Quotulatiousness

September 25, 2021

Webley 1913 Semiauto Pistol: History and Disassembly

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 May 2017

William Whiting and the Webley company had high hopes for their self-loading pistols being adopted by the British military — but they never got the success they were hoping for.

After the poor performance of the Webley 1904 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hT38…) at trials, William Whiting decided to make sure his next attempt would be fully developed before he put it in the hands of the military. He did very well at that too, as the gun which would become the Model 1913 Webley did very well from its very first military tests. The Royal Navy was, in fact, quite enthusiastic about it, although the Army was not. The Navy would ultimately adopt the gun and purchase about 8,000 of them during World War One, while the Army acquired just a couple hundred and preferred to stick to its revolvers.

Thanks to Mike Carrick of Arms Heritage magazine for loaning me these pistols to bring to you!

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September 24, 2021

From Handmaid’s Tale cosplay to eco-terrorism

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Connor Tomlinson outlines the many performative and disruptive projects of Roger Hallam:

Insulate Britain gluing themselves to the M25 for a week has already produced a four-car collision, with victims airlifted to hospital, and delayed a mother’s treatment, leaving her paralysed by a stroke. Despite these events, activists claim they “don’t accept that we put lives at risk”. It’s vital that legal and cultural action is taken to insulate Britons from this dangerous brand of eco-extremism.

As Dan Wootton’s interview with activist Liam Norton explained, the endangerment of lives to exercise political pressure would classify Insulate Britain as ecological terrorists. The action Insulate Britain wishes to force government to take is “to produce within four months a legally binding national plan to fully fund” the insulation of all Britain’s 29 million homes with taxpayer cash. Essentially, they’re sitting in the motorway, blocking your work commute, so the state can take and spend more of your pay-check.

Insulate Britain is another in a long line of activist vanity projects engineered to make headlines by founder Roger Hallam. Starting with “Stop Killing Londoners” in 2017, Hallam went on to co-create Extinction Rebellion; before being ousted over his comments concerning the Holocaust. But Hallam’s alarmist and extremist rhetoric preceded this insensitive remark. In, 2019, Hallam said “forcing the governments to act” or “bring[ing] them down and create[ing] a democracy fit for purpose” will require “some [to] die in the process”. This “democracy” would, paradoxically, be a “socialist project”, with Hallam in the ideological driving seat.

Hallam’s prior protests demonstrated a similar indifference to human suffering. Hallam was arrested at Heathrow Airport for aiming to fly drones into active airspace and ground commercial flights. His “Heathrow Pause” protests constituted a terror threat, in that drones could cause flights to be grounded or collide and crash. Again, Hallam was willing to risk lives to make headlines.

All of these movements claim the sole solutions to apocalyptic emergencies are the appointment of Hallam himself to a position of public power which lets him implement whichever solutions he deems necessary. His PhD at Kings College on “civil disobedience” exposes Hallam’s own egoism in comparing himself to MLK and Gandhi. This was also an indictment of modern university radicalism; echoed by Dr. Charlie Gardner of the University of Kent making the same comparison in a lecture, calling himself “a hero of our times”, and refusing to disavow Hallam when I challenged him on it.

When I first heard of the M25 protests, I thought they’d be allowed to carry on for a token amount of time to get their actions into the media and then they’d be cleared off by the police. I was quite astonished to find that they were permitted to stay in place for several hours and that the police were being quite solicitous of their health and protecting them from any attempt at counter-protest by the stranded motorists. I’m now worried that the next time they try this, the motorists will have learned that the police aren’t there to enforce the law and be tempted to take it into their own hands.

QotD: The LGBT advocacy group Stonewall proves Hoffer right — “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is a law of nature that governs campaigning groups and charities, which is that an organisation set up to deal with a particular problem will always find a way to exist even after that problem has been addressed.

The reason is simple: by the time an issue has been solved, or almost solved, the business is at its peak. Employees’ salaries and pensions are at stake, reputations have been built and influence has been secured. And so it is that Eric Hoffer’s great insight is fulfilled: every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Very few causes have degenerated into a racket so completely as the former gay-rights group known as Stonewall. When it was founded in 1989, gay rights in Britain, as across Europe, had some way to go to reach equality. Back then, there was a different age of consent for homosexuals and heterosexuals, homosexuals did not have the right to marry or to have their partnerships legally recognised and, most pertinently, a Conservative government had made it impossible for young gay people to be in any way informed about their sexuality during their time at school.

There was certainly a long way to go, and Ian McKellen, Matthew Parris, Simon Fanshawe and the rest of the group’s founders faced an uphill battle for many years. But it was a battle which they helped to win.

Once most of their objectives had been achieved, though, what were Stonewall to do? There were several options in front of them. The most obvious, one might think, would have been to scale down and remain in place to deal with residual issues, such as the existence of homophobia in schools and other remaining pockets of society.

Douglas Murray, “How Stonewall sacrificed gay rights”, UnHerd, 2021-05-25.

September 22, 2021

Ishapore SMLE MkI** India Pattern

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Feb 2017

While many people are familiar with the Ishapore 2A1 rifles chambered in 7.62mm NATO (largely thanks to their importation and sale in the US in large numbers), production of Indian Enfield rifles actually dates back to 1905, when the Ishapore arsenal was opened. The first rifles produced there were a batch of 3,000 MkI Enfield rifles in 1908/9. These were of course early pattern SMLEs, with features like split charger bridges, volley sights, and magazine cutoffs. Production quickly changed to the No1 Mk III pattern of rifle, which had been formally adopted in Britain in 1907.

During World War One, the need for arms led to those first early rifles being rebuilt in the MkIII configuration, but they retain their original markings, showing their origin. Today we have one of those first 3,000 to look at.

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September 20, 2021

Canada was given advance notice of the AUKUS deal … about five minutes notice

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When the news broke about a new western alliance involving Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, the official line — belatedly — was that our allies had kept Canadian officials “in the loop”, about the negotiations. Now that everyone’s attention is on the vote-counting, it can be safely acknowledged that the Canadian government got a heads-up just a few minutes before the formal announcement, as Ted Campbell discusses:

US President Joe Biden with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (onscreen) during the AUKUS announcement.
Image from businesstelegraph.co.uk.

So, Steven Chase and Robert Fife say, in the Globe and Mail, that “The Canadian government was surprised this week by the announcement of a new security pact between the United States, Britain and Australia, one that excluded Canada and is aimed at confronting China’s growing military and political influence in the Indo-Pacific region, according to senior government officials [and] Three officials, representing Canada’s foreign affairs, intelligence and defence departments, told The Globe and Mail that Ottawa was not consulted about the pact, and had no idea the trilateral security announcement was coming until it was made on Wednesday by U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.”

Not only did our oldest and closest friends and allies kick Canada out of the “inner circle”, they didn’t even bother to tell us that the political and diplomatic kick in the arse was coming, although, the Globe journalists say, the Australian and British defence ministers gave Harjit Sajjan a brief “heads up” just minutes before the announcement. Mr Sajjan’s spokesman said that Canada “had been kept in the loop”, I call BS.

Vice Admiral Mark Norman, someone who knows a lot about what happens at the highest echelons of government in Ottawa said that “if Mr. Trudeau was fully briefed” [on this new AUKUS pact, then] “he doesn’t understand what is going on internationally and he doesn’t understand what the significance of an arrangement like this is as it relates to international security.” I don’t think he had heard a word about this until Minister Sajjan’s senior aids called the PCO and PMO on Wednesday afternoon.

One can easily imagine the conversations on Wednesday and Thursday in some of the corridors of power in Ottawa: “ Biden us!” said one senior official. “No,” said another, even more senior, “this has been coming for a long time. It’s a shock, but it really shouldn’t be a surprise.” “They screwed us,” said a third, “we’ve done nothing to deserve this. It’s just because we aren’t spending as much as Biden and Morrison want on the military and it’s because we’re not sending more ships to Asia, more often.” “No,” the second person said, “it’s because we decided, all of us, you and me, too, to not do whatever it took to arrest the changes in our national strategic outlook.” “How can you say that?” the first speaker said, “We all protested, I wrote a long brief explaining why we needed to step up …” “We’re still here,” the more senior official said. “We didn’t resign and go public as soon as we saw how things were shaping up. Almost no one did.” “No one listens when senior officials or admirals or generals resign,” said the third official, “it wouldn’t have done any good.” “You’re right,” the most senior official answered, “resignations are, normally, not news and they rarely change politicians’ minds … not, anyway, when they’re done one at a time. Back in 2016, when many us started to see, clearly, how things were going we should have resigned en masse ~ and not just we three, but dozens of us from PCO, from Foreign Affairs and from DND and the military. If the senior public service had rebelled, as it should when the government makes destructive policy choice against our advice, then there would have been enormous, even irresistible political pressure. But we didn’t, did we? We all stayed on and wrote a couple of arse-covering briefing notes and went about our business. We are as much to blame for this as are those dimwits in Trudeau’s cabinet and inner circle. We failed Canada.”

Vice Admiral Norman, the article explains, “said the agreement goes far beyond access to U.S. submarine technology [which is Mr Trudeau’s lame excuse for why Canada was kicked out of the inner circle] This is about accessing both current and emerging technologies, from cyber and artificial intelligence, to acoustics and underwater warfare – a whole range of very important strategic capabilities.” Further, “Mr. Norman said Canada has many national interests in the Indo-Pacific – including trade, promoting the rule of law and democracy, and countering China’s aggressive behaviour and posturing – but he suspects close allies do not take Canadian defence commitments seriously [and he added] I don’t think our allies think we are serious when it comes to defence. I think they have concerns not just about our defence expenditures, but also the extent to which our [international] commitments are both lasting and meaningful.” This has been evident since 2015. Justin Trudeau effectively campaigned on doing less in the world. Everyone knew this was coming ~ especially those who voted for the Liberal Party … it is what they wanted. It’s what Canada got.

You Can’t See Memes on the Radio

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Alasdair Beckett-King
Published 4 Jun 2021

The hottest memes on 1940s radio. Support me on kofi (https://ko-fi.com/misterabk) and/or laboriously describe your favourite memes in the comments.

Carbon ringmount microphone model by Inlite: https://blendswap.com/blend/6724

QotD: English jingoism

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the “Rule Britannia” stuff, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious. They do not retain among their historical memories the name of a single military victory. English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore’s army at Corunna, fighting a desperate rear-guard action before escaping overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction. And of the last war, the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.

The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is that it ignores the existence of the British Empire. It looks like sheer hypocrisy. After all, the English have absorbed a quarter of the earth and held on to it by means of a huge navy. How dare they then turn round and say that war is wicked?

It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire. In the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire exists. But their dislike of standing armies is a perfectly sound instinct. A navy employs comparatively few people, and it is an external weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots. Decades before Hitler was ever heard of, the word “Prussian” had much the same significance in England as “Nazi” has to-day. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of the British Army, in peace-time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

September 19, 2021

QotD: Gender stereotypes

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Whenever I hear people stereotyping based on gender. “Women vote this way”, “Men act in this manner”, I am reminded of the great contrast between Britain’s two women Prime Ministers. Thatcher, won a brilliant renegotiation of the EEC, trounced the unions, denationalized vast swaths of obscene nationalized industries, and was one of the four people instrumental in ending the cold war. May, the other lady from number 10, apparently couldn’t negotiate the purchase of a sausage supper for fifty quid in the local fish and chip shop.

Apparently, it is more to do with the content of your character than the content of your underpants.

Fraser Orr, commenting at Samizdata, 2018-12-08.

September 17, 2021

Australia, the UK, and the US join in a military alliance … Canada of course is nowhere in sight

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, China, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

News broke the other day about a new three-nation military arrangement clearly aimed at containing Chinese ambitions in the Pacific, involving Australia, Britain, and the United States, to be known as AUKUS (or AUUKUS, depending on the reporting source). These three countries are already tightly linked in the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing network which also includes Canada and New Zealand. As more than one wit noted on Twitter after the announcement, it’s a good thing Canada doesn’t have a Pacific coast or any economic interests in that ocean…

Ted Campbell, who recently emerged from a blogging hiatus to comment on the ongoing federal election, felt this new pact cemented the idea that Canada is “no longer a serious country” in military terms:

It is now abundantly clear that the USA, inter alia, puts Justin Trudeau’s Canada in the same league as (anti-nuclear) New Zealand. Canada is no longer one of the most trusted allies … Australia is; Britain is: India is; Japan is … Canada is NOT.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has, in six short years, moved Canada from one of America’s best friends to, de facto, a Chinese puppet state. He has done this with his own (and his many advisors’) eyes wide open. Canada, Justin Trudeau’s Canada is no longer a serious nation … perhaps we don’t really deserve to be. After all, we (almost 40% of the almost 70% who bothered to vote at all) elected him … then we did it again. Maybe the world is just concluding that we are not serious people who can be relied upon when the going gets tough.

He followed this up with a bit more concern on the sinking Canadian international profile:

Just take a look at those technologies ~ AI, quantum computing, cyber warfare ~ those are all areas vital to Canada’s security and prosperity and what are we focused on? Climate change and Québec’s latest attempts to make Canada into an illiberal state. China spews out more carbon in a week than Canada does in a year. China is aiming to displace America as the global guarantor of peace, security and trade. Do any of the dimwits in the Liberal government understand that? Why in hell is Prime Minister Trudeau attacking Alberta’s (relatively clean) oil industry rather than, for example, concentrating on making Canadian nuclear energy work for us?

A few days ago I said that Canada needs nuclear powered submarines to assert and protect our sovereignty in the waters we claim as our own. No one contradicted me. No one ever raises any serious, well-founded objections to nuclear submarines for Canada. It’s a no brainer. But, look at the last line in the quote above. Who is getting nuclear submarines? Australia … because it is a serious country with adult political leadership.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s regime has sidelines Canada. Our strongest, most traditional allies have abandoned us. We have been sold out … to China.

I use that term “sold out”, intentionally. I do NOT believe that Justin Trudeau is a traitor … for heaven’s sake, he’s not smart enough to betray anything. He’s barely able to memorize his lines. But a lot of people have invested a lot in China ~ the Desmarais family (of Power Corporation fame) and former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Bob Rae, Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, for example, are all closely tied together and even more closely tied to the Canada-China trade file. I assert that the “China lobby” in Canada is very, very powerful, very, very rich and extraordinarily well connected to Canada’s political leadership ~ Liberal and Conservative, alike. I further assert that it, not Justin Trudeau and Marc Garneau and the mandarins in Ottawa, drives Canada’s foreign, trade and fiscal policies. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is NOT a traitor … but he is puppet and people whose vital interests are centred on China, not Canada, pull the strings.

Why is Canada excluded from the AUKUS pact?

One reason Canada isn’t involved is certainly the distraction of the federal election, and there would have been no way that Justin Trudeau would have wanted to answer questions on the campaign trail about anything geostrategic or military, and he especially doesn’t want Canadians looking closely at his servile deference to the Chinese government. Of course, given that he’s literally bribed the major newspaper chains and TV networks with “subsidies” right before the election was called, he might well have been safe from any hint of an awkward question from his unofficial PR branches in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Over at the Thin Pinstriped Line, Sir Humphrey looks at the military and technical implications of the new alliance:

The Royal Australian Navy is likely to become the next nation to join the nuclear submarine operators club. This is the key headline emerging from the surprise tri-lateral announcement on Wed 15 September by the Prime Ministers of Australia and the UK, and the President of the United States.

The move, forming a new “three eyes” club known as AUKUS is a genuinely significant development intended to provide a significant uplift in capability in the Indo-Pacific region. For the first time in nearly 70 years, the US has agreed to share some of its most sensitive technology with a third party, to help Australia become a “naval power underway on nuclear power”.

There are several ramifications of this decision, that will be felt for many years to come. The first is that from an American perspective, this is a good opportunity to take steps to increase burden sharing in the Pacific.

[…]

From a wider diplomatic perspective, there are three distinct groupings to consider. Firstly, the remaining 5-EYES members (Canada and New Zealand). Its unlikely that this will do much damage to 5-EYES – for example New Zealand would never have been approached as the acquisition of a nuclear submarine would be vastly beyond the budget, or needs, of the small but incredibly professional Royal New Zealand Navy.

Canada may be feeling slightly raw about this – particularly those with long memories who recall the 1980s and the doomed plan to acquire nuclear submarines for the RCN. But who knows, in terms of timelines these vessels may be entering service in the same timeframe as Canada seeks to replace the Upholder/Victoria class – it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they may seek to join in later on.

Given 5-EYES is more than just an Indo-Pacific focus, it would be wrong to read much into this as a statement on the future of that Alliance. Rather it is better to see this as a subgrouping of a very successful international alliance.

HMCS Victoria
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

September 16, 2021

Tanks Chat #124 | FV4005 Tank Destroyer | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 23 Apr 2021

David Fletcher MBE explores the experimental FV4005, with original turret and 183mm gun fitted on a Centurion Mark 12 hull.
(more…)

September 15, 2021

Look at Life – Sea Horses – Tugboats from the 1960s

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PauliosVids
Published 24 Nov 2018

[The version of this film I originally scheduled has been taken down, but included a much more informative description, which I’m retaining below:]

capspread
Published 11 Oct 2020

#LookatLife #Tugboats #MerchantNavy #QueenMary #QueenElizabeth
Look at Life – Sea Horses – Tugboats from the 1960s

The video is the latest Look at Life, Volume One – Transport called Sea Horses – Little Tugs, without which any big port would come to a standstill, are featured made in May 1962.

Several Tugs are featured in the video along with several ships, including Ocean Liners. Those with names that are recognisable are below. There are others which are not shown below because their names are not known.

Tugboats

William Ryan
Built 1908 – Re-engined 1956 – Sold in 2000 for £1 as a “non-commercial worker”. In 2005, spotted at Hoo Marina converted to a houseboat. In 2009 for sale priced £33k In 2010 – Engine Removed.

Sun.X
Built in 1920 in Selby in Yorkshire. 196grt. Disposed 1969 and scrapped in 1969.

Effleton Hall
Paddlewheel Tugboat built in 1914. In service until 1967 where she was sold to shipbreakers for scrap. She was left sitting on a mudbank in Dunston. As part of the scrapping process her wooden afterdeck and interior were destroyed by fire prior to being broken up. The tug remained there for 2 years, deck frames warped, wood burned or rotted, hull part flooded and engines rusty but intact. But she was bought by an American and rebuilt on the River Tyne during 1969, modified to enable her to cross the Atlantic Ocean under her own steam, requiring fitting of modern navigational aids, radio, an enclosed wheelhouse and conversion from coal to diesel oil firing. She set sail on 18 September 1969 and arrived late March 1970 at San Francisco. She was donated to the National Park Service in 1979 and is now berthed at Hyde Street Pier, San Francisco. She has been restored to resemble her condition post-War 1946. 166grt – Length – 100 feet; Beam 21 feet; Depth of hold 10.8 feet.

Gladstone – Registered at Liverpool

Formby – Built 1951 Registered at Liverpool – 237grt Steam Engine

Canada – Registered at Liverpool

Marinia – Ocean going Tugboat

Poolzee – Dutch Smit Tug – Built 1942

Hestor – Could be Dutch

Ocean Liners

Queen Mary – 81,000 grt
In service between 1936 and 1967. She is now permanently moored as a tourist attraction, hotel, museum and event facility in Long Beach California.

Queen Elizabeth – Largest Ocean Liner at the time at 83,000 grt. In service between 1939 and 1968. Caught fire in Hong Kong in 1972 and completely destroyed.

Cargo Ships

Northern Clipper – No info

Toula – Built in 1937 as Westralia as a passenger-cargo ship. Renamed Toula in 1959 and in 1970 broken up in Shanghai.

Allegrity – Built 1945 as a coastal tanker. In 1946 renamed Sobat. In 1951 renamed Allegrity and purchased by FT Everard. On 22 December 1961 she capsized after grounding near Falmouth. She was a total loss
798grt Length – 183 feet; Breadth – 28 feet; Depth – 13 feet
Speed – 9 knots.

September 14, 2021

QotD: “In 1918 it was statistically safer for a British soldier to fight in the trenches of the Western Front than be a prisoner in Germany”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the Kaiser’s armies behaved abysmally on the battlefields of the Great War fighting foreigners. As soon as the Germany Army crossed the border into Belgium, the atrocities began. If the sensational stories of German soldiers eating Belgian babies can be discounted as Allied propaganda, the painstaking research of Alan Kramer and John Horne, in German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (2001), demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that Germany engaged in a systematic programme of civilian executions with the purpose of striking terror into the heart of the Belgian population. On 23 August, 1914, in the city of Dinant, the German army burned down a thousand buildings and executed some 674 civilians. The oldest among them was in his 90s; the youngest was barely a month old.

On and on the German outrages went: the sinking of the Lusitania, the execution of Nurse Cavell. Of course, the Allies were not saints, but the fashionable fallacy of moral equivalence — that all sides in the Great War were as bad as each other — founders on the rocks of Germany’s treatment of prisoners of war, who became slave labourers.

This was the main substance of the British agenda at Leipzig. Almost 165,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner on the Western Front between 1914-18; by the end of 1916, almost 80% were forced into labour for the Second Reich. Prisoners were literally worked to death in salt mines. And conditions in many camps were inhuman: in Wittenberg, two water taps served 17,000 Allied PoWs. When typhus struck the camp, the German staff abandoned it and left the prisoners to die. Some 13,000 Brits perished in the Kaiser’s camps — the vast majority because of brutality, disease, malnutrition or exhaustion. But 500 British soldiers were summarily shot or beaten to death at the Kaiser’s pleasure during their detention.

Of all the German PoWs held in Britain during the Great War, 3% died; of the British PoWs held in Germany, more than 10% perished. In 1918 it was statistically safer for a British soldier to fight in the trenches of the Western Front than be a prisoner in Germany. That year, 5.8% of British PoWs in Germany died, compared to 4% of British soldiers on the battlefield.

John Lewis Stempel, “Germany’s First World War Guilt”, UnHerd, 2021-05-25.

September 13, 2021

How Is Worcestershire Sauce Made? | How Do They Do It?

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, India — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

DCODE by Discovery
Published 25 Sep 2018

Worcestershire Sauce was invented in 1835 when a posh army officer went to India to help run the British Empire. He fell in love, not with a woman, but with a fish sauce. DCODE how the iconic sauce is made in England today.

#DCODE, #HowDoTheyDoIt, #WorcestershireSauce

QotD: Those classic British children’s stories

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

England, some time in the first half of the last century. Night.

In a boarding school near the Kentish coast, a ruffian sneaks along the corridor, hunting for the rare stamp that will make him rich. In a Home Counties village, a tousled-haired schoolboy lies awake, putting the finishing touches to his scheme that will win the war for the Allies. Many miles to the north, a boat pulls away from Wildcat Island, bound for fortune and glory. And far across the oceans, a group of schoolboys tremble in terror, as their South Sea captors prepare to sacrifice them to their idol …

Such is the world of the classic British children’s story: the world of Billy Bunter and his Greyfriars chums, William Brown and his fellow Outlaws, Titty, Roger and the rest of the Swallows and Amazons, Jennings, Molesworth and the Secret Seven. For more than half a century, such stories dominated the imagination of millions of readers. You can still buy second-hand editions of Richmal Crompton’s Guillermo el Detective, and wonder what on earth readers in General Franco’s Spain made of them.

When I was growing up, the books of Frank Richards, Arthur Ransome and Richmal Crompton were still everywhere, just about. Our local library groaned with stories in which middle-class British children spent their weekends in the barn across the fields and their weeknights sneaking out of the dormitory for some stolen tuck. Raised on the virtues of teamwork and courage, the boys grew up to become hunters, naval commanders and Spitfire pilots. I never found out what happened to the girls. For a boy in the early Eighties, to have been caught reading Mallory Towers would have been social suicide.

Dominic Sandbrook, “Children don’t need woke stories”, UnHerd, 2021-05-17.

September 12, 2021

Ocean travel without losing half the crew to scurvy

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Europe, Food, Health, History, India — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the most recent Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes discusses the scurvy dogs of the Spanish Main, or any other ocean before Europeans discovered how to fight off scurvy:

An English ship of the late 16th/early 17th century: this is a replica of the Susan Constant at the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. The original ship was built sometime before 1607 and rented by the Virginia Company of London to transport the original settlers to Jamestown.
Photo by Nicholas Russon, March 2004.

For as long as humans have suffered severe food shortages, scurvy has been known. The first record of it appears to date to ancient Egypt, in 1550BC, and it was especially familiar to the inhabitants of northern climates, with fresh vegetation every winter becoming scarce. Our word for scurvy almost certainly comes from the old Norse skyrbjugr — the skyr being a sort of soured cow’s milk that was thought to have caused the disease by going bad. In mid-sixteenth-century sources, scurvy was often referred to as though it was endemic to the Netherlands — a flat land assailed by the North Sea each winter, that had suffered long sieges and devastation thanks to the Dutch Revolt, and where fishing and merchant shipping employed an especially large proportion of the workforce. The Dutch thus had a perfect storm of factors to make vitamin C deficiencies more common, even though they abounded in fresh-caught fish and imported Baltic grain.

And so, over the centuries, the people of the northern climes had discovered the cure. Or rather, cures. The Iroquois ate the bark, needles or sap of evergreen trees — most likely white cedar, or some other kind of spruce, fir, juniper or pine, all rich in vitamin C. Their remedy saved the lives of Jacques Cartier’s colonists based near modern-day Quebec City in the winter of 1536. It’s the reason white cedar is known as arborvitae, the tree of life. And the Saami of northern Scandinavia prized cabbages and other leafy greens, in the summertime filling up casks of reindeer milk with crowberries and cloudberries, to be ready for winter.

[…]

Still more remedies were discovered by accident, as European ships began to range farther and farther abroad. The very first Portuguese voyagers around the Cape of Good Hope almost immediately discovered the value of orange and lemons — especially effective sources of vitamin C, as their acidity helps to preserve it. The voyage of Vasco da Gama, having been the first to round the Cape and reach the eastern coast of Africa, was then stricken with scurvy. They were only inadvertently saved when they traded with some Arabian ships laden with oranges, before landing at Mombasa. There, the ruler sent them a sheep and some sugar-cane, the gift also happening to include some oranges and lemons. Although the Portuguese couldn’t stay there long — they learned of a conspiracy to capture their ship — one of the voyagers later reported in wonder how the climate there must have been especially healthful to have cured them all.

Fortunately, at least some of the crew suspected the citrus instead. On the return journey from India, after a fatally slow three-month crossing of the Indian Ocean, some of the newly scurvy-ridden sailors asked their captain to procure them some oranges at Malindi. At least a few of the crew must certainly have been saved by this request, though perhaps the excitement of their imminent deliverance induced a few fatal aneurysms: “our sick did not profit”, was the report, “for the climate affected them in such a way that many of them died here.” By the time the fleet limped home back to Lisbon in 1499, scurvy had still managed to claim the lives of over two thirds of the original crew.

Nonetheless, the status of oranges as a scurvy wonder-cure had entered sailors’ lore. When Pedro Alvares Cabral repeated da Gama’s feat of rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1500, his crew purposefully treated their scurvy using oranges. And by the 1560s, if not earlier, the news of the cure had spread beyond the Portuguese. Sailors from the Low Countries, on the eve of the Dutch Revolt from Spain, were said to be staving off scurvy by eating oranges in large quantities, skins and all. (Orange peel is in fact especially rich in vitamin C, so they were onto something.) Their value was certainly appreciated by the Dutch explorer Jacob Corneliszoon van Neck by the time of his second expedition to the Indian Ocean in 1598. Not long after setting out, he purchased 10,000 oranges from a passing ship off the coast of Spain, rationing them out to all his crew. And on the return journey via St Helena they were dismayed when initially “we found no oranges, whereof we had most need, for those that were troubled with the scurvy disease.”

The account of van Neck’s journey was translated into English for the first voyage of the East India Company in 1601, which may be why its commander, James Lancaster, directed his crew to drink three spoonfuls of lemon juice every morning. Lancaster doesn’t appear to have paid any special attention to oranges and lemons ten years earlier, when he first attempted the voyage, although other English mariners like the privateer Sir Richard Hawkins had in the 1590s already been extolling their virtues. We don’t know many of the details of Lancaster’s lemon juice trial, but his flagship’s crew was not entirely saved. Contrary to common report, at least a third of them had died by the time they left their first landing at Table Bay, South Africa — a proportion similar those on the other ships of his fleet, though we don’t know how many actually died of scurvy or of other causes. But upon the expedition’s return, the experience placed lemon juice firmly on the list of known scurvy cures — “the most precious help that ever was discovered against the scurvy” as the East India Company’s surgeon-general put it.

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