Filed under Personal
It is with great sadness that we announce the sudden, unexpected and untimely death of John Knifton on Sunday 3rd March in Nottingham. Although he had been unwell for some while, John’s health had been improving and as always he remained positive and optimistic and had many exciting plans in mind for the future. His insights and scholarly approach to so many different topics will be sorely missed by all those who have enjoyed his erudition over the years.
John leaves behind his wife, Gaynor, and daughter, Lauren, as well as over a year’s worth of scheduled blog posts and one unpublished book. We are devastated by his sudden death and, after his funeral and when we feel capable, we will continue to publish his blog posts as well as his last book.
May he rest in peace.
Filed under Personal
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.
Last time, I had managed tro show you two of the three routes Widdel used to reach our patio aka “Sausageland”. He could do a tightrope act fifteen feet from the ground round the back of next door’s garage…….
He coulf take the path whose steps wound their way up the rockery…….
I didn’t mention though, the last route, which was to make his way across the lawn to the hedge between ourselves and the other neighbours’ garden, and then to walk in and out of the hedge, through the foliage, climbing upwards, slowly, until he reached a fence, a fence which, like the path, I had made some forty years previously when we first moved in…….
Then he could follow the fence along to his destination……..
The last picture was in spring. woth a moulted coat and fairly sparse vegetation. Here’s late summer with an early arrival of his winter coat…..
He’ll soon have reached his destinastion……
And then it’s off to see what’s happening in Sausageland…….
After that, he could do what he wanted. H could reverse his steps and make his way to “The Waiting Tree” which you can just see on the left of this photograph. There, he would wait and wait patiently until somebody came out, and ascertained what he wanted, as if we didn’t know…..
He might put his paws on somebody’s knee and then look wistful and plaintive until he was given a sausage or two…..
If he was feeling particularly fierce, he might even go down to the end of the patio for a quick game of “The Lone Wolf on Watch”………
Filed under Humour, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature
Let’s remind ourselves of a typical urban fox. Let’s call him “Widdle”.
In December 2009, he arrives at the corner of our blizzard swept lawn:
The weather is unusually cold for Nottingham, and he is rather cold. And, as always, he is rather hungry. Lucky then, that he knows exactly where to go.
He makes his way up to what used to be the base of an old garage which was burnt down years ago in an insurance job fire, and prison time was served, I believe, (not by me, I hasten to add, nor indeed, by Widdle). He doesn’t have to shout out his order, but if he could shout it out, it would be “Sausages all round!” .
And then he settles down in the snow to sit quietly and wait for his meal. Just look at that fantastic fur coat. For winter, it is at its thickest. A luxuriant, magnificent warm fur coat:
Just occasionally, he changes his position so that nothing freezes solid:
He waits patiently until he catches that distinctive smell…….
“What’s that smell?
That meaty smell ?
That’s the smell of…..sausages!!!”
The best cheap sausages we could find. They came from the Iceland supermarket chain and contained 42% meat with no ash included, as many foods for dogs seemed to have. Widdle took what he could carry in his mouth, and set off back to his den to take it to his family:
And he ate one, and then he took another three back to his den, for Mrs Widdle and the rest of the family. Naturally, in such weather, Widdle left a lot of tracks. Mixed in may be a few domestic cat (felis catus) but I would be amazed if there were any dog prints:
Here’s an individual print. The claws are visible which excludes domestic cat:
Here’s another one:
The following day, the weather cleared up markedly and most of the snow quickly melted. Even so, I was more than a little surprised to see a butterfly sunning itself in the rays of the winter sun:
And even closer up, it is really beautiful. It’s a Small Tortoiseshell:
It looks as if it is injured but I don’t think it is. It seems merely to have twisted itself a little to make sure that it gets the maximum amount of sun.
Filed under My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Science, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature
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?
Last time we looked at some of the Cold War aircraft in the Newark Air Museum, but there are a good many civil aircraft as well, most of them from this same period.
Let’s start with the exception, though, which would be the Avro Anson, even though this normally peace loving multi-engined aircrew trainer was originally designed as a maritime reconnaissance aircraft. In World War Two, the Anson finished up instead as the mainstay of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan in North America, training pilots, navigators, air gunners and radio operators. Newark’s Anson C.19, though, was used as a light transport and communications aircraft. Top speed : 182 mph. The Anson is the bigger silver aircraft. The custard coloured one is a Taylor JT.1 Monoplane.
The Handley Page Hastings began life as the C1 troop-carrier and freight transport aircraft. The aircraft married a completely new fuselage to the wings which had been designed for the abandoned HP.66 bomber development of the existing Handley Page Halifax. This particular individual, TG517, was used in the Berlin Airlift, and then in meteorological flights and finally in the Cod Wars against the evil Icelanders from 1958-1976 . It had begun its career as a completely ordinary C1 but in 1958 was converted for RAF Bomber Command, acquiring a ventral radome to train V-bomber crews on the Navigation Bombing System (NBS). Top speed : 348 mph
The DH.104 Dove was a short-haul airliner manufactured by de Havilland. The aircraft was the monoplane successor to the pre-war Dragon Rapide biplane and was intended as a short-haul feeder for large airlines and airports. The Dove carried eight passengers and two crew, and overall, it was very popular, sales being in excess of five hundred. Top speed : 210 mph
Now we reach a few nasty foreigners, beginning with the Russkies whose simple plan was to enslave us all. To do that, they might well have used the Mikoyan-Gurevich Mig-27, codenamed “Flogger”. This was a swing wing ground attack fighter based on the basic airframe of the MiG-23, but with a revised nose, hence its Russian nickname of “Platypus”. The “Flogger” was also used by Sri Lanka and later it was licence-produced in India by Hindustan Aeronautics as the Bahadur (“Valiant”). Top speed : 1,171 mph.
This next aircraft is French. It is a Dassault MD.454 Mystère IV and was used primarily in the 1950s and 60s as a fighter-bomber. It was the first French aircraft to break the sound barrier, and the first transonic aircraft to enter service with the French Air Force. It saw action with both the French and Israeli air forces in the Suez Crisis of 1956 and then again with the Israeli Air Force during the 1967 Six Day War, fighting Mig-17s and Mig-19s.
The Newark Air Museum also has a good many objects connected with the Dambusters’ Raid of May 17th 1943. They have a propeller from the crashed “S-Sugar” of 617 Squadron:
There is the relevant page from the logbook of Guy Gibson:
There is a piece of fuselage from a Lancaster:
And a man inside it demonstrates how many garments he has to wear:
There is a mid-upper turret from a Lancaster:
And finally, you can see the weight and distinctive shape of one of Barnes Wallis’ “Bouncing Bombs”, codenamed “Upkeep”. This particular bomb was built for testing purposes and was recovered from the waters off Reculver in Kent by Andrew Hemsley and the personnel of 101 Field Regiment TA, and 22 and 223 Squadrons.
All photographs courtesy of Lauren Knifton Fainberg
Filed under Aviation, Bomber Command, History, military, Personal
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.
Last time, I tried to explain why and how there came to be a healthy population of urban foxes living in the leafy suburbs of London. Within a decade, there were large populations of urban foxes in other cities with extensive leafy suburbs, such as such as Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham. One of these sophisticated city foxes even came to be a personal friend of Banksie:
There was nothing to stop the urban foxes. On average, councils found that for every letter of complaint, there were 25 which said “Hands off our foxes”. And killing them off was very expensive. anyway. And unpopular. The Daily Express reported that…….
“Hackney Council ordered the removal of traps in a popular park within hours of animal lovers reacting angrily to the idea of the inner city foxes being destroyed.”
Nottingham, of course, has its urban foxes. On one occasion. long before I got to know Widdle, I found traces of them near a path between the Ring Road and the tennis courts. Here’s the path, which seems to be Nottingham’s first Linear Litter Bin. The tennis courts are to the left behind the chainlink fencing, and the ringroad is behind the heavy black metal fence on the right:
Something seems to have crawled underneath the chain link fencing which protects the tennis courts:
At one point I found this carefully excavated hole, which I believe to be a fox’s den.
In a city, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of possible places for a fox family to live, such as disused sheds and out buildings and underneath garden decking. There’s plenty of food, especially if there is a fast food restaurant nearby. Indeed, news was released recently that foxes in cities have begun to have broader, stronger muzzles than their country cousins, because a certain amount of strength is needed to open the discarded food containers. Once the containers are open, though, the food that they contain will contain many more calories than the usual diet of a fox out there in the countryside, eating mice, hedgehogs, beetles and other insects.
It was Kevin Parsons, a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow, who recently announced that investigators had found that “urban foxes had wider, shorter muzzles than those in rural areas. Diet plays a large part in some of the changes. Urban foxes need a stronger bite for the food they eat in cities.
Foxes have all they might need in the city. Even their life expectancy is better than country foxes. The only fly in the ointment is mange which is a disease which can sweep through a city’s fox population and kill nearly every single one. Here’s a fox with the early stages of mange. Look at his tail ! :
Here’s a fox who is past the point of no return. He looks, and is, a terminally sick animal:
Don’t be fooled though! Sometimes a perfectly healthy fox can look as if he is at Death’s Door, when he is moulting, which is, of course, a perfectly normal stage of his life:
Surely you will recognise this rather tatty chap. He is called “Widdle” and was a personal friend of mine. He could look extremely ill when he was moulting, but there was a difference. If a fox is basically healthy, his moult starts at the tail and then spreads up towards the head, which is usually the last to go. Other body extemities, such as the legs, may also stay rich red rather than turn to that tatty fawn-pale orannge-black. And in the three photographs, one of a healthy Widdle and the other two of a fox with mange, that is exactly what is happening.
Filed under Humour, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature
After the First World War, London began to expand as a city, particularly to the north and west. What had been farmland was now purchased and then built on. Many, but not all, of the woods were chopped down, the trees and branches were burnt, and new houses were then built on the site. The people who lived in those new houses for the most part worked in the centre of London and new words had to be invented to describe what they had to do in order to get to work. They took the train. Suburban, local trains, whose only purpose was to carry people who were now being called “commuters”, on their way to work. What they did was called “commuting”, and it obviously paid them to do it. Their salaries must have been high enough to justify adding a couple of hours to every one of their working days.
The very best paid commuters lived in what were called the “leafy suburbs”. They could even afford to buy a detached house near the golf course, with four or five bedrooms and a large private garden all the way round it:
In some cases, the leaves of the new leafy suburbs were attached to trees which pre-dated the building of the new houses. Builders with a bit of vision had soon realised that they could save themselves a lot of cash, and finish up with a much better product if they kept as many of the mature trees as possible. All they had to do was to build the houses between them and to do the same with the streets, if they could. Look at the age of these trees:
That slight change in approach by the builders had quite an effect on the suburbs created at the ends of the hundreds of the suburban railway lines which linked the centre of London with the houses where their office workers lived. And, to their credit, instead of just moving on elsewhere, the creatures which had lived in the woods before the developers arrived, made enormous efforts to stay in their homes and not be forced out.
In some cases badger setts survived the building process and remained unnoticed behind the park-keeper’s new storage sheds.
Hedgehogs hunted slugs and snails in rockeries and vegetable gardens, just as they had in spinneys, copses and woods.
Mice, shrews and rats went unnoticed, as they always have. But above all, one animal benefited enormously. That was “vulpes vulpes”, better known as the fox. They carried on their lives pretty much as they always had done, taking little or no notice of human beings and their machines. If anything, life was considerably easier, and food more plentiful now that they lived in a city suburb, which was always a few degrees warmer than the bleak countryside. And very soon London had in excess of 10,000 urban foxes. And many other cities experienced the same process. Bristol. Birmingham. Sheffield. And Nottingham, the home of the most famous fox of them all…….
Here’s another of them, hurrying to the fish and chip shop to see if anybody couldn’t eat all of what are, hopefully, generous portions:
Foxes, like all undomesticated canids, are extremely intelligent. Once they have made a friend such as a big, fat rabbit, they always like to see if they can get even closer to him, perhaps by pulling a likely chain:
And here’s one of the very few photographs of Banksy Fox”…….
Next time, we take a look at the quality of the sausages available in the Iceland supermarket chain, exploring the views of one of their keenest consumers…………
Filed under History, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Science, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature
John Knifton 