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?
V-2 Sculpture in Den Haag?
Outside of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Den Haag is this sculpture.
V-2 Sculpture in Den Haag?
Is it a V-2 exploding on takeoff?
Because it is in the area that was devastated by RAF bombing, as they tried to stop the missiles.
Den Haag’s Dark Secret
If you cycle towards Scheveningen past the prison and the barracks, there is a building on the eastern side of the road, that looks like a station. We see old stations all over the UK that have been converted into houses and although it’s a different style, it has the same aura.
When I got back I looked it up and found that there used to be a railway that ran from the main line from Den Haag to Amsterdam, through Wassenaar to a station by the beach at Scheveningen. As I had thought, the railway had run where the road is now.
It was the site with the map that told me the dark secret, that few know about. Den Haag was the launching point for all of the V-2 rockets that the Nazis sent towards London. A lot were fired from a beautiful estate called Duindigt, near the racecourse. It ended up being totally destroyed by Allied bombing and V-2’s that exploded on takeoff.
Nearly three thousand died in 1944, in London due to these weapons. But not as many as about 20,000 concentration camp inmates, who died making the weapons. Even the Dutch suffered greatly, as the weapons misfired and hit local targets, the Nazis executed anybody for the most trivial of reasons and the Allies destroyed parts of Den Haag by mistake as they tried to stop the launching of the rockets.
War is never the simple business it is made out to be.
There is also a book, Spitfire Dive Bombers versus the V2, by Bill Simpson, which details the hunt for the rockets by RAF Fighter Command.
Southampton and Football
I went to Southampton on Saturday to see Ipswich play them in the FA Cup.
I’ve always had rather a low opinion of Southampton. Not that I’ve been there very often, but I had great difficulty once getting a gluten-free meal and that clouded my view of the place.
I was surprised that the city had medieval walls, which contain the longest stretch in England, and you can walk along the top of them in places. Like many English cities, it has a ruined church, Holyrood, that was bombed by the Luftwaffe in the Second World Wat and has been left as a memorial sailors of the Merchant Navy.
Let’s not talk about the football.
General Sikorski
I was walking from Regent’s Park to Oxford Circus when I passed the statue of General Sikorski in Portland Place.
General Sikorski
The Ban on Islam4UK
Organisations such as Islam4UK and all the other so-called Muslim organisations, that don’t like the way things are done in the Western World bother me. But then so do right-wing so-called Christian groups and also those fake religions and cults beloved of celebrities with too much money and not enough common sense.
Most preach fiery hate to unbelievers like me and say we will rot in hell. That by the way is impossible, as hell doesn’t exist, unless you are stuck on the M25 (put your favourite in here) at the time of a small bump, that the Police decide is worthy of an enormous investigation.
When these groups commit crimes such as murder, assault, kidnapping and extortion, then hopefully they will feel the full force of the law.
So why do they bother me?
Usually the charlatans at the top are clever individuals, who know how to stay out of trouble, by playing the law to the limit. There are a lot of extreme political organisations, which are just as dangerous and use exactly the same techniques.
But their followers are often not so bright and in some cases can easily be encouraged to do things that are very much against the law. These are the ones that do the damage and those that led them on have all the excuses ready.
So Prudence has decided for popular reasons to add Islam4UK to the list of banned organisations.
I’d rather have them out in the open, than as a secretive underground organisation.
I thought this might be a lone view, but read Martin Bentham in the Evening Standard tonight. Here’s the article.
Today’s ban on Islam4UK and its offshoots is certain to be widely welcomed but its impact is likely to be limited.
The reality is that Anjem Choudary, a lawyer proficient at staying in the bounds of legality, will continue to propagate his extremist message and, if anything, attract even greater attention because of the increased notoriety.
The previous ban on The Saved Sect and Al Ghurabaa was unable to prevent him and his followers reorganising under a different guise, and the same will almost certainly happen this time.
There is also the wider question of whether such an order is proper in a democracy. If extremists’ views, however abhorrent, do not breach laws such as those against incitement to murder and racial hatred, instead of seeking to stifle them it might be better to ignore them — rather than generating yet more publicity.
There is also one very powerful weapon that we should use against all of these people – humour.
Remember in the Second World War nothing was off-limits when combatting the Nazis. Just read this little piece about Spike Jones in 1942. We need him now!
All of these groups give splendid opportunities for satire, ridicule and just plain fun.
Lundy Island
This little island has just been named as Britain’s first Marine Conservation Zone.
Lundy is an island I’ve always known about and is definitely on my list of places to visit. This is because when I was a child for a few years we lived nextdoor to someone, who my father called “The King of Lundy Island”. All I can remember of him is seeing him walking to the station after the house had been sold and a removal van had collected his belongings.
Was this Martin Coles Harman, who styled himself the “King of Lundy Island”, after he’d bought the island in 1924?
I can’t find any reference to him as living in Southgate in North London and he died in Oxted in Surrey, a few years after the mysterious King left.
He seems to have been an interesting man as according to this article in the Age in 1955.
London, June 23 – Mr. Martin Coles Harman, “king” of Lundy Island, in Bristol Channel, the financier who knew wealth, bankruptcy and gaol, sent a message from his grave yesterday to everyone in debt to his estate.
He said in his will “waive and destroy all I.O.U.’s.
His son, John Pennington Harman, was also one of the heroes of Kohima and won a VC in the battle.
Sir Sydney Camm
How many people know who Sir Sydney Camm was? According to the Telegraph there is now a campaign to remember the designer of the legendary Hurricane in his home town of Windsor.
Camm was one of a small group of engineers, scientists and an odd-ball who were responsible for providing the tools that enabled the RAF to win the Battle of Britain.
- R. J. Mitchell was the designer of the Spitfire, who had died in 1937 at the age of only 42.
- Henry Royce is credited with the initial design of the Merlin engine, following on as it did from the successful R type engine, that had won the Schneider Trophy in 1929 and 1931.
- Ernest Hives was the engineer at Rolls-Royce, who had the forethought to create the production lines for the Merlin engines that powered the Hurricanes and Spitfires.
- Robert Watson Watt may not have been the sole inventor of radar, but he made it work, so that fighters could be used efficiently and directed towards targets in the battle.
And then there was the odd-ball, Lady Houston.
Bawdsey Manor
In the photographs of Felixstowe Ferry, there is a photograph of Bawdsey Manor.
Bawdsey Manor
It is a large house in a very prominent position and was built in the late 1900s by the Quilter family.
But its role in the development of radar just before and during the Second World War has given this house its true fame. There is a museum on the site.
As a child I remember the three towers which formed part of the Chain Home radar system, that warned of early approach of German aircraft. This simple radar was very significant in the winning of the Battle of Britain.
It is interesting to note that British radar was actually inferior to German at the time. This is what Wikipedia says.
The Chain Home system was fairly primitive, since in order to be battle-ready it had been rushed into production by Sir Robert Watson-Watt’s Air Ministry research station near Bawdsey. Watson-Watt, a pragmatic engineer, believed that “third-best” would do if “second-best” would not be available in time and “best” never available at all. Chain Home certainly suffered from glitches and errors in reporting.
It was in many ways technically inferior to German radar developments, but the better German technology proved to be a disadvantage. The Chain Home stations were relatively simple to construct and comprehensive coverage was available by the start of the Battle of Britain.
I like Watson-Watt philosophy, as often something available in double-quick time is many many times better than nothing at all.
The Germans made a big mistake over these radar stations. Obviously, if they had been destroyed, victory for Britain in the Battle of Britain would have been more difficult. Wikipedia again.
During the battle, Chain Home stations, most notably the one at Ventnor, Isle of Wight, were attacked a number of times between 12 and 18 August, 1940. On one occasion a section of the radar chain in Kent, including the Dover CH, was put out of action by a lucky hit on the power grid. However, though the wooden huts housing the radar equipment were damaged, the towers survived owing to their open steel girder construction. Because the towers were untoppled and the signals soon restored, the Luftwaffe concluded the stations were too difficult to damage by bombing and so left them alone for the rest of the war. Had the Luftwaffe realised just how essential the radar stations were to British air defences, it is likely that they would have gone all out to destroy them.
What also puzzles me is that radar research carried on until the summer of 1940 at Bawdsey. If the Germans had known, the house would have been an easy target. Perhaps, it just shows how bad their intelligence was.
Stalin and Hitler
Gareth Jones was a journalist, who visited the Ukraine and Germany before the Second World War. What he reported was accurate, although it was rubbished by Stalin’s apologists. Read more about Gareth Jones in The Times.
There is an exhibition in the Wren Library at Cambridge University.
I shall be going.
