Tobruk.

Frank Corner:

John Mayo:

Arthur Mellows

And Peter Paulson

And here is Bernard William Grocock, shot down by Oberleutnant Helmut Lent of 6/Nachtgeschwader 1, the second greatest night fighter ace of all time.

John Aubrey Starkey, killed at HMS Bambara in Ceylon, as he flew his Grumman Hellcat fighter :

And Ian Leslie Wilkinson, First XV rugby player and First XI cricketer :

And Herbert Temple Nidd, surely the most colourful Old Nottinghamian of them all, a man who worked on every single one of the great North Atlantic liners of the 1930s, and whose understanding of the rule “Only one wife at a time” seems to have have been woefully deficient. And that may well go for his father, too.

They died in many different places. In the Denmark Strait, facing the Bismarck. In an Italian prison camp. Fighting Rommel in Tunisia. Shot by guerillas in Ethiopia. In the Netherlands, clearing the Scheldt Estuary of Germans. Crossing the Rhine only weeks from the end of the war. And in aircraft. Over Duisburg in a Lancaster. In a Gloster Meteor. In a Whitley over Staffordshire. In a Whitley over Berlin.  In a Liberator over Tripoli in Libya. And most interesting, the POW who died, or was perhaps murdered, on his “Long March”, as, in 1945, the Germans marched their prisoners hundreds of miles westwards in deep snow, away from the Russians. What a tale he had to tell. Other men from his camp had been stationed right next to Auschwitz and had watched carefully what the Germans were doing. Alas, had he survived, he might well have added his testimony to the prosecution’s case.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I also discovered the only direct remembrance left behind by any of our Old Nottinghamians. Peter Vernon died at the age of 23 from an illness contracted in the North Atlantic on H.M. Motor Minesweeper 260. Battered ceaselessly by extra strong winds and freezing rain, Peter probably died in the Invergordon Royal Navy Auxiliary Hospital in northern Scotland. Before he went off to war, his father had already told him of his plan to rename their butcher’s shop, “A.Vernon & Son High Class Butcher”. A huge new sign was painted on the side of the building. Perhaps it was going to be a surprise when Peter came home on leave, although it certainly didn’t work out like that. Alas, we will never know.

What we can do, though, is to go to Ilkeston Road in Nottingham, and, at its junction with Stansfield Street, see the sign, which is still there. The only part of Peter Vernon’s life still remaining alive in our world……………………..

 

Any royalties generated by these books will be split between “ABF The Soldiers’ Charity” and the Royal Air Forces Association.

Let’s finish with two poems.

One by Keith Doncaster of Maples’ House and the Fifth Form:

“Along the silvery beach we run,

Gathering coloured shells.

We think that gathering shells is fun.

Along the silvery beach we run.

And as we go beneath the sun,

We hear the distant bells.

Along the silvery beach we run,

Gathering coloured shells.”

And one, almost a thousand years older, from Wace, slightly altered:

“Eventually

All things decline

Everything falters, dies and ends

Towers cave in, walls collapse

Roses wither, horses stumble

Cloth grows old, men expire

Iron rusts and timber rots away

Nothing made by hand will last.

I understand the truth

That all must die, both clerk and lay

And the fame of men now dead

Will quickly be forgotten,

Unless the clerk takes up his pen

And brings their deeds to life again

 

I say and will say that I am

John Knifton from the City of Nottingham”

 

 

 

25 Comments

Filed under Africa, Aviation, Canada, cricket, History, military, Nottingham, Pacific Theatre, The High School, war crimes

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,