A Place for the Little Ships
In the Diamond Jubilee flotilla today, there are about forty or so of the Little Ships of Dunkirk. If you look at the Wikipedia entry, you’ll see that some unusual boats took part in 1940. What surprised me was that 39 Dutch coasters that had escaped the Germans also took part and rescued about seven percent of the total of the troops brought home.
A Big Spelling Mistake
I photographed this in a shop window in the Kingsland Road.
A Big Spelling Mistake
I thought spelling mistakes like this on products were a thing of the past.
Getting Emotional
I can sometimes get very emotional and start crying quietly. I did this morning in Carluccio’s in Islington. I’ve talked of this before. All I was doing as reading the colour magazine in The Times and especially the piece about some of the people who had won medals at the 1948 Games after suffering badly in the war.
The star of those Games was the Dutch female athlete, Fanny Blankers-Koen, who won four gold medals. The Dutch presented her with a new bicycle.
One other competitor I’d heard of was the Hungarian marksman, Karoly Takacs, who after losing his right hand to a grenade accident, learned to shoot left handed and won gold. He also won gold four years later in Helsinki.
One amazing tale concerns Jim Halliday, who fought in the retreat from Dunkirk and later was captured by the Japanese in 1942. On release from the his POW camp, he weighed just 27 Kg. He then won silver or bronze, depending on the source, in the wrestling. Sadly he died in 2007, so won’t be able to present any medals. Perhaps, he has a son or daughter, who can be asked!
And people moan about, VAT on pies and pasties. They don’t know they’re alive.
To me though, the crying may also be about my eyes telling me that they have now wetted up and are not as bone dry as they have been in recent months. Two years ago, a nurse treated them and said they were the driest eyes she’d ever seen. She gave me some artificial tears, but I can’t put anything in my eyes.
It’s not as if this day is anything significant in my life, as my son died on the 23rd, not the 30th.
Perhaps, I’m just one of those people, who needs to cry!
Remembering M.R.D. Foot
M. R. D. Foot, who has recently died, was an historian, whose wartime exploits and subsequent researches led him to be a leading authority on the Special Operations Executive.
I seem to have come across him first, as he had written one of C’s books for her History and Politics course at Liverpool. But I remember him most for his book that he wrote in conjunction with Jimmy Langley, MI9: Escape and Evasion in 1939-1945. In there he relates how the first two British servicemen to make a Home Run from Germany were two Sikh sergeants in the Pioneer Corps.
It is a tale that has fascinated me and no-one seems to have any more knowledge than that one line in the book.
Hopefully, one day the tale will fully surface.
An Obituary For an Unknown in the Fight Against Capital Punishment in the UK
I have said before that C used to visit prisoners in Holloway Prison in the early 1970s.
Yesterday, the Times and other papers carried reports of the death or full obituaries of the death of Stella Cunliffe.
Here is the report of her death on the Surrey Today website.
I have a feeling that C used to visit Holloway prison in a group, which involved this formidable lady. She seems to have provided the statistical evidence for the abolishment of capital punishment in parts or all of the UK. The obituaries vary.
There’s more here on Wikipedia, which states she was one of the first civilians to go into Belsen.
I think I met her a couple of times in about 1970 and we never knew what she did. Her male friend and they were just that, was a senior hospital manager and one of the best practical jokers that I’ve ever come across. I have to admit to stealing one of his best jokes.
Farewell Ronald Searle
Ronald Searle was one of the greatest cartoonists this country has ever produced.
He is remembered most for St. Trinians. But I saw his wartime drawings from the Burma Railway in the sixties and they left a deep impression about the horrors of war and man’s inhumanity to man. All are part of a legacy of a great artist, who is mainly remembered for just one small part of his work.
He deserves to have a proper retrospective exhibition at a major gallery in the UK.
I noticed that Ronald Searle had the initials, RDI, after his name. The initials stand for Royal Designers for Industry. It is is a distinction established by the Royal Society of Arts in 1936, to encourage a high standard of industrial design and enhance the status of designers.
Liverpool Parish Church
Liverpool parish church is St. Nick’s by the Pierhead or the Church of Our Lady and St. Nicholas to name it correctly.
The pictures show the church and the surrounding gardens.
Like St. Luke’s church, it was seriously damaged in the Second World War.
P.G. Wodehouse Was A Traitor
My father hated P.G. Wodehouse with a vengeance because of his broadcasts for the Nazis in the Second World War. We didn’t have any of his books in the house.
More has just been released from MI5 files as reported here in the Guardian.
I would follow my father and have nothing to do with any of Wodehouse’s books and can’t even say now, I’d go out of my way to watch a film, play or TV series of any of his books.
Remember my father was very involved with anti-Fascism protests before the war and active on the left wing of the Conservative party. He was also present at the Battle of Cable Street, when the East End stopped Mosley from marching.
My father could also do a mean impersonation of Lord Haw-Haw. But then I’ve never met anybody who didn’t feel that he wasn’t one of the funniest things of the war.
The Amazing Story of Rudolf Brazda
I’d never heard of Rudolf Brazda, until I saw his obituary today, but it gives deep insight into how the Nazis just didn’t persecute Jews, but a lot of others as well. Brazda was gay and somehow kept himself alive amongst the horrors of Buchenwald.
The Anonymous Widower 