Published on 1 Mar 2013
Here’s also an older post covering the technological challenges faced by the Royal Navy in the post-Napoleonic era, and some of the reasons for all those “weird” ship designs in the Victorian era.
May 6, 2017
History of the Royal Navy – Steam, steel and Dreadnoughts (1806-1918)
Comments Off on History of the Royal Navy – Steam, steel and Dreadnoughts (1806-1918)
May 5, 2017
HRH The Duke of Edinburgh calls it a career
HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Canadian Regiment, presenting the 3rd Battalion with their Regimental Colours, 17 April 2013. (via Wikipedia)
Mark Steyn on the announcement yesterday that His Royal Highness will be retiring from public appearances this fall:
Buckingham Palace announced today that the Duke of Edinburgh will retire from Royal engagements this autumn. He’ll be 96 next month, which is a quarter-century past the average retirement age – or four decades past it, if you’re a French or Greek civil servant.
His Royal Highness is the Queen’s consort. That’s an ill-defined role prone to an accumulation of frustrations: for Americans, think First Lady or Vice President for life. A lot of consorts are unpopular with their spouse’s subjects (for example, Queen Rania, Jordan’s current Hashemite hottie). Prince Philip has been doing it longer than anyone in the history of the Royal Family, since the day in 1952 when he and Princess Elizabeth were at Treetops in Kenya and received the news that George VI (the King’s Speech guy) had died. Harry Truman was in the White House; Stalin was in the Kremlin; some guy called Mao had just taken over in China. That’s a long time.
I last saw him five years ago in Glasgow with my daughter, who was impressed by how cool he was, and how spry for a nonagenarian. Elsewhere, opinions differ. He’s worshiped as a god in outlying parts of Vanuatu, but in Canberra the ruling Liberal Party went bananas and ended Tony Abbott’s premiership for giving the guy an Australian knighthood. Still and all, he’s kept the show on the road in an age hostile to the monarchical principle, and one which has seen the crowns of almost all his cousins come tumbling throughout Europe.
Steyn also recounts discussing the respective Australian and Canadian constitutions with Prince Philip during the Australian referendum on becoming a republic:
As a Canadian, I was somewhat distracted by the referendum Down Under, which I kept trying to slip into the conversation. But the Duke was inscrutable on that front – or perhaps, as I now think of it, quietly confident about victory. Toward the end, as he walked us to the door before my carriage turned back into a pumpkin, I made an offhand remark contrasting the 1901 Aussie constitution with the 1867 Canadian one, and the subject evidently engaged him, because he launched into a very well informed disquisition on the differences between the two. There were a half-dozen or so of us at dinner that night – an earl, a viscount, a baron, a knight, etc, plus a plain old mister (me). I’d assumed upon acceptance of my invitation that we guests would be there as unpaid jesters to amuse our Royal hosts. But, in fact, HRH was a quickwitted chap, and we were hard put to keep up with him.
One of my fellow diners, bemoaning the lack of agricultural workers in Britain, explained that his farm now brought in young Australians and South Africans, who were able to make ninety-to-a-hundred quid a day (about £60,000 a year) picking onions.
“Crying all the way to the bank?” said the Duke.
I thought that was a rather good line. Happy retirement.
Comments Off on HRH The Duke of Edinburgh calls it a career
The Battle of Arleux – Robert Nivelle Gets Fired I THE GREAT WAR Week 145
Published on 4 May 2017
The Battle of Arras continued in smaller scale attacks this week 100 years ago. Fighting focused on Arleux and the Scarpe river. Neither of these battles was able to repeat the success of the early Arras offensive. The casualties of the Nivelle Offensive were now costing Robert Nivelle his job as he was still blaming everyone but himself.
Comments Off on The Battle of Arleux – Robert Nivelle Gets Fired I THE GREAT WAR Week 145
Back from the brink of extinction … the Scottish Tory
In The Spectator, Alex Massie discusses one of the most unexpected political revivals of this century:
Twenty years ago, Conservatism all but died in Scotland. Tony Blair’s landslide victory made Scotland, at least in terms of its Westminster representation, a Tory-free zone. At no point since has the party won more than a single Scottish seat, and the last time the party won more than a quarter of the Scottish vote, in 1983, its current leader, Ruth Davidson, was four years old. Two years ago, the Tories won just 14 per cent of the vote, an even worse result than 1997. This seemed to fit a broader narrative: Toryism had been beaten back into England, a sign of the union’s exhaustion and a Scotland moving inexorably towards independence.
How different it all looks now. The most recent opinion polls in Scotland suggest the Tories could win as many as one in three ballots cast on 8 June. One opinion poll even suggested that, albeit on a uniform swing, the party could win as many as a dozen Scottish seats — including Moray, seat of the SNP’s Westminster leader Angus Robertson. In an era where elections are delivering extra-ordinary results, one might just be a stronger union and a strange rebirth of Scottish Conservatism.
Massie credits the leader of Scotland’s Conservatives for much of the turnaround:
Just as it remains hard to imagine how the SNP could have risen to its current state of supremacy without Alex Salmond, so it is difficult to underestimate Ruth Davidson’s importance to the Scottish Tory revival. Her personal background — working-class, lesbian, BBC journalist — is often used to explain her ability to reach a wider audience than previous Tory leaders, but there is more to it than that. Viewed from one angle, she is every inch the modernising Tory — her influence played a large part in persuading Theresa May to maintain the commitment to spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on international aid. But seen from a different perspective, she is also a traditional Conservative: a god-fearing Christian and former army reservist. She believes in gay marriage because she is a Conservative, not despite it.
Most of all, she offers an alternative to SNP orthodoxy. Sturgeon warns that only a vote for the SNP can ‘protect’ Scotland against an ‘unfettered’ Tory govern-ment whose values are alien and inimical to those of Scotland. Davidson observes that ‘the SNP is not Scotland’. Unionists are Scots too. Labour, not so long ago the party of Scotland, might even finish fourth in this election, at least in terms of seats won. If Ian Murray retains Edinburgh South, he will be Scotland’s only red panda.
Political anthropologists are already asking why the Scottish Tory party, previously thought close to extinction, has made such a remarkable recovery. For more than a generation on the left, the idea of the Tories being an invasive species in Scotland has been the foundation of first Labour and then SNP politics — but it no longer holds. If at least one in four Scots are prepared to endorse Tory candidates, can one really maintain the fiction there is something grubbily disreputable or even unpatriotic about voting for a Conservative candidate?
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
Comments Off on Back from the brink of extinction … the Scottish Tory
QotD: The British Army before WW1
When the Duke of Wellington described the British army as “the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink,” he was probably speaking no more than the truth. But what is significant is that his opinion would have been echoed by any non-military Englishman for nearly a hundred years subsequently.
The French Revolution and the new conception of “national” war changed the character of most Continental armies, but England was in the exceptional position of being immune from invasion and of being governed during most of the nineteenth century by non-military bourgeoisie. Consequently its army remained, as before, a small profession force more or less cut off from the rest of the nation. The war-scare of the [eighteen-]sixties produced the Volunteers, later to develop into the Territorials, but it was not till a few years before the Great War that there was serious talk of universal service. Until the late nineteenth century the total number of white troops, even in war-time never reached a quarter of a million men, and it is probable that every great British land battle between Blenheim and Loos was fought mainly by foreign soldiers.
George Orwell, “Democracy in the British Army”, Left, 1939-09.
Comments Off on QotD: The British Army before WW1
May 4, 2017
Ici Londres: Do Theresa May’s opponents seriously prefer Juncker?
Published on 3 May 2017
Comments Off on Ici Londres: Do Theresa May’s opponents seriously prefer Juncker?
May 3, 2017
QotD: “Patrick Macnee was a Serious Feminist”
Patrick Macnee
- Refused to model Steed after James Bond because Bond “uses women like battering rams”
- Embraced the concept of a female partner after being cast opposite a male one for a season
- Listened when Honor Blackman began telling him about gender inequality
- Didn’t think that being saved by a woman in any way injured his character’s masculinity
- Consistently gave the women credit for the success of the show
- Recognized that the male producers were chauvinists, and blamed himself for not doing more about it
- Stood up for Linda Thorson when the producers tried to bully her (and was apparently terrifyingly angry about it)
- Was literally the only person on that show that Diana Rigg never said a bad word about
- Consistently talked about being raised by women and viewing women as equal to men
Lauren H. Brooks, “Patrick Macnee was a Serious Feminist”, Kinkiness … and Patrick Mcnee, 2017-04-21.
Comments Off on QotD: “Patrick Macnee was a Serious Feminist”
May 2, 2017
Britain’s “foregone conclusion” election
Colby Cosh provides a thumbnail sketch of how Britain got to the point of having an election where the end result is not in great doubt, and the likely losers and big losers:
[British PM Theresa May] has now broken that promise [to serve the full term her party won in 2015], unapologetically. Any half-sane politician’s instinct would tell her that this is an incredibly dangerous thing to have done, and we all know that voters generally loathe unnecessary election activity, or that they pretend to. But the current polls suggest that the British public completely understands why she broke the promise, that they approve of her breaking it, and that they intend to reward her for it. If you follow the UK election as a Canadian, you will hear May talking about “strong and stable” government at about 200 RPM, in exactly the same way Stephen Harper used to. This is no coincidence.
The Labour Party is torn between the old-fashioned socialist militants who made Jeremy Corbyn leader and the respectable corporate types who actually run the party and serve in the House of Commons. The UK has legislation requiring fixed-term parliaments, so May needed the support of Labour in a Commons vote in order to hold an early election. A Parliament can still be dismissed early if there is a vote of no confidence in the government, or if two-thirds of MPs vote to allow it.
Which they did. Corbyn loyalists, uncertain whether their man could survive as leader until 2020, had little reason not to consent to the snap vote. Labourite Corbyn-haters, seeing a chance to dispose of their village-Marxist boss without the dangers of a party coup, went along too. They almost seem to be half-throwing the election, relieved to have some prospect of Labour returning to power before 2025.
Meanwhile, the Scottish National Party, seemingly in firm control of Scottish politics and culture, made the Quebec mistake of talking about another independence referendum too soon after losing one. It is a classic shark jump. The people of Scotland seem to have realized that within Scotland, the UK general election will be a referendum on whether they want another divisive, stressful independence struggle right away.
This is not looking like good news for the strident but useless SNP delegation to Westminster. Polls show the Conservatives running a strong second in Scotland, with a chance of taking ten or so seats away from the Nats. Four years ago, I would have fully expected to be typing “Jesus Christ just held a press conference in Clackmannanshire” before I typed the words in that last sentence.
Comments Off on Britain’s “foregone conclusion” election
May 1, 2017
“We can leave aside the idea of a libertarian revival. No one in or near government wants less control by the State”
Sean Gabb reflects on the coming British general election (where he’s decided to hold his nose and vote Conservative, despite his strong distaste for Theresa May’s governing style and the party itself):
… we are entering an age of rapid ideological change. Questions of whether we should have identity cards, or if the authorities should be able to censor the media, are becoming less important than the questions of who makes these decisions, and how they are made. There is not – and probably, in my lifetime, never has been – a libertarian option in British politics. The choice has always been so far which elements of a broadly leftist-authoritarian agenda should be pushed hardest. The choice now is between a Conservative Government that has no electoral interest in leftism, and limited inclination to uphold its hegemony, and various parties that will try to keep that hegemony going till it fully shrivels away. The Conservative Party is an organisation of frauds and liars. Its directors are in the pocket of any interest group with money to spend. Though split on exactly what it believes, however, Labour is a party of true believers. The Conservatives will do evil by inertia, Labour by choice. Without hope of immediate improvement, I will vote Conservative.
Give her a decent majority, and Theresa May will take us out of the European Union on acceptable terms. These terms will be available almost for the asking. The European Union is little more than the agent of twenty seven governments, all with conflicting interests. The British Government will have a fresh mandate to act on behalf of a unitary state. Mrs May is no fool, and she must understand that her hold on power and her place in the history books are both contingent on how she manages our disengagement. Her lack of principle is beside the point – or may be an advantage.
And then?
We can leave aside the idea of a libertarian revival. No one in or near government wants less control by the State. Hardly any of the electors want it. This is probably for the best. I have been an insider on the British free market movement for about forty years. Those who run it are willing to nod approvingly whenever freedom of speech is mentioned, or due process of law. The mainstream utopia, though, involves full speed ahead for the City banking casinos, and an immigration policy that will stuff the rest of us into sixty-storey tower blocks of bedsitting rooms. What we can more likely expect – and hope for – is what I will delicately call a revival of national identity. This will eventually involve some regard for historic liberties. It will also involve a degree of directed reindustrialisation, and even a pretty generous welfare system.
Comments Off on “We can leave aside the idea of a libertarian revival. No one in or near government wants less control by the State”
April 30, 2017
Fight For Air Supremacy – Bloody April 1917 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. Real Engineering
Published on 29 Apr 2017
Check out Real Engineering and their video about WW1 airplanes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI08NGCgISE
Meet us and see original WW1 airplanes: http://bit.ly/TGWStowMaries
“Bloody April” was the result of two competing aviation strategies: The more defence oriented German Luftstreitkräfte and the more offensive oriented British Royal Flying Corps. The RFC needed air reconnaissance for the Battle of Arras and the Germans needed to deny them them. With the superior German Albatross D.III fighters, the German Jagdstaffeln inflicted heavy losses on the RFC.
Comments Off on Fight For Air Supremacy – Bloody April 1917 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. Real Engineering
QotD: Famous for being famous
Every country that has television, which is all of them, must have celebrities who are famous for almost nothing. The U.K. practically specializes in this. But the “almost” is important. Even the weird layer of U.K. celebrity that subsists on the old country’s old-fashioned panel and reality shows normally tends to demand that a celeb have been a member of Parliament or received a surgically enhanced bosom. If possible, both.
Colby Cosh, “On the ignominious downfall of Jared from Subway”, National Post, 2015-08-20.
Comments Off on QotD: Famous for being famous
April 29, 2017
If Walls Could Talk The History of the Home Episode 4: The Kitchen
Published on 2 Feb 2017
Comments Off on If Walls Could Talk The History of the Home Episode 4: The Kitchen
April 28, 2017
The Battle of Doiran – Turmoil In The French Army I THE GREAT WAR Week 144
Published on 27 Apr 2017
The Salonica Front had been quiet over the winter, but much like the recent battles on the Western Front, it erupted this week. The British Army tried to take the Bulgarian positions at Doiran – these positions might have been some of the best defences of the entire war. After the failed Nivelle Offensive, some French soldiers start to question the whole war.
Comments Off on The Battle of Doiran – Turmoil In The French Army I THE GREAT WAR Week 144
April 27, 2017
Jack Dee’s Encounter with an ex-SAS Officer – Live at the Apollo – BBC
Uploaded on 7 Mar 2008
British comedian Jack Dee explains why you should never surprise an ex-SAS officer in a pub.
Comments Off on Jack Dee’s Encounter with an ex-SAS Officer – Live at the Apollo – BBC
April 23, 2017
The Real Reason We Never Hear From Monty Python Anymore
Published on 20 Apr 2017
The legendary comedy group Monty Python was once a force of nature, influencing everything that came after them with their surreal, absurdist approach to comedy. So, why don’t we hear from them anymore? When Graham Chapman ceased to be in 1989, fellow Python member Terry Jones described it as “the worst case of party-pooping [he’d] ever seen.” His death came the day before Python’s 20th anniversary, and what followed was a bizarre but fitting eulogy, written to pay tribute to the man who’d written a dead parrot into one of the troupe’s most famous sketches. Chapman becoming an ex-person seemed to put a damper on any kind of authentic reunion, but what about the others? What happened to the late, great Monty Python?
Terry Jones’s illness | 0:44
Michael Palin’s travel shows | 1:54
John Cleese’s purism | 3:01
Terry Gilliam’s moved on | 4:13
Eric Idle’s Broadway ambitions | 5:06
They want to finish on a good note | 6:02Read more here → http://www.grunge.com/53323/never-hear-monty-python-anymore-2/
Comments Off on The Real Reason We Never Hear From Monty Python Anymore
