Coast is in Denmark
Coast is one of my favourite telvision programs. Today was all about Denmark. I’ve been to the country a couple of times, although one was just to get a connection to Oslo.
My next-door neighbour at the football is also a man who has a Danish father, who had been trapped in the UK at the start of the Second World War.
The program was about the Danish coast and agriculture, but with a fair amount of Second World War and other history thrown in. They also visited Heliogoland, which seems a fascinating place. A large part of the program was about how the Danes got most of their Jews to safety in Sweden. They didn’t mention King Christian X, who surely became one of the unlikely heroes of the war.
I doubt many monarchs would have did what he did to give support to his people.
The Largest Tea Urn in the World
The One Show on BBC this evening told the sort of tale that I like. It was of a man Ted Simmons, who after Coventry had been blitzed in the Second World War created an enormous kettle, so that people could have a hot drink. The story of the recreation of the kettle is told here.
I sometimes wonder whether we could do such things today, as we often have this negative give-up attitudes to stiff challenges. But as the Coventry Urn tale says, that if you have strong and good leadership, this will inspire others to get the job done in the best and quickest way possible.
Should We Still Call It The Battle of Britain?
Today is the 70th anniversary of the start of The Battle of Britain in 1940, which perhaps is one of the great battles in history.
But are we right to name it such?
I remember a French documentary on the battle in probably 1965, that was considered controversial. It wasn’t in any great sense, but it criticised us for calling it The Battle of Britain. As they felt, it was effectively Europe’s last stand against the Nazis and if we had lost the battle then the war might well have been over, then the battle should be called The Battle of Europe.
I thinik the French were right!
A Statue of Arthur Lowe
It is being unvieled today in Thetford according to the California Chronicle. The reference shows how far the much-loved TV series, Dad’s Army, has penetrated the world’s pysche.
Perhaps, the UK and especially England’s beleaguered sportsman could learn a lot from Captain Mannering’s ragbag collection of heroes.
Even Old Bombs Are Dangerous
Probably sevnty years after it was dropped, this bomb went off in Germany.
I know thhat old film is examined to find them, but they must have missed this one! So very sad!
Liverpool Street and the Kindertransport
Liverpool Street Station is one of London’s finest stations.
It also has the memorial to the Kindertransport on the main entrance.
The station was the main terminal for all the trains from Germany carrying mainly Jewish children to safety from the Nazis before the Second World War.
Echoes of Orde Wingate
In The Times today, there is an obituary of Major-General David Tyacke. The first two paragraphs talk about how he worked for Orde Wingate.
David Tyacke was the last officer on the staff of the Chindit HQ at Sylhet in Assam to see General Orde Wingate on the morning he left to fly to “Broadway” and “White City”, the jungle bases of 77 and 111 Brigades attacking the Japanese lines of communication in Burma.
Writing in old age, Tyacke described how, when Wingate’s aircraft was first reported overdue, a strange euphoria spread among the HQ staff as they realised that the general would not be keeping them on tenterhooks that evening. But it was soon replaced by a grim foreboding that their eccentric but visionary leader was dead.
Somewhere my father must have met Wingate, or perhaps someone he knew had served with him. But he was one of my father’s heroes.
I have read quite a bit about Wingate and feel that although some of his views were questionable, on the whole his was the right sort of thinking in difficult times. Wingate definitely was not a conservative thinker. The trouble today is that we have far too many of those.
Andrée Peel: A Brave Lady
Andrée Peel was a heroine of the French Resistance and she died a few days ago. This is the first paragraph of her obituary in The Times.
The youthful Andrée Virot was running a beauty salon in the Breton port-city of Brest when Germany invaded and overran northern France in May-June 1940. Being adventurous and high spirited, she was an early recruit to the Resistance movement but her work was initially confined to the distribution of an underground newspaper. Later she worked for an escape line smuggling shot-down Allied airmen out of France to Britain and the reception and dispatch to safety of the occasional agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
She went on to survive the war and incarceration in concentration camps. After the war she married an Englishman and settled in Bristol.
Perhaps though she had the last laugh on all those who punished and imprisoned her. She lived to be 105.
Would we do the same now, if we were fighting a foe as ruthless as the Nazis?
The Anonymous Widower 