Category Archives: History

by | February 11, 2024 · 6:17 am

The Last of the Saxon Kings (1)

When I was a little boy, I used to read every comic I could lay my hands on, usually for a period of just a few weeks. I was very quick to change if they didn’t attract me for whatever reason. Some took only five minutes to read, which was clearly a waste of my sixpence pocket money. Some were repetitively inane, something which is funny the first time but not the fiftieth.

Two stories stood out and I remembered them well into my adult years.  There was “The Big Tree” in “Rover and Wizard”, and, best of all, “The Last of the Saxon Kings” in “Eagle”. The Last of the Saxon Kings, of course, was Harold, and the double page centre spread began in Volume 12, No 38, and finished in that volume’s No 52.

In terms of dates, that would be September 23rd-December 30th 1961. As a little boy 0f only seven, I did not know that the story had already appeared in a publication called “Comet”, but entitled “Under the Golden Dragon”. These were issues 285-306, January 3rd-May 29 1954. The story was written by Michael Butterworth and it was drawn by Patrick Nicolle.

When the graphic novel appeared, Eagle was already on the way down and out. “Last of The Saxon Kings” was quickly accused of being historically inaccurate and of being sluggishly and insipidly drawn, with two many small panels. But I adored it.

I can still remember the thrill of reading the first four frames. They use the well tried device of a single person making his way to somewhere important, usually in darkness. I would meet it for the first time in my final year at school, in the novel “Germinal” by the French novelist Emile Zola, the man who invented cheese.

Here’s the first frame. It’s really raining. But what is this daring rider doing? :

Just look at the sheen on the soaked surface of the stone area in front of the castle:

And now we are given some idea of what is going on:

And here is the solution to the mystery. The colours are not desperately dramatic, nor is the palette particularly varied, but a seven year old was delighted:

The king, not named at this point, is actually Harthacnut.  The next picture I have chosen may be the first outbreak of “historical inaccuracy”. As an argument about who will succeed to the throne develops, Harold finds himself fighting his elder brother, Sweyn. Whether it all happened in this way on such an absolutely splendid bridge I do not know:

Harold is unwilling to kill his brother, no matter how much of a swine Sweyn is. The frame below has a very Roy Lichtenstein like look about it:

Even in the most dramatic situations, the dialogue can be rather extended. Still, at least you know who’s doing what to whom and why.

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by | February 5, 2024 · 6:17 am

Part 3 : John Watson and Mycroft Holmes

Last time, we saw how Arthur Conan Doyle decided to immortalise his favourite bowler and wicketkeeper combination by combining the two names “Shacklock” and “Sherwin”, to give the name “Shackwin” to the hero of his new detective novel, “A Study in Scarlet”.

“Shackwin??” said all of his friends “Are you mad?? Think again. You can do better than that!!”

Arthur went away to think again, and he turned the name on its head. Now it became “Sherlock”.  And Sherlock Holmes, a star, was born.

The next question is, of course, whether anybody else in the Sherlock Holmes books had their origins in cricket?

Well, there was an Alexander (Alec) Watson, who was a slow bowler for Lancashire. He took 1,384 wickets in a career that took in 303 matches. I believe that Arthur Conan Doyle, as a keen member of the Marylebone Cricket Club, watched Watson play in May 1886, and take 10 wickets for 54 runs, an extraordinary feat. And Alec was duly rewarded with a kind of immortality.

Here is the exact analysis of his bowling:

And in May 1877, perhaps Arthur Conan Doyle had again been there to watch Watson take 14 wickets for 49 runs against the Marylebone Cricket Club.  After all, Lancashire were one of the very best teams in England .Here are the MCC innings:

And here are the detailed statistics of each bowler:

No wonder that Arthur felt he had to include “Watson” as one of his two main characters. Fourteen wickets for 49 runs is really as good as it gets! Here is our hero, second from the left……..

And a close up………………

Now, a frequent pub quiz question.

“What was the name of Sherlock Holmes brother?”

Well, he was called Mycroft Holmes.

I believe that Arthur Conan Doyle got the name “Mycroft” from William Mycroft, a bowler who played for Derbyshire in 138 matches and who took 863 wickets. I am 99% certain that Arthur had perhaps watched William Mycroft play for the Marylebone Cricket Club in May 1877 when Alec Watson took fourteen wickets for England. For the other side, though, Mycroft took a fabulous six England wickets for 12 runs in the second innings. Here we are. First of all, the full scorecard. Just look at the second innings:

And the bowling figures:

It looks as if Arthur took two names from this one single game, Mycroft and Watson. Here’s Mycroft:

Here’s another superb performance by William Mycroft, playing for the MCC against Hertfordshire in July 1879. Again, the probability is that Arthur Conan Doyle actually watched this game, insofar as he was a member of the MCC. Mycroft went out to bowl against Hertfordshire with the odds stacked strongly against the MCC. Hertfordshire, with ten batsmen needed a paltry sixty runs:

Wickets fell regularly during the innings. A wicket was lost when the score was 2, then 10, then 10 again, 11, 11 again, 15, 17, 23 and 23 again.  Mycroft’s bowling figures were:

An amazing nine wickets for eight runs!!  And here’s another picture of Mycroft to finish with:

Sadly, despite a fair amount of research, I have been unable to come up with the origin of the surname. “Holmes”.

 

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by | January 17, 2024 · 6:17 am

Part 2 : where the name Sherlock came from

First class cricket has a very long history in England, and Nottinghamshire is one of the oldest counties.  Teams of that name have, in fact, played cricket since at least 1835. During that time, they have played their home games at a world famous ground called Trent Bridge……

One of their most famous, and colourful, nineteenth century players was Mordecai Sherwin who was born in 1851 and died in 1910. In the wintertime, when cricket was impossible because of the weather, “Mordy”, an expert at catching a moving ball, actually played football for Notts County, the local football club. He was very agile and, despite weighing seventeen stones (238 pounds, 108 kilos), he always played as a goalkeeper. Even though he carried a lot of weight, every time that Notts County scored a goal, he would treat the crowd to a cartwheel.

In those days, goalkeepers could be barged into the net to score a goal, so Mordy’s weight frequently came in useful. On one famous occasion, the Blackburn Rovers outside right, Joe Lofthouse, barged him, but merely bounced off. Sherwin famously said:

“Young man, you’ll hurt yourself if you do that again.”

A little while later, Lofthouse tried his luck again, but Mordy stepped aside and Lofthouse collided with the goalpost and cut himself .

Mordy was much more famous, though, as a first class cricketer for his native county. He played 328 times for Nottinghamshire and three times for England in international “Test” matches. He scored 2362 runs as a batsman and as a wicketkeeper he caught 616 batsmen and stumped 227. We have not looked at stumpings but it is basically a way which only the wicketkeeper can use to dismiss the batsman. If the batsman tries to hit the ball but misses it, the wicketkeeper can catch it and knock the wicket over himself, but only if the batsman has wandered too far down the pitch, beyond the special white line, about a yard or so from the wicket. Here’s Mordecai. You can just about see the white line for stumpings…..

During Mordy’s golden years, one of Nottinghamshire’s most effective bowlers was called Francis “Frank” Joseph Shacklock (1861-1937). He played for Nottinghamshire from 1886-1893 and took around 120 wickets. In his entire career, playing also for Derbyshire, the MCC/Marylebone Cricket Club and Otago in New Zealand, he took 497 wickets.

It didn’t take me too long to find some examples of Frank Shacklock’s partnership with Mordy Sherwin as they played together for Nottinghamshire.

These scorecards come from the annually appearing almanac of cricket entitled “Wisden”. Here is part of the scorecard for a Nottinghamshire v Sussex game in July 1891:

In this game, Shacklock  managed eight wickets for 144 runs, with four in the first innings (in a a total of 332 runs by Sussex) and four more in the second (a pathetic 38). That is a remarkable difference in the two innings totals for Sussex. Below are the bowling statistics. Shacklock took his four wickets in the first innings at a cost of 117 runs but at a cost of only 27 runs in the second.  :

Here’s Frank Shacklock :

In this next game, Shacklock took nine wickets in the match, which was a fixture against Somerset in June 1892. First come the statistics for Nottinghamshire’s two innings, and then Somerset’s two innings. Look how many times the phrase “b Shacklock” appears, particularly in the second Somerset innings of just under one hundred……

A frequent visitor to watch Nottinghamshire cricket at Trent Bridge around this time was an up-and-coming young author called Arthur Conan Doyle. Arthur was a huge sports fan. He actually played in ten first class cricket matches with a highest score of 43 and just one wicket as a bowler, that of WG Grace, the greatest cricketer in the world at the time. Arthur enjoyed bodybuilding and he was an amateur boxer as well as a keen skier, a talented billiards player, a golfer and, in amateur football, a goalkeeper for Portsmouth FC, the predecessor of the present club. Here he is:

Arthur had enormous regard for the wicketkeeping skills of Mordecai Sherwin and the bowling skills of Frank Shacklock. He was very much taken with how frequently batsmen were out, “caught Sherwin bowled Shacklock”.

Arthur decided that he would commemorate the skills of these two cricketers in the forthcoming detective novel he was about to start writing. The book was to be called “A Study in Scarlet” and it would appear in 1887. The best idea, Arthur thought, would be to have “caught Sherwin bowled Shacklock” become an important part of the book. One way of doing this would be to use the two men’s names in the name of the book’s hero, by taking the first syllable from one cricketer’s surname and the second one from the second cricketr’s surname. An excellent idea, although his first effort was a very poor one, it must be said. Who could admire a detective with the first name “Shackwin” ?

And so…….Arthur Conan Doyle turned the name on its head, came up with “Sherlock”, and the famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, was born.

“But what’s the connection between Mordecai Sherwin, Frank Shacklock and a Victorian pub called the Grove”, I hear you all ask. Well, with the money he had made playing cricket, Mordecai Sherwin bought the Grove pub. I have only got a few photographs from its very last days…

…..but it would have been a nice pub during the last few years of Queen Victoria’s reign. And I cannot imagine that with a character like Mordecai in charge, his old pal rank Shacklock didn’t come along every now and again for some free ale!

Next time, two other major characters in Sherlock Holmes stories who arrived directly from a fine bowling performance at Lord’s, probably witnessed by Arthur Conann Doyle, who was a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club and who would have visited this famous old ground on many occasions.

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by | January 5, 2024 · 6:17 am

Sherlock Holmes : Part 1

Bear with me, but before we get to the meat of this post, I need to explain a little bit about cricket for those of my readers who think that cricket is some kind of insect, albeit a big, scary one, that you definitely wouldn’t want to find on your knee. This one can be up to four inches long…..

Cricket can be a very complicated sport but most people can recognise the two wickets, one at either end of the pitch.

Then there are two “batsmen”, one of whom, Batsman A, tries to hit the ball as far as possible when it is bowled at his wicket.

The other batsman, B, stands at the other end of the pitch and awaits developments.  By coincidence, he is near where the “bowler” bowls from.

If Batsman A hits the ball a long way, then both batsmen, both A and B, may then decide to run as fast as they can to the wicket at the other end. Every time they do this, they exchange their original positions and their team scores one “run”.  The batsmen here are wearing yellow helmets……

The two batsmen’s immediate opponents are the bowler who bowls the ball, subject to a rather long list of rules, and the wicketkeeper.  Any ball hit by Batsman A is eventually returned to the bowler so he can have another go.  By that point, more or less, the batsmen will have stopped running.  Here’s the bowler bowling, and Batsman B waiting for Batsman A at the other end to hit the ball to the moon so that they can run 10,000 times.

Now comes the complicated bit.

Batsman A is trying to defend his wicket against the bowler, who bowls the ball from a position level with the opposite wicket. Batsman B is standing nearby (picture above).

Batsman A, at the other end, will try to hit the ball as far as possible.

The bowler, though, is trying to dismiss Batsman A so that he will have to return to the dressing room and cannot bat any more. The most obvious way for the bowler to do this is to hit the wicket and to knock at least some of it over. And then the batsman is “out” ! :

And now, the wicketkeeper. He is on the same side as the bowler, and his primary job is to stop any balls bowled by the bowler and then missed by Batsman A. If he doesn’t stop the ball, the batsmen can run, just as if Batsman A had hit it:

The wicketkeeper also has another job to do. If Batsman A hits the ball, but only nicks it, then wicketkeeper can catch it as it whizzes past at high speed, and Batsman A will be “out”, dismissed from the game, provided that the ball doesn’t touch the ground.

Indeed, this same rule applies to all the members of the bowling side. If Batsman A is a fool, he will hit the ball in the air and then when any opponent catches it before it touches the ground, it’s “Goodnight, Vienna” for him. This way of being, literally, “caught out” is the commonest way to be dismissed for a batsman:

Extremely common too is the situation mentioned above where Batsman A just nicks the ball as it passes him, and the wicketkeeper then catches it. The reason is that the ball may well be travelling extremely fast when Batsman A nicks it…perhaps 80 or 90 mph in top class cricket. If a team has a very good fast bowler, then the bowling team’s main tactic will be to get the batsman to nick the ball and then have the wicketkeeper catch it.

In the 1970s, the Australians’ main bowler was Dennis Lillee, and he bowled extremely fast, and with any luck, his colleague, Rodney Marsh, the Australian wicketkeeper, would catch the ball when it was nicked by the terrified Batsman A.

Here’s Dennis Lillee, my favourite ever bowler:

And here’s Rodney Marsh, who died recently, in March 2022. Dennis Lillee is also in the picture:

In the scorebook, that particular dismissal of the batsman would be recorded as:

Batsman A        caught Marsh        bowled Lillee        0

In the more usual abbreviated form…..

Batsman A         c    Marsh                b  Lillee                  0

Those five words soon became the most frequent means of dismissal in the history of international cricket, with more than 200 occurrences. Here’s just one of them:

Lillee is on the right, Marsh is flying, and the English batsman is Tony Greig.

And here’s another. Lillee is on the left, flying, Marsh is on the extreme right and the English batsman is doomed.

Be patient. This blog post is definitely leading somewhere. On a journey. A journey that takes in a world famous cricket ground. An author with a household name. And a demolished pub about a mile away from where I am sitting right now. Just bear with me.

In the meantime, here’s that pub, just before the demolition men got to it:

And here it is now;

It was a great pity to lose a real Victorian pub, even if social housing replaces it.

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by | December 29, 2023 · 6:17 am

What would you do ? (19) 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 that yellow box enlarged:

And the correct solution was now relegated to page 9 of the comic. Here it is:

And the text, a bit blurry for my taste at this point, reads:

“This was the exact situation Buffalo Bill faced on one of his many buffalo hunts. He saved himself by shooting the leading buffalo, knowing that the rest of the herd would avoid the fallen animal. He then crouched down behind the carcass, using it as a shield, and escaped without a scratch from the stampede passing him on either side. “

 

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by | December 23, 2023 · 6:17 am

What would you do ? (19) The Puzzle

“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:

The yellow 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 yellow box enlarged:

So…..it’s one “Dilly of a pickle”.  A thousand hooves thunder across the American plains as the bison all set off in a frightening stampede. In their path stands Buffalo Bill, an All-American Hero, but  armed at this moment with only a single shot rifle. His revolver will be useless and against these terrified huge animals, his one bullet will not kill the herd.

What can  he do??

Incidentally, Buffalo Bill and his famous Wild West Show came to Nottingham, accompanied by riders of many different nationalities, such as Lakota and Cheyenne Native Americans, Argentinian gauchos, Russian Cossacks, Mongols and Turks, all of them expert riders. They camped on grassland between the southern bank of the Trent and the houses of that part of West Bridgford, but I have been unable to discover where they performed.

After one Saturday matinée, a stand holding 800 people collapsed, but the only damage was one broken ankle, a very lucky escape for everybody.

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by | December 5, 2023 · 6:17 am

The Murder of Leslie Howard (6)

Leslie Howard was such a Hollywood star that we always think that he was the sole cause of  the BOAC airliner “Ibis” being shot down. The aircraft was actually owned by the Dutch, hence the flag on the top of the fuselage. I don’t quite understand how or why, but somehow BOAC were using a foreign airliner to fly some of their run-of-the-mill European trips, and the aircraft remained, throughout, Dutch property with an all-Dutch crew:

Could any of the other people on the plane, though, be the reason for the unexpected arrival of those eight heavy German Ju-88 fighters?

Perhaps the BOAC aircraft was destroyed because of Wilfrid Jacob Berthold Israel, a supposed British secret agent and a prominent Zionist, who was engaged in making sure that Jewish refugees could leave Spain and Portugal without difficulty to go to their rightful homeland. So far, he had helped 1500 of them, many of them children, to go there. Supposedly, Wilfrid had recently presented to the British government a very important proposal to solve the problem of getting Jewish refugees out of Europe to their homeland in Palestine. He was on his way to discuss increasing this exodus with Government ministers in London.  Here’s Wilfrid:

Perhaps the reason for the plane’s destruction was Ivan James Sharp, a mining engineer.  He was working for the British Government to offer the Portuguese and Spanish top prices for their tungsten, a hard, rare, metal used to produce various alloys and steels for weapon production. Also called “wolfram”, it was indispensable if you intended to manufacture armaments. Sharp had been trying to buy up 100% of the tungsten produced by Spain and Portugal. He was on his way to an important meeting at the Ministry of Economic Warfare.  I couldn’t find a picture of Ivan, but he began his career at the Camborne School of Mining in West Cornwall. They have a lovely example of a modern coat cof arms:

Perhaps the plane was destroyed because of Tyrrell Mildmay Shervington. Outwardly he was the Lisbon manager of the Shell-Mex oil company but, in the shadowy world of espionage, he was supposedly an agent of the Special Operations Executive. He was deeply involved in all of its many machinations across both Spain and Portugal and, according to some, he was the Head of the Lisbon Office.

Perhaps the plane was destroyed because of Francis German Cowlrick, a 67 year old civil engineer. He had worked for Babcock and Wilcox since 1905. Babcock and Wilcox made steam boilers, piping for steam, water tube boilers and welded pressure vessels, in short, as they said in an advertisement in 1937, “Everything for the Boiler House, including Valves”. They also produced electric cranes and pressed steel forgings. They manufactured munitions and tanks and boilers for Royal Navy warships. Mr Cowlrick was the manager and chief engineer for the company in Spain and Portugal. He was personally responsible for the designing and erection of a number of impressively large steam-generating plants in Lisbon, Madrid and half a hundred other places in Iberia. On this particular day he was travelling on behalf of the British Department of Overseas Trade. Here is one of the huge number of  Babcock and Wilcox factories which are situated all over the world. They are a truly gigantic, global concern:

Most of ther other passengers were ostensibly much more innocent. There was Mrs Rotha Violet Lettie Hutcheon and her two daughters, Petra Hutcheon, aged eleven, and Carolina Hutcheon, a baby some eighteen months old. Mrs Hutcheon was flying to rejoin her husband Allen, in England where he was a staff officer in the Imperial General Staff.

Mrs Cecelia Emilia Falla Paton was travelling back to England to start a new post as a secretary. She was the wife of James Paton of 53 Ullswater Road, Flixton in Greater Manchester. Kenneth Stonehouse, a British journalist, was working as the Reuters correspondent in Washington DC. He was accompanied by his wife Evelyn Peggy Margetts Stonehouse.

There were certainly no tourists in the aircraft. Everybody seems to have had a specific reason for being on board the “Ibis”.

It  is even possible to argue that the entire event was completely accidental. There doesn’t always have to be a conspiracy theory to explain everything that happens to famous people such as Leslie Howard.

For example, was it actually normal for the Luftwaffe’s Junkers  Ju88 fighters to patrol the Bay of Biscay in small groups? Were they so frightened of the RAF’s formidably powerful Bristol Beaufighter?

Or were the Germans still haunted by the bogey man of their worst nightmares, Das Fliegende Schtachelschwein?

Or perhaps we should accept as the true, the story told by the senior officer in the German fighter formation, Oberleutnant Herbert Heintze, who said that he had decided to shoot the plane down before the eight German aircraft ran out of fuel? Do you accept his word that they thought it was a bona fide warplane? After all, the DC-3 was camouflaged like a military aircraft. Why was the aircraft not silver or white? After all, it was an airliner. Why did it not have neutral markings? A green cross on a white circle. Why no Portuguese or Dutch insignia? One further complaint from German pilots was that their Luftwaffe superiors knew very well that this airliner made a regular flight from Portugal to England but they had not bothered to tell them. If they had known this, Heintze said, they would not have shot the aircraft down but they would have escorted it back to their own base in France. Whatever the solution, BOAC issued the following statement:

“The British Overseas Airways Corporation regrets to announce that a civil aircraft on passage between Lisbon and the United Kingdom is overdue and presumed lost. The last message received from the aircraft stated that it was being attacked by an enemy aircraft. The aircraft carried 13 passengers and crew of four. Next of kin have been informed.”

 

 

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by | November 17, 2023 · 6:17 am

The Murder of Leslie Howard (5)

Last time, I tried to show you some of the marvellous speeches and wonderful films that Leslie Howard created to defend Democracy and Freedom against the German onslaught. I do know if any of you actually watched any of the recommended titles, but keep your eyes open for them on TV. Howard truly was a very gifted man.

Among his films, don’t forget “49th Parallel”, the horrendous tale of a U-boat whose crew members are forced to abandon it on the southern shore of the Hudson’s Bay in Canada and then make their way southwards to the USA. I will never forget the scene where the Germans slaughter the peaceful Inuits of a village they come across, just because the Inuits are not of the same race as themselves. Here’s a link to the complete film :

To whet your appetiote, here’s the film’s official trailer :

This is a very strong film. It was directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and the main parts were played by Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Anton Walbrook, Raymond Massey, Glynis Johns and Eric Portman. The film editing was by David Lean and the music came from Ralph Vaughan Williams. One detail that I particularly enjoyed was that :

“For the scene where the Hutterite community listens to Eric Portman’s impassioned pro-Nazi speech, the actors had to be all “hand picked faces”. Over half were refugees from Hitler.”

That says it all about the appeal of Nazism and racism.

Leslie Howard had done amazingly well with his films to defend Democracy and Freedom against the Germans. The Germans, of course, had long decided that Howard had to die.

The American-born traitor, William Joyce, who, as Lord Haw-Haw, broadcast on German propaganda radio to Britain, had even promised on the radio that Goebbels was personally going to have him shot. And Goebbels himself had made the same threats in “Der Angriff”, his own personal propaganda newspaper. Goebbels was not happy that Leslie had both directed and starred in, not just the anti-Nazi “49th Parallel” and “’Pimpernel’ Smith” but also in “The First of the Few”. He called Leslie, among many other things,

“Britain’s most dangerous propagandist.”

He viewed Howard as an irritant, a source of pain and, perhaps, a source of infection for Nazism, and a source, even, of death for German bigotry.

Linked with this is the theory that Chenhalls, Howard’s business manager, had negotiated a huge deal with the Portuguese and Spanish film industries. Vast numbers of English films were to be sold directly to companies in those two countries. All of the proceeds would then be spent on making new propaganda films.

Further to this, it has long been thought that both Leslie Howard and Alfred Chenhalls may have been British secret agents.

They were supposedly on the “Ibis” in the first place because they were returning from a job in Spain, whereby Howard had carried a top secret message from Churchill to Generalissimo Franco, trying to persuade Franco to stay neutral, not to join Hitler as an ally and not to close the Mediterranean to the British and thereby sever permanently their links to both India and Australia. And for this anti-German meddling, Hitler had decided that Howard had to die. Here’s Franco, whose first name was not either “Frank” and certainly not “Franco”. It was “Generalissimo” :

Those ideas about the real reason for the destruction of DC-3 Dakota “Ibis”, though, are just the beginning. There are lots and lots and lots more. So, let’s take a quick look at some of them……

Hitler did not like the fact that Leslie Howard had been working hard to win over the neutral Portuguese, trying to get them to allow the Allies to use the Azores for air and naval bases in the U-boat war. For this, he had to die.

Leslie Howard was merely an ordinary run-of-the-mill spy. For this, he had to die.

Leslie Howard was working hard at fundraising for the war. He was, given his mother’s background, a fluent German speaker and was turning out anti-Nazi programmes for the radio. For this, he had to die.

The presence of Howard and Chenhalls on that DC-3 saved the lives of seven year old Derek Partridge and his friend, the two little boys who were put off the aircraft to make room for the two important latecomers, Howard and Chenhalls. Several crewmembers immediately came to the door of the airliner and asked them to get off. As they left the aircraft, young Derek could not fail to see several aircraft with German markings parked around the airfield. He could see even more of them from the terminal building when he got back there. According to Derek, the BOAC aircraft was supposed to leave at 9.30 am but Howard was late. He was buying silk stockings at the departure lounge as a gift for a lady friend. They finally left at 9.35 am. Ironically that five minutes was fatal. It meant that the DC-3 ran into the eight German fighters. If they had taken off as planned, they wouldn’t have. The cruising speed of a Dakota is around 210 mph. In five or so minutes therefore, it covers just under twenty miles. If the DC-3 and the eight German fighters had been even fifteen miles apart, neither party would have seen the other. No lives would have been lost.

We may have a very long wait for the truth. Certain papers about the flight will be secret until 2025. Other papers which were due to be declassified in 1980 were not released and will now remain classified until January 2056. I’ll see you then!

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by | November 11, 2023 · 6:17 am

Some slides of Scotland, where we used to go camping, in the mid-1970s (2)

In my early twenties. I used to go camping around Scotland with my friend, Bill. We used to travel around the perimeter of Scotland in a clockwise fashion, with a route which took in Glasgow, then up to the north-west corner of Scotland at Cape Wrath, then the north-east corner at John O’Groats and then home southwards along the east coast to Edinburgh and England. In those days we use to camp where we could find a reasonable place to do so…..”wild camping”, it used to be called. As long as we left no mess, the landowners didn’t seem to bother. I used to take slides with my trusty Voigtländer and was then able to bore people rigid with my “Pine Trees of the Northern Highlands”. I found all my slides recently, in a very large box in the attic, but unfortunately, there were a good few which I could not identify. When I got round to doing it, one or two of them also suffered during the conversion process into digital images, usually acquiring either an overall blue or purple cast, or, on other occasions, the image becoming much darker than it had originally been.

This 45 year old slide shows just a few seconds in the short life of a cloud formation somewhere in the Western Highlands. It seems so very bright compared to so many of my old slides….

This is quite a nice slode, too. I don’t remember where I took it from, possibly the north west coast of the Isle of Skye, but it looks westwards into a spectacular sunset where the Outer Hebrides can just be seen on the horizon. I remember thinking how remote this site must have seemed to some of the people who have visited Scotlsand over the centuries.

Did any of the survivors of the Roman Ninth Legion flee north and reach the Atlantic Ocean? Did they look out thinking that they had found the fabled “Ultima Thule” ?

But  there are still plenty of dark places in Scotland. This is a very famous road at Applecross, a small village on the west coast, almost directly east of Skye. The road is famous not just for its steepness, which measures around 1 in 4 (25% ?), but for the fact that it continues for so long…….not fifty yards, but some two miles or so. In years gone by, it was used by a good many advertising companies to sell various motoring products.

I have driven  up the road myself at least once and I have been a passenger perhaps half a dozen times, and I can testify, it is exremely steep and it goes on for quite a long way! On the other hand, there are no sudden huge drops to either left or right.

Well, there were some relatively bright shots there, weren’t there? This is Scotland, though, and it won’t last! Here’s a grassy area in the middle of nowhere, as the darkness comes in and the mist swirls round….

Here’s a much brighter day in the same overall area. In actual fact, this slide is pretty much a quick lesson about the ice ages. Vast sheets of ice, thousands of feet thick, smoothed most of the land into a huge stony snooker table. Where there are huge tall mountains, something of them will survive. So, in this region five peaks remain, but only as a shadow of their former selves. The ice sheets also carried huge rocks around on top of them, like hitch hikers in a 1960s film. They are usually called “erratics”, and 90% of the time, they are made of a type of rock not local to the area. Here, for example, the great big rock in the centre of the picture is probably sandstone, found in the north east, near John O’Groats.

This slide shows the end of Loch Ness. It is such a  bright, sunshiny day that it is difficult to tell if the image is in in black and white or colour. It is, in fact, in  colour……just.

As well as sandstone, there are some areas of the Highlands which contain limestone. Limestone, I think, is calcium carbonate and will readily dissolve if rainwater carrying even moderate amounts of acidity drains over it. The result may be the relatively spectacular “Limestone Pavement” made up of “clints” and “grykes”.  These are flat areas separated by open cracks or fissures. The flat areas are “grykes” and the cracks or fissures are “clints”.

This one is on the mainland opposite the northern part of the Isle of Skye. A limestone pavement is one of the best ways to break your ankle known to man….

Mention of the Isle of Skye tempts me back to show you a second photograph of “Kilt Rock” and its 180 foot high waterfall, the “Mealt Falls”. It says everything about the control freakery of our modern world that on the internet nowadays you are actually recommended to book in advance to look at the rock and its waterfall. The tartan patterns in the cliff face (at the back) are seen much better here……

The Kilt Rock does have one very famous “kill” to its credit, so do not underestimate the danger of leaning over a 200 cliff, however picturesque it may seem. A newly married bride came out with her new husband in, I think, the late 1960s, to be photographed at the top of the waterfall. Alas, it was a windy day, and a sudden gust got under the yards of material in her ornate wedding dress and she fell over the cliff to her death.

My last two slides show Scotland in slightly poorer light conditions, as late afternoon turns to early evening. I have no idea whatsoever where either slide was taken, but the first one is very atmospheric…..

At the time, I am sure that I would have thought that my slide was a complete waste of a shilling, but nowadays, my standards are a lot more thoughtful. I love the way that the viewers’ eyes are led between two shorelines and then we notice that there is even more land half way to the horizon. Beyond the horizon, we can just catch sight of  Newfoundland. In the corner, bottom right, there are a few sprigs of vegetation, but are we completely certain that that is what they are? Or do we have  a pair of wading birds? Two thirds of the way back from Africa to western Greenland?

And then there is the biggest question of all. Is the slide colour or black and white? Well, look at the top right, where we have the very last, teeny tiny area of the early afternoon’s pale blue.

We finish with the last slide. Some long forgotten sand dune in western Scotland, covered in tough everlasting rye grass of some kind. And it’s the approach of dusk. And the Outer Hebrides cluster on the far horizon.

Underfoot, there are smashed up concrete blocks and lumps of carefully cut sandstone. Were they all part of some Second World War radar base? Or was there a village here until it was finally deserted after the ravages of the First World War?

 

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by | November 5, 2023 · 6:17 am

The Murder of Leslie Howard (4)

Last time I showed you a whole selection of what could be called “mistaken identity” conspiracy theories. Leslie Howard was erroneously identified therefore by the German intelligence service, the “Abwehr”, as Harold Thompson, Churchill’s bodygard.

Here’s Leslie Howard, in the wonderful anti-war play by RC Sheriff, “Journey’s End”…..

And here’s Harold Thompson (on the right), a man who was frequently appalled by Churchill’s apparently total disregard for his own safety. The best example of that was when Churchill stopped his staff car in Hyde Park and jumped out, armed with a Colt revolver, to do battle with the three members of the Irish Republican Army who were trying to assassinate him…….

……..sometimes Leslie Howard was identified as Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, despite the biggest hairy caterpillar in the world, that he had trained to cling to his top lip, irrespective of weather conditions…….

Sometimes the Germans confused Leslie Howard with Reginald Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire, and in the grave for the past six years :

And,  an Old Boy of Nottingham High School, Alfred Chenhalls, Leslie Howard’s business manager, was repeatedly thought to be Winston Churchill. Bald, cigar smoking and fond of whisky, who else could it be?

Another rather different theory suggests that Leslie Howard rather than Churchill, was the real target of those eight Luftwaffe aircraft. By now, Howard had become a hard core enemy of the Third Reich, reverting back to his origins as……

“a Jew who was a ferocious and prominent critic of Nazism”

By 1943, Howard frequently expressed himself much more actively than merely speaking up occasionally in interviews.

Indeed, he was soon not just starring in anti-German propaganda films, but he was directing and producing them himself, using as much of his own money as he dared.

On one occasion, his royalties from “Gone with the Wind” paid for his anti-Nazi productions. And in those movies, Howard did not hesitate to name and shame. In one film, he speaks of the Germans’ plans for the rest of Mankind, the people who had suffered the dreadful fate of not being born German. Howard was sure that Hitler would destroy for ever the political systems they had adopted…….

“Every day reveals the utter and desperate determination to smash us to bits, root and branch and to wipe out every trace of democracy.”

But……

“we are better than them”

In 1941, Howard made a fifteen minute film entitled “From the Four Corners” (1941). This is a still from it:

And here is a speech that may well make the hair stand up on the back of your neck :

“And so our fathers’ minds crept along and their ideas of justice and tolerance and the rights of man took shape in the sunlight and the smoke, sometimes standing still, sometimes even slipping back, but slowly broadening with the centuries. Some of those ideas are written down in the constitutions of our commonwealth and some are unwritten. We just try and carry them in our hearts and in our minds. Perhaps the men who came nearest to putting them into words were those Americans, many of them the sons of British pioneers, who, founding an independent nation, proclaimed:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those words and that spirit were born and nourished here, and your fathers carried them to the ends of the earth. They are our inheritance from the past, our legacy to the future. That’s why you came here – to defend them.”

Here is a link to the complete film. It is fifteen minutes that may well reaffirm your faith in good old fashioned democracy:

In “Pimpernel Smith”, he discusses Nazi philosophy with the film’s head of the SS,  who has just captured Howard, the man who has helped countless political prisoners to escape from Germany:

“von Graum : Why do I talk to you? You are a dead man.

Smith : May a dead man say a few words to you for your enlightenment?

You will never rule the world, because you are doomed. All of you who have demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred. And still you will have to go on, because you will find no horizon, and see no dawn, until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers. And one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words…”

You can watch the complete film of “Pimpernel Smith” if you click on this link :

Having said that, the film is so good that you may wish to buy a much better quality DVD of it for around £10.

Like millions of people in the world, Leslie Howard had little reason to love the Germans, but, as a Jew, the appalling anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis in the 1930s really sealed the deal.

Howard wrote: “Britain’s destiny has been to uphold tolerance in religion, thought, speech, and race–– the mainspring of democracy. We have still far to travel on the road to true democracy, but only the Germans have made no progress in this direction. Britain, with her great gifts has helped populate five continents and shown that the white man and the coloured man can live in peace together.”

Few of us, more than eighty years later, would quarrel with those sentiments.

 

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