Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 23 Jun 2023Every castle tells a story, but when one small country has over 600 castles, the collective story they tell is something like “holy heck ouch, ow, oh god, why are there so many arrows, ouch, good lord ow” – And that’s Wales for you.
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October 15, 2023
History Summarized: The Castles of Wales
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October 14, 2023
A Jacobite spy for Bonnie Prince Charlie
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes talks about the career of John Holker of Manchester, cloth manufacturer, who joined the army of Prince Charles Edward Stewart in 1745, and eventually became an expert in industrial espionage:
Prince Charles Edward Stuart, 1720 – 1788. Eldest Son of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart.
Portrait by Allan Ramsay, National Galleries Scotland via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve lately been reading about one of history’s greatest spies — not a James Bond-like agent with licence to kill, but a master of industrial espionage, John Holker.1
Holker was originally from Manchester, in Lancashire, where he was a skilled cloth manufacturer in the early eighteenth century, his specialty being calendering — a finishing process to give cloth a kind of sheen or glazed effect. But Holker was also a Catholic and a Jacobite — a believer in the claim of the Catholic descendants of the deposed king James II to be the rightful rulers of Great Britain, instead of the Hanoverian George I and George II who had only succeeded to the throne because they were Protestants. In 1745 James II’s grandson Charles, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie — likely the “Bonnie” who lies over the ocean in the famous song — landed in the Scottish Highlands and raised the royal standard. Charles’s uprising defeated the British troops stationed in Scotland, captured Edinburgh, and then marched down the west coast of England, capturing Carlisle and entering Lancashire.
To Holker, who had been born in the same year as the last Jacobite rebellion in 1719, the arrival of Charles in Manchester must have seemed like a once-in-a-generation opportunity. He and his business partner instantly joined Charles’s troops and he was appointed a lieutenant. But Manchester was the last place to provide many eager volunteers for the uprising, and when Charles reached Derby he lost heart and turned around. Holker and his business partner ended up being left to garrison Carlisle as Charles and his force retreated into Scotland to hunker down, and they were soon captured by the British troops sent to quash the uprising. They were then, as officers, sent to Newgate prison in London to sit with their legs bound in irons and await trial and certain execution.
But they never made it to trial. In the first demonstration of Holker’s extraordinary talent for espionage, they escaped. Holker had been allowed visitors in prison, so had drawn on London’s crypto-Jacobite circle to smuggle in files, ropes, and information about the prison and its surroundings. They managed to file through the leg-irons and window bars, climbed up the gutters onto the prison roof, and then used planks from the cell’s tabletop to cross onto the roof of a nearby house. In the event, they disturbed a dog guarding the house, and so Holker hid in a water-butt and became separated from the others. He eventually found refuge at a crypto-Jacobite’s house, then escaped into the countryside before managing to make his way to France.
In France, Holker joined his fellow veterans of the failed uprising of ‘45, becoming a lieutenant in a Jacobite regiment of the French army. He fought for the French in the Austrian Netherlands — present-day Belgium — against the Hapsburgs, the Hanoverians, the Dutch, and the British. Even more extraordinary, however, was that when Bonnie Prince Charlie wanted to go in secret to England in 1750, it was Holker who went with him as his sole companion and guide. Although Charles failed to persuade his supporters in England to rise up in rebellion on their own, Holker managed to get the prince secretly and safely to London and back.
By the time Holker reached his early thirties he had been an industrialist, rebel, prisoner, fugitive, soldier, undercover agent, and even spy-catcher: he successfully identified a spy for the British in Charles’s circle, even if Charles failed to heed his warning. But in 1751 Holker’s career took yet another turn when he was recruited by the French government as an industrial spymaster.
Holker’s chief task was to steal British textile technologies.
1. Unless otherwise stated, I’ve drawn much of my information on Holker and the industries that the French attempted to copy from John R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the 18th Century (Taylor & Francis, 2017), particularly chapter 3.
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October 13, 2023
Elvira, the Party Girl Double Agent
World War Two
Published 11 Oct 2023She’s the gambler with a hotline to the Abwehr. The party girl tearing up the London social scene. Now she’s doing her bit to hold back the Panzer divisions and pave the way for D-Day. This is the story of Elvira Concepcion Josefina de la Fuente Chaudoir, Double Cross’s most flamboyant double agent.
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QotD: Sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four remains widely read today — and ubiquitously quoted and cited. In fact, during the spring of 2017, in the wake of the inauguration of President Donald Trump — and controversies about the “alternative facts” that his aides marshaled as evidence of record attendance figures at the event — the book achieved the remarkable, unprecedented feat of skyrocketing to number one on fiction bestseller lists. This occurred an astonishing 67 years after its original date of release. Nothing of this kind had ever happened to another book in publishing history. And, in the case of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was the fourth time that it had topped the bestseller lists: first in 1954, in the U.K., after a BBC-TV adaptation sent sales soaring; second, throughout the English-speaking world during the so-called countdown to 1984 between October 1983 and April 1984; and third, in 2003, as the centennial commemorations of Orwell’s birth dominated the headlines and airwaves on both sides of the Atlantic.
In fact, it is fair to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four has never not been a bestseller and a publishing phenomenon. According to the website Ranker.com, the work has sold more than 25 million copies since 1949. More than a half century later, Manchester Guardian readers voted Nineteen Eighty-Four the most influential book of the 20th century. Waterstone’s, a British bookstore chain, has ranked Orwell’s dystopia as the second most popular book of the 20th century (behind J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings). That is an amazing feat in its own right, given that most people understandably do not particularly enjoy reading (let alone rereading) nightmarish stories of torture, betrayal, and brainwashing. The book’s ascent to the top of fiction bestseller lists in 2016 and 2017, along with the ceaseless invocation of Orwell’s catchwords to characterize the Trump administration, induced Signet, Orwell’s American publisher, to rush out a new print run of 500,000 copies. Expectations are that total sales will pass 30 million by the time of the 2020 election in the United States.
John Rodden and John Rossi, “George Orwell Warned Us, But Was Anyone Listening?”, The American Conservative, 2019-10-02.
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October 12, 2023
It’s not mere “activism”, it’s “AAAAAH-ctivism”!
In The Critic, Charlotte Gill outlines the changes in activist tactics down to today’s utter hysterics on Every. Single. Issue.
“Just Stop Oil Activists Walking Up Whitehall” by Alisdare Hickson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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“How many kids have to die?” were the apocalyptic words of a Just Stop Oil activist on Sky News last week. She grimaced and flung her hands out as she asked presenter Anna Jones, and others in the studio, what it would take for them to get involved in the fight against climate change. Would it be “until the water’s lapping at your ankles? Until your own kids haven’t got food?” Forget the British mantra to “keep calm and carry on”. Anyone watching would get the impression that the advice is now firmly to “PANIC!!”
Far from jumping on the nearest piece of furniture to protect myself from rising tides and who knows what else — sharks with Leave-Means-Leave-branded laser beams shooting from their heads, for example — I felt strangely immune to someone telling me the world’s going to end. Like the “boy who cried wolf”, there’s no shortage of middle-aged people ready to cry apocalypse. It’s no surprise one’s sensory reactions have resultantly dialled down a notch or two.
I only really noticed the rise of AAAAAH-ctivism this year, after covering the war on cars. Whenever I have defended the petrol proletariat — those punished every time they drive a car — I am struck by the increasing number of people telling me I don’t care about “CHILDREN’S LUNGS!!” or “PEOPLE DYING!!” Last month Wales introduced 20mph speed limits, which vast amounts of voters have objected to. The counterargument to any perfectly pragmatic concerns is always “SO YOU THINK SPEED IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIVES?!” It is quite an effective way to close down debate, portraying it as a matter of being for or against death.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when AAAAAH-ctivism began. After all, fear mongering is nothing new in politics — one of the most disastrous examples being Tony Blair and George W. Bush’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” claims that led the West into the Iraq War.
Following some quiet(ish) years in Blighty, the hyperbole ramped up around Brexit, when Labour MP David Lammy compared the pro-Leave European Research Group to the Nazis, as well as advocates of South African apartheid. Elsewhere, militant Remainers repeatedly warned of the Hard and Far Right being on the march. Writing for The Guardian in 2018, Michael Chessum set the tone when he warned, “We are living through a moment of encroaching darkness and nationalist resurgence.” Nowadays, you could say that the “darkness” looks more like a £6 salmon sandwich at Pret.
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KAMIKAZE: HMS Formidable, May 4, 1945
Armoured Carriers
Published 18 Apr 2020It was the height of the invasion of Okinawa. Japan was throwing a last-ditch effort at unseating US Marines from their beachheads. Kamikazes swarmed the skies. HMS Formidable, part of the British Pacific Fleet interdicting attacks from Formosa (Taiwan), was to suffer a direct hit on her armoured flight deck. Here’s what happened — in the words of those who were there.
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October 11, 2023
How Britain Broke Hitler’s Brain
World War Two
Published 10 Oct 2023In a re-upload of one of our D-Day 24 Hour videos, Astrid introduces you to the war’s most effective counter-espionage and deception programme, The Double Cross system. Today she’ll talk about their operations before and during D-Day and introduce you to some of the most important double agents. Their mission: fool the Führer.
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October 8, 2023
The End of the Warsaw Uprising – WW2 – Week 267 – October 7, 1944
World War Two
Published 7 Oct 2023The Warsaw Uprising comes to its conclusion, a tragic one for the Poles. In the field in Europe, there are Allied attacks toward Aachen, Bologna, and Debrecen, while in China the Japanese have begun a new phase of their Ichi Go Offensive.
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Richard Blair’s memories of his father, George Orwell
Jonathon Van Maren contacted Richard Horatio Blair, the adopted son of George Orwell to discuss his memories of his famous father:
“My story starts on the 14th of May, 1944, when I was adopted by Eric Arthur Blair and his wife Eileen,” he told me. “This was during the Second World War. He’d been wanting a child for several years because he felt, rightly or wrongly, that he was unable to have children himself. I think this was compounded slightly by the fact that Eileen — my mother — was not very well herself, and in fact when I was ten months old, in March of 1945, she went to the hospital in Newcastle, which was the area where she was born and had gone to school. She went into a nursing home and died very soon after being anesthetized to have a hysterectomy. She probably had cancer, was very anemic, and simply had a heart attack on the operating table and died.”
The adoption had come about when Eileen was told by her sister-in-law, Dr. Gwen Shaughnessy, that she knew of a pregnant woman whose husband was off fighting. Orwell and Eileen adopted Richard when he was only three weeks old, and Orwell ensured that he alone would be known as Richard’s father by burning the names of the birth parents from the birth certificate with a cigarette. Richard would never know Eileen, as she died a mere nine months after the adoption took place, leaving the little boy and Orwell to fend for themselves. Some of Orwell’s friends suggested that perhaps he turn Richard over to someone else, but Orwell was having none of it. “I’ve got my son now, I’m not going to give him over,” Blair recalled. Blair even remembers Orwell “changing my nappy and feeding me after my mother died.”
“Meanwhile, my father had been asked to go to Germany at the end of the war by his friend, a gentleman by the name of David Astor of the Astor family,” Blair told me.
He was the proprietor of a newspaper called The Observer, and he asked my father — they had met during the war and become friends — to go to Germany after the war to observe what was happening, and it was while he was in Paris that he got a telegram telling him that Eileen, my mother, had died. He had to rush back and attend to the funeral and funeral arrangements. He decided the best thing he could do would be to go back to Germany and continue his war report, so that’s what he did. I was placed in the hands of relatives and friends to be looked after. I was cared for from that period onward by a nanny.
In 1946, he had decided to give up his reviews and extra work, because by now he had published his first major book, Animal Farm, which gave him enough resources to think about what to do next. And he had in his mind by then that he wanted to write what turned out to be 1984, and he decided to take the invitation of his friend David Astor to go to a remote island off the west coast of Scotland called Jura. He went up for a holiday and spent a couple of weeks there in the early part of 1946, came back, and announced that he would like to move out of London to this island of Jura and rent a farmhouse called Barnhill. A few weeks later I joined him with my nanny at the farmhouse, a place he had indicated to a friend was a very ‘un-get-at-able’ place.
Indeed it was. To reach the remote Hebridean island from London, “you had to take a train and several ferries, and then a taxi from the top part of the island, and then for the last five miles you had to walk,” Blair recalled. At first, it was Richard, Orwell, and his nanny, Susie Watson. This didn’t last long: Watson clashed with Orwell’s younger sister Avril and returned to London. “From that point on,” Blair told me, “I was cared for by my father’s sister Avril, and that continued well past when he died in 1950.” In the meantime, Blair still had a few precious years with his ailing father, who was trying to balance his fear of passing on his tuberculosis to his son with wanting to be an involved father. “He was really hands-on in a way that was really unusual for that era,” Blair told one interviewer.
In fact, he was so hands-on that he even worried about Richard’s television consumption, which is perhaps not surprising from someone who was so concerned about how people absorbed information — but Richard was, at this point, a very small child. “As a father he was completely devoted to me,” Blair told me. “He was terribly worried about my emotional development simply because he had TV, and he was very concerned that the views [on TV] might be passed on to me.” Blair still bears a scar on his temple from balancing on a chair while “watching him make a wooden toy for me”. He fell off the chair, cracked his head, and was bustled down to the village for a few stitches in the enormous gash on his forehead. “There’s a groove in the bone,” he ruefully told one interviewer. But there were no tests in those days, and so his head was sewn shut and he was sent back home again.
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October 6, 2023
Farnborough Airshow – 1959 (in colour)
spottydog4477
Published 28 Dec 2009Farnborough Airshow – 1959 (in colour)
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October 5, 2023
From Hilaire Belloc’s sailboat to your nearest international airport terminal
The most recent review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf considers Hilaire Belloc’s The Cruise of the “Nona”:
Late in the May of 1925, around midnight, Hilaire Belloc climbed into a tiny boat and put out to sea so that he would have some time to think. The sea gives ample time to think, especially if like Belloc you disdain the use of a motor. Some wag once jested that sailing is like being at war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of abject terror. I suppose in some sense that’s correct, but give me the boredom of the sailboat any day over the boredom of the trench, the boredom of the cubicle, the boredom of endless doomscrolling.
Sailing is productive boredom, and seems unusually well calibrated for causing the mind to wander in interesting or delightful or just plain ridiculous directions. Maybe it’s the stimulating effects of the wind in your face and the smell of salt in the air, or maybe it’s the weird altered state of consciousness that comes from staring at the ocean. I think it’s because sailing is the human condition in miniature. It places you perfectly-balanced on a knife’s edge between agency and helplessness, and in so doing it both spurs the mind to activity and gives it space to relax and reflect.1
[…]
Anybody who’s travelled extensively in the third world has seen the modern version of this. There’s nothing intrinsic to being a reformer or a liberalizer that makes you an agent of American power, and yet … there’s a better than even chance that you are. After a while these people all blend together — the idealistic students, the LGBT activists, the NGO staffers, the embassy employees recruited from amongst the locals. They come from a hundred nations, from every conceivable race and religion, and yet something invisibly and inexorably molds them all into the same shape, like iron filings lining themselves up in the presence of a powerful magnet.
Soon they have American souls, and divided loyalties to match. The local regime panics and views them as an internal enemy, which only furthers their alienation from their motherland and their flight into the bosom of Global America. Most empires rule primarily though influence, not coercion, and this class of people is one of America’s most powerful weapons for maintaining and extending its hegemony.
A related phenomenon is the awful sameness that is slowly taking over the whole world. Perhaps your cruise ship docks at a dozen ports over the course of its journey, and every one of them looks exactly the same — the same tiki bar with the same sign, the same shops selling the same ornamental kitsch probably all made in the same factory. You aren’t visiting a place, you’re visiting a psychic manifestation of the Buffetverse, another outpost of Margaritaville, a Potemkin seaport with frozen daiquiris. You all know what I’m talking about. We make fun of it all the time, because cruise ships are for chuds. But it doesn’t just happen with cruise ships.
The cancer usually starts in an international airport. Form follows function, so it’s superficially reasonable that every airport on earth should look and feel exactly the same. But the real reason is that it follows in the wake of the kinds of people who fly into those airports, praising the broadening effects of foreign travel whilst terraforming everything they touch until it resembles the “arts district” of a midsize American city, replete with distressed wood finishes, gravid with craft beers. Real foreignness would cause these people to recoil in shock, or to demand a peacekeeping intervention. It’s not unusual for the imperial functionary class to be parochial, but what’s surreal about ours is how they combine the blinkered innocence of a farm boy with an ideology of weary cosmopolitanism.
None of this was as far along when Belloc took his little cruise, but the seeds had been planted, and he could feel in his bones that something horrible lay across the horizon. So he fights it the only way he knows how — by noticing and celebrating everything distinctive and local and weird about every place he visits. No island is too small for him to mention by name and recall a ghost story or two associated with it. No village is too commonplace for him to remark on the habits, physiognomy, and vices of the people who live in it. It’s the same spirit as that which animates Chesterton’s essay on cheese, but applied to a hundred hamlets and fishing ports, a paean to the regional diversity and distinctiveness that was already slipping away.
1. Oh hey, it’s the focused-mode and diffuse-mode of cognition! The best way to think deeply about anything is to toggle between them.
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The Great War: Its End and Effects, Lecture by Prof Margaret MacMillan
McDonald Centre
Published 25 Jan 201922 January 2019, “How far did the Versailles Treaty make Peace?”, Professor Margaret MacMillan, Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford. The lecture was sponsored by Christ Church Cathedral and the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, Oxford.
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October 2, 2023
Why Web Filters Don’t Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem
Tom Scott
Published 6 Jun 2016In a small town with an unfortunate name, let’s talk about filtering and innuendo. And use it as an excuse for as many visual jokes as possible.
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October 1, 2023
The End of Market Garden – WW2 – Week 266 – September 30, 1944
World War Two
Published 30 Sep 2023This week, Operation Market Garden comes to its unsuccessful conclusion, but there’s a lot more going on — the Soviets launch an offensive in the Estonian Archipelago, the Warsaw Uprising is on the ropes, the Allies advance in Italy, the Americans on Peleliu, and Tito and Stalin make plans to clear Yugoslavia of the enemy.
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September 30, 2023
Multiculturalism has led to a “promissory note that the West cannot fulfill”
Colby Cosh on a recent speech by British Home Secretary Suella Braverman decrying the inevitable result of western multicultural attitudes and actions:
The Rt Hon Suella Braverman KC MP, Secretary of State for the Home Department.
Picture by Rory Arnold / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.
U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s scathing criticism of the postwar framework for refugee protection needs to be considered, but is falling on deaf ears
The concept of multiculturalism, whether you like it or not, is of acknowledged Canadian origin. So perhaps we should all flinch a little when it is grumblingly condemned by European leaders — an increasingly common phenomenon that may have reached a new pinnacle on Tuesday.
Suella Braverman, the United Kingdom’s Conservative home secretary, appeared at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the American Enterprise Institute to deliver a resounding critique of the postwar framework for refugee protection and of the “misguided” and “toxic” multiculturalism doctrine that has bent it out of shape.
Braverman’s speech is meeting with an orgy of denunciation among British liberals and celebrities. On the other hand, the inevitable fate of the speech is to be laughed off by anti-immigration critics who have heard British and European politicians warn for decades that humanitarianism cannot be a suicide pact for Old World nation-states — without ever doing anything much themselves to change migration policy.
In Braverman’s account, European countries devised the United Nations Refugee Convention largely to sort out the continent’s own affairs in the aftermath of the Second World War. Refugees are defined in the text as those with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted,” but the treaty is now interpreted so as to permit ill-disguised economic migration, to encourage unlawful and risky crossings of seas and borders, and to facilitate prolonged shopping by migrants among desirable destination countries.
The result, for better or worse, is that refugee protections are now potentially available to nigh on a billion people, creating a “promissory note that the West cannot fulfill.” (Or, as French President Emmanuel Macron put it a few days ago, “We (Europeans) cannot accommodate all the misery in the world.”) Braverman enumerates four critiques of a period in which “there has been more migration to the U.K. and Europe … than in all the time that went before.”
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