Extra Credits
Published on 20 May 2019Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
When a soldier returns home from the battlefield, he finds the townspeople in fear of a warlock — but the solider wants to learn more about this fellow. And (un?)fortunately, the warlock is all too happy to tell…
May 21, 2019
Warlocks and Warriors – Russian Myth – Extra Mythology
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Four “youths” vandalize model railway show
There don’t appear to be any details online about the four “youths” who were arrested then released, so I assume their anonymity is protected by a British equivalent of the “Young Offenders Act”. The Market Deeping Model Railway Club describes the crime on their website:
We were all immensely upset to discover that overnight the school where our show was to be held had been broken into and almost everything totally ruined. This has devastated not only our own members but those of other clubs and the traders who had already set up shop. In the circumstances we felt we had no option other than to cancel the show.
Some of the models destroyed were irreplaceable and while we will of course be seeking to replace and rebuild wherever possible, this will take time and money. We have been overwhelmed by the many messages of support we have received together with offers of financial assistance. Please do help raise funds via our Just Giving page.
Click the image to go to their Just Giving fundraising page.
More on the incident from Deepings Nub News:
Bill Sowerby, Market Deeping Model Railway Club exhibition manager, told Deepings Nub News: “I arrived at 7.30am to be met by one of our members who told me the terrible news.
“Four of the layouts were completely trashed – two of our club’s, one privately owned and one from St Neots club.
“Four demonstrator stands and one for Bourne U3A stall, which would have raised funds for their organisation, was also smashed.
“Fortunately five other layouts in another room were undamaged and we had nine more left to install early this morning.
“It’s really hurtful for us all, not just because of the thousands of pounds we have lost in income – we were expecting between 400 and 500 visitors – and have paid out a lot of money to put on what is the club’s main fundraising event. Demonstrators and trade stands have also lost income.
“But it’s also the time and effort that members put into building the layouts. The St Neots layout took 25 years to construct and our Woodcroft layout took 26 years and involved more than 100 people over those years spending thousands of hours.
“Woodcroft will be repaired, but it’s so sad because a large number of the people who dedicated their time to build it are no longer with us. It has real sentimental importance to the club.
“Although our Knowl End – a children’s layout – was completely destroyed.”
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May 20, 2019
Britain’s InterCity 125 has run its last revenue miles
Tim Worstall explains why the withdrawal of the InterCity 125 has struck a chord in commuters and railfans alike:
An InterCity 125 power car in British Rail livery at Manchester Piccadilly in October 1976.
Photo by Dave Hitchborne via Wikimedia Commons.
The last run was between London’s Paddington Station and Exeter St. Davids. There’s an amusing anecdote about the development and testing of the locomotives that I thought I’d blogged, but better late than never:
There’s something called the chicken gun. If you’ve a jet engine then you want to make sure that it doesn’t fall apart in a bird strike. Shards of sharp metal flying around at hundreds of miles an hour are not known to be good for aluminium skinned modes of transport hundreds or thousands of feet off the ground.
So, you set up a cannon, spin the jet engine up and fire a chicken into it. […] Great. So, bright sparks at British Rail noted that their train was going to be hurtling through the countryside at 125 miles per hour. There would be cuttings and embankments and birdies flying around and the possibility of bird strikes. Better test this out.
So, borrow the chicken gun. Load chicken, fire. The carcass goes straight through the reinforced glass, through the steel back of the driver’s seat and embeds itself in the back wall of the engine compartment.
Umm, is it supposed to do that? No, it bloody well isn’t.
So, long pondering, they enlist the help of the Americans they’d borrowed the chicken gun from. Big report finally arrives, hundreds of pages of analysis, tensor strengths, bits of Fortran coding, the lot.
On the first page it reads
“In order to use the chicken gun, first defrost your chicken”.
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The Evolution Of Knightly Armour – 1066 – 1485
Metatron
Published on 16 May 2017A video full of details which took over 30 hours in the making. I hope you like it and you find the info in it useful 😀
Armour (spelled armor in the US) is a protective covering that is used to prevent damage from being inflicted to an object, individual, or vehicle by weapons or projectiles, usually during combat, or from damage caused by a potentially dangerous environment or action. The word “armour” began to appear in the Middle Ages as a derivative of Old French. It is dated from 1297 as a “mail, defensive covering worn in combat”. The word originates from the Old French armure, itself derived from the Latin armatura meaning “arms and/or equipment”, with the root armare meaning “arms or gear”.
Armour has been used throughout recorded history. It has been made from a variety of materials, beginning with rudimentary leather protection and evolving through mail and metal plate into today’s modern composites.
Significant factors in the development of armour include the economic and technological necessities of its production. For instance, plate armour first appeared in Medieval Europe when water-powered trip hammers made the formation of plates faster and cheaper.Well-known armour types in European history include the lorica hamata, lorica squamata, and lorica segmentata of the Roman legions, the mail hauberk of the early medieval age, and the full steel plate harness worn by later medieval and renaissance knights, and breast and back plates worn by heavy cavalry in several European countries until the first year of World War I (1914–15). The samurai warriors of feudal Japan utilised many types of armour for hundreds of years up to the 19th century.
Plate armour became cheaper than mail by the 15th century as it required less labour, labour that had become more expensive after the Black Death, though it did require larger furnaces to produce larger blooms. Mail continued to be used to protect those joints which could not be adequately protected by plate.
The small skull cap evolved into a bigger helmet, the bascinet. Several new forms of fully enclosed helmets were introduced in the late 14th century.By about 1400 the full plate armour had been developed in armouries of Lombardy. Heavy cavalry dominated the battlefield for centuries in part because of their armour.
Probably the most recognised style of armour in the World became the plate armour associated with the knights of the European Late Middle Ages.
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A Guide to Dark Age British Politics
History With Hilbert
Published on 26 Sep 2017A beginner’s guide to the politics of Dark Age Britain, from the southern Celts to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Pictish north.
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May 19, 2019
Siege of Vienna & Queen Nzinga – Lies – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 18 May 2019Writer Rob Rath talks about all the cool stories and facts we didn’t get to cover in our two special short series on the Siege of Vienna, and the life of Queen Nzinga.
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
From the comments:
Extra Credits
Timestamps:
2:00 – Demonetization sucks. THANK YOU PATRONS!
7:15 – Istanbul was Constantinople now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople been a long time gone oh Constantinople
11:07 – the arrival of the Winged Hussars wasn’t exactly the same as Rohan answering Gondor’s call for aid
16:20 – Nzinga’s controversial role in slavery
19:25 – what’s next on Extra History?
21:02 – SIX DEGREES OF WALPOLERecommended reading:
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe by Andrew Wheatcroft
The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent by John Stoye
Hispanics and the Civil War: From Battlefield to Homefront by the National Park ServiceMusic videos:
Queen Nzinga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N94H6F0WObcSiege of Vienna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ_HV57cgbg
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The German Breakthrough in the West – WW2 – 038 – May 18 1940
World War Two
Published on 18 May 2019The German invasion of Western Europe has been going for over a week now, and the Neutral and Allied countries are in disarray. The Netherlands, despite putting up fierce resistance on some occasions, faces overwhelming powers while Belgium, France and the British feel the pressure from an organised and armoured assault from the Ardennes. And still, the German tanks, soldiers and aircraft are not all the Allies have to fear, as many of their losses are caused by their own command.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvChurchills ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech: https://winstonchurchill.org/resource…
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Indy Neidell
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations: EastoryColorisations by Norman Stewart and Julius Jääskeläinen https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Eastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.Sources:
– © IWM (C 1666)A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
This is the longest weekly episode of our World War Two series to this date, and boy are we proud. We made sure to make this the absolute best it could possibly be. After last week’s episode of WW2, it was hard to imagine that Eastory could surpass his efforts for that episode anytime soon, but it took him one week. Iryna, our editor in Warsaw, did an amazing job with putting together this episode. We hope you like it as much as we do. Thanks for your ongoing support and if you don’t already, please consider supporting us on Patreon.By the way, we have an Instagram feed where we dedicate one post per day of the war, which allows us to give some topics a little more attention, like the invasion of the Netherlands. You can check them out here:
11 May 1940 – Germans attack Dutch positions on the Grebbeberg and the Grebbeline: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxVBQcwnHAs/
12 May 1940 – Three German Panzer divisions approach Sedan to Force a breakthrough into France: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxYS8XqHdTh/
13 May 1940 – The Battle of the Grebbeberg ends in a German victory, allowing them to push into Holland: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxauq9HnqOW/
14 May 1940 – German bombers destroy the inner city of Rotterdam while peace talks are going on: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxc7zreiXo8/
15 May 1940 – The French fight a successful but practically meaningless battle at Gembloux: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxfGP1qCzV9/
16 May 1940 – Guderian rapidly moves westward, showing the full potential of tank-warfare: https://www.instagram.com/p/BxhxvyDClbY/
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Samuel Pauly Invents the Cartridge in 1812
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 4 May 2019(Video reuploaded to removed an allegedly copyrighted still image)
This Pauly shotgun (lot #1346) sold at Morphy’s April 2019 auction for $5,535.
Samuel Johannes Pauli was born outside Bern, Switzerland in 1766, and became an engineer of wide interests. Among them were bridge design, passenger-carrying balloons (he would work seriously on a 15-20 passenger balloon service between London and Paris later in life), and firearms. Only a few years after Forsyth’s invention of fulminate priming, Pauly would become the first to use it in a fully self-contained cartridge. He patented this invention in Paris in 1812, having moved there in 1802 in pursuit of financing for his many grand projects (going then by the name Jean Samuel Pauly).
Pauly’s cartridge was a multi-part affair with a rimmed brass base containing a fulminate powder, connected to a paper or cardboard cartridge body which held a charge of regular gunpowder and the shot or ball to be fired. It was an expensive system, but contained all the necessary elements of a modern cartridge.
Pauly would move to England in 1814 (then taking the name Samuel John Pauly) in pursuit of aviation inventions, although he continued to tinker on his firearms design and filed two additional patent improvements. He died in London in 1821, and his name and work became rather obscure. His former apprentices would carry on his legacy in their own work – Nicolaus Dreyse would produce the needle fire system of Dreyse rifles used by the Prussian military, and Casimir Lefaucheux would create the pinfire system based on Pauly’s designs. Lefaucheux in fact became owner of the company in 1827, and with his son would provide the most direct link between Pauly’s design and the modern metallic cartridge.
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Forgotten Weapons
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May 18, 2019
Tim Worstall lists the benefits of a hard Brexit
In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall responds to a demand for a list of the benefits of a hard Brexit:
1) How will you protect UK business from dumping?
We won’t. The aim, purpose and intention of trade is to gain access to those things which Johnny Foreigner makes better, cheaper, faster – pick any two of three – than our own domestic producers do. Given that the aim of an economy is to make the people, consumers, as well off as the constraints of the real world allow, we wouldn’t protect domestic producers from anything. Shape up or go bust.
As even the Treasury’s briefing on the costs and benefits of Brexit said, competition from trade is exactly what incentivises domestic producers to become more productive.
So, we don’t protect from dumping and the people of Britain become richer. The problem with this is?
2) What will you do for those who lose their jobs because the businesses that employ them are undermined by WTO rules?
Exactly the same as we do for anyone else who loses their job for any other reason. The economy destroys some 10% of all jobs every year – some 3 million – and another 10% are generated newly as well. That’s just what labour market churn is. We have a welfare system for the interim and people who lose jobs because of Brexit or WTO do exactly as everyone else, get another job with the welfare state as the backstop.
And it’s important to note how new job creation works. It isn’t that we must plan what those jobs are before the old disappear. It’s the availability of the newly employable labour which generates the testing of what should be done next.
3) What will you do on the Northern Ireland border?
Lie.
We have pointed this out before:
Our answer should be “Yes.” We agree that we are leaving, that we have put in place that hard border. Then we do absolutely nothing above what we already do. People come and go as they wish, carrying what goods they can, and we do nothing. Except, as we already do, we keep an eye on those moving things on an industrial scale and have our little customs and tax chats with them away from that line on the map.
What other people wish to do on their side of that line is entirely up to them. We will do, as we’ve always done when in our right minds, what is useful and beneficial to us. It’s somewhat unfashionable these days to talk of the empire but it’s still true that we had it. Often because we’re rather good at this lying, cheating and dissembling. We should carry on. So, there’s the border, as it is today. And?
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The Maginot Line – WW2 on Location – France 1940 – 01
World War Two
Published on 16 May 2019The Maginot Line was not the failure many think — in fact it was quite a remarkable feat — find out more in this video.
Guest Experts in order of appearance:
Mark Halter – Fortress Schoenenbourg http://www.lignemaginot.com/accueil/i…
Richard Tucker – Maginot Line Tours http://maginotlinetours.co.uk or https://www.tripadvisor.nl/Attraction…
Roland Müller – L’Abri de Hatten http://www.abrihatten.fr/index-en.htmlJoin us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Join our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/D6D2aYN.
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Wieke KapteijnsEastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
In April, with the help of many of you fantastic people we went to France to visit some of the sites of the German invasion in 1940. This is the first of a series of specials that we recorded there. More will follow in May and June as the war in France proceeds. On Saturday we will come out with a double length episode about the German breakthrough in the West — we are exceedingly proud of that episode and we hope that you will enjoy it as much as we do. This video gives you some great background to that event. For us it was a revelation to visit the sites and talk to the experts you will meet in the video. Mark Halter of the amazingly well preserved Schoenenburg Fortress, Richard Tucker who gives fantastic tours around the Sedan area, and Roland Müller who has worked for decades to keep alive the memory of the men who served on the front. If you happen to be in the Alsace or Ardennes area, you need to go visit these places. Most of the Maginot museums are private initiatives that depend on their visitor income and financial contributions to continue existing — links are in the description.
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6 Wartime Foods | British Pathé
British Pathé
Published on 20 Sep 2016BON APPETIT – FOOD MONTH ON BRITISH PATHÉ (SEPTEMBER 2016): 6 Wartime Foods.
War and postwar changed the perception of foods that we now may consider as ordinary and basic. Here is a list of 6 Wartime Foods.
Check the newsreels used to make this video here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Music:
The Show Must Be Go (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…A NEW THEME EVERY MONTH!
Each month, a range of new uploads and playlists tell the story of a particular topic through archive footage. Let us know what themes you’d like to see by leaving us a comment or connecting with us on social media.BRITISH PATHÉ’S STORY
Before television, people came to movie theatres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the forefront of cinematic journalism, blending information with entertainment to popular effect. Over the course of a century, it documented everything from major armed conflicts and seismic political crises to the curious hobbies and eccentric lives of ordinary people. If it happened, British Pathé filmed it.Now considered to be the finest newsreel archive in the world, British Pathé is a treasure trove of 85,000 films unrivalled in their historical and cultural significance.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
A VIDEO FROM BRITISH PATHÉ. EXPLORE OUR ONLINE CHANNEL, BRITISH PATHÉ TV. IT’S FULL OF GREAT DOCUMENTARIES, FASCINATING INTERVIEWS, AND CLASSIC MOVIES. http://www.britishpathe.tv/
FOR LICENSING ENQUIRIES VISIT http://www.britishpathe.com/
British Pathé also represents the Reuters historical collection, which includes more than 120,000 items from the news agencies Gaumont Graphic (1910-1932), Empire News Bulletin (1926-1930), British Paramount (1931-1957), and Gaumont British (1934-1959), as well as Visnews content from 1957 to the end of 1979. All footage can be viewed on the British Pathé website.
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May 17, 2019
The EU’s trade distortions harm African farmers in many ways
One of the unifying themes of the European Union is its dedication to farm subsidies, which are very popular among some European farmers. EU farming subsidies and trade policies also do significant measurable harm to African farmers:
spiked: How does the EU harm African economies?
Sam Akaki: Thanks to the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which heavily subsidises EU farmers, Africa’s markets are flooded with their cheap excess produce. If you go to any African market, you can buy all kinds of European produce sold at very, very cheap prices. This is driving African farmers out of the market. At the same time, the EU imposes strict limitations on what African countries can export to the European market. In particular, African farmers cannot export value-added goods. So if a farmer in Ghana is producing cocoa, or a farmer in Kenya is producing coffee, they can perhaps get less than a dollar for their product as they have to export it raw. Only a fraction of the money you pay for a jar of coffee goes to an African farmer. The value-added goods, such as processed coffee, are then produced in Europe. Germany, especially, has been doing a lot of harm.
EU lobby groups and NGOs are not working in the interests of Africa and are opposed to African attempts to get themselves out of poverty. For instance, many African farmers work with genetically modified (GM) crops. One of the big issues about GM food is that Western companies sell GM seeds that don’t produce new seeds for the next season. Farmers have to go back to companies like Monsanto every year. In Uganda, at the Kawanda Agricultural Research Institute, scientists have been working on their own way of producing local GM seeds that will be reusable each year. Europe is against this and tries to stop it.
[…]
spiked: How have EU sanctions affected Africa?
Akaki: The clearest examples are Zimbabwe and Eritrea. Of course, these countries have human-rights issues. But human rights are a question of development. Countries go through developmental stages. There would have been enormous human-rights abuses in Europe 100 years ago. The UK and the EU use their influence selectively to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on African countries. We should follow a consistent policy. We impose sanctions on African countries but we are happy to trade with other human-rights abusers like Saudi Arabia. One danger is that these sanctions are driving African countries closer and closer into the arms of the Chinese. This is a real own goal.
Sanctions are a blunt instrument. The leaders responsible for human-rights abuses are protected. They still have access to the best lifestyles money can buy. Their money is stashed away in British and other foreign banks. Sanctions don’t touch them at all. Instead, they hit the poorest hardest. Sanctions are directly contributing to poverty and mass migration. We should promote human rights, certainly, but we shouldn’t use human rights to punish the very poorest.
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The Red Baron – The Great War – Sabaton History 015
Sabaton History
Published on 16 May 2019The Red Baron is one of the, if not THE MOST iconic heroes of The Great War. He simultaneously embodies the mechanisation of modern war and a romanticised version of war with his individual skill and heroism. Indy goes beyond the legend to tell the history of Manfred von Richthofen, a.k.a The Red Baron, the latter of which also is the name of a Sabaton song that will feature on their upcoming album The Great War.
You can find the eight points of the Dicta Boelcke in the pinned comment.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon (and possibly get a History Channel special edition): https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Pre-order The Great War here: https://www.sabaton.net/pre-order-of-…
Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album ‘The Great War’ right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…
Watch more videos on the Sabaton YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Sabaton?…
Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShopHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek KaminskiEastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.Sources:
– © IWM: Q 66959, Q 105717, Q 73533, Q 67598, Q 50329, Q 50328, Q 42284, Q 111872, Q 54397, Q 63148, Q 63122, Q 3140, Q 57513 Q 58028, Q 52781, Q 63822, Q 50673, Q 72919, Q 12044, IWM 187, EPH 9001, Q 67832, IWM 1004, Q 63162, Q 67780, Q 58034, Q 63137, Q 63160
– © IWM Art: IWM ART 517, 1488, 517, 3071, 2659, 2660, 3199, 2754, 654
– Bendigo Soldiers Memorial Institute Military Museum: 2075P
– Klimbim Colorization
– James Miller ColorizationAn OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.
From the comments:
Sabaton History
This is the second episode of Sabaton History about one of the songs of the upcoming Sabaton album The Great War. By supporting us on Patreon, you can help us continue making these YouTube videos. You will also get some exclusive content – like a full version of Indy and Joakim talking about The Red Baron, which is live on our Patreon site right here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-length-red-26854763Indy mentions the Dicta Boelcke in the video. These are the eight points that Boelcke and von Richthofen used in the skies (source: Werner, Johannes von, 1932):
1. Try to secure advantages before attacking. If possible, keep the sun behind you.
2. Always carry through an attack when you have started it.
3. Fire only at close range, and only when your opponent is properly in your sights.
4. Always keep your eye on your opponent, and never let yourself be deceived by ruses.
5. In any form of attack it is essential to assail your enemy from behind.
6. If your opponent dives on you, do not try to evade his onslaught, but fly to meet it.
7. When over the enemy’s lines never forget your own line of retreat.
8. For the Staffel (squadron): Attack on principle in groups of four or six. When the fight breaks up into a series of single combats, take care that several do not go for the same opponent.
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Was Shakespeare really an illiterate illegal immigrant disabled asexual woman of colour?
Oliver Kamm discusses the most recent “Was Shakespeare really …?” article, this one published in The Atlantic by Elizabeth Winkler:
This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.
[Winkler] accuses what she calls orthodox Shakespeare scholars of “a dogmatism of their own” on the issue, whereby “even to dabble in authorship questions is considered a sign of bad faith, a blinkered failure to countenance genius in a glover’s son.” Armed with this tendentious premise, along with the less contentious one that Shakespeare depicts female characters with unrivalled sympathy and insight, Winkler spins a hypothesis that Emilia Bassano, born in London in 1569 to Venetian immigrants, is a viable candidate for the true author.
Even as I read Winkler’s piece, I expected a denouement that it was all a piece of fiction, analogous to the enjoyable 2009 caper St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold, which ends with buried treasure under the Globe Theatre and the discovery of Shakespeare’s true identity. It never came. The article was presented as a serious contribution to a debate in which Winkler has made a potentially historic discovery.
In British newspapers, there is a longstanding technique of obscuring a paucity of evidence in support of a preposterous thesis by posing it as a question. It’s been dubbed by the political commentator John Rentoul “Questions to Which the Answer is No” (QTWAIN). Winkler’s article employs the stratagem liberally. “Was Shakespeare’s name useful camouflage, allowing [Bassano] to publish what she otherwise couldn’t?” “Could Bassano have contributed [to literature] even more widely and directly?” In a moment of self-knowledge, Winkler asks: “Was I getting carried away, reinventing Shakespeare in the image of our age?” Yet she immediately supplies not the correct answer but yet another QTWAIN: “Or was I seeing past gendered assumptions to the woman who — like Shakespeare’s heroines — had fashioned herself a clever disguise?”
Feminist readings of Shakespeare have enriched literary criticism and scholarship in, among other areas, reconsidering genre distinctions and examining the effects of patriarchal structures on relations between the sexes. There is no decorous way of saying that Winkler’s article, by contrast, is a farrago that should never have been conceived, pitched, commissioned or published. Winkler credulously retails a series of purported mysteries about Shakespeare’s authorship that are no mystery at all, and repeats claims derived from Shakespeare denialists that any capable scholar would have been able to correct. She places particular stress on the work of a “meticulous scholar” Diana Price, who claims: “Writers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England left behind records of their professional activities. Shakespeare left behind documentation of his professional activities, but none is literary… He is the only alleged [emphasis added] writer of any consequence from the time period who left behind no personal evidence of his career as a professional writer.”
Price is neither meticulous nor a scholar (she designates herself “an independent scholar,” which should have caused Winkler greater wariness). As Alan Nelson of Berkeley University has put it, Price knows how to put a sentence together but she doesn’t know how to put an argument together.
We in fact have unimpeachable evidence of Shakespeare’s activities as a writer, far more than we do for, say, his fellow-dramatists John Webster or Cyril Tourneur, but by a series of rhetorical sleights-of-hand Price rules it all inadmissible. To give a single but weighty example: Shakespeare’s fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell assembled the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, published in 1623, with Shakespeare’s name on the title page and his engraved image in the frontispiece, and with a laudatory poem by Ben Jonson referring to the author as “Sweet Swan of Avon.” Price dismisses this as evidence of authorship because it’s posthumous, coming seven years after Shakespeare’s death, even though the planning and publishing of the book must have taken years, and Heminge, Condell and Jonson all knew Shakespeare personally. This isn’t scholarship but sophistry.
A noteworthy example of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. (As is, of course, the headline on this post.)
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May 16, 2019
Remembering Monte Cassino … and Wojtek the Bear, a Polish war hero
At the Daily Chrenk, Arthur Chrenkoff remembers the Polish soldiers who finally took Monte Cassino from the Germans in 1944, after earlier allied attempts by soldiers of many other nations (including Canada) had failed:
The ruins of the abbey at Monte Cassino after the 1944 battle.
Photograph credited to “Wittke” in the German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) via Wikimedia Commons.
On May 18, the day Australia goes to the polls, on the other side of the world we will be commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of the bloodiest and hardest fought battle of the Italian campaign if not the whole of the Western front of WW2. On that day, a patrol from the 12th Podolian Cavalry Regiment raised the Polish flag above the ruins of the Benedictine monastery on top of Monte Cassino, bringing to an end four months and four Allied offensives against the heavily fortified Gustav (or Winter) Line, manned by crack German divisions across the entire width of the Italian boot about 100 miles south of Rome. Some of the German troops, veterans of the Eastern front, thought the fighting was worse than at Stalingrad. Others, on the Allied side, compared the conditions to Verdun. Unlike Russian cities or French fields, most of the fighting around Monte Cassino took place over an unimaginably difficult terrain of steep mountain slopes, deep valleys, wild rivers and landscape stripped bare by the artillery. It was a truly world battle in a world war: pitted against the Wehrmacht were the units from Great Britain, including British India and Rhodesia, the United States, France and its north African colonies like Morocco, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, including Maori troops, South Africa, Italy and Poland. Since the start of the Allied offensive in January 1944, waves after waves of troops of the 5th US and the 8th British armies smashed themselves against the rocks, unable to dislodge the well dug-in Germans. Finally, the fourth battle code-named Operation Diadem, which commenced with a massive bombardment on May 16, threw the British 13th Army Corp and the 2nd Polish Corp against the very linchpin of the Gustav Line at Monte Cassino and its monastery. Two days later it was over.
[…]
Churchill, right from the time of the Gallipoli disaster, remained obsessed about the vulnerability of the continental powers – primarily Germany – through what he called “the soft underbelly of Europe”. The war records are full of his harebrained schemes to attack the Axis through Italy, the Balkans or Greece and knock them out of the fight by a sharp thrust into the Central Europe. This was to be a masterstroke in place of the Normandy invasion, which Churchill strenuously opposed, and later in addition to it, to draw some of the German troops away from the northern France and indeed to get to Austria and southern Germany before the Red Army.
The problem with the soft underbelly of Europe is that it’s anything but. In fact it’s the hardest part of Europe; all rock, no roll. It’s mountains and deep valleys, fast rivers and vast forests, rudimentary roads and virtually no useful infrastructure. Unlike the northern European plains, this is the defender’s country where the Allies lost all the advantage of their numbers, their maneuverability and their armour. The two years of arduous slogfest from the southern Sicily to the Emilia-Romagna in the north might have indeed drawn valuable German troops from the other theaters of war but it was a bloody dead end. Poles were still stuck taking Bologna in April 1945, while only days later the patrols from Patton’s 3rd US Army were reaching the outskirts of Prague.
And Wojtek?
Monte Cassino is on my mind today, because entirely coincidentally I’m reading a delightful war book (that’s an oxymoron if there is one) titled Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero. It tells the surreal but entirely true story of a bear cub adopted by the Polish troops in northern Iran in 1942, towards the start of their anabasis from Stalin’s Siberia all the way to Italy and eventually Scotland. Accompanying the Poles through all their service in the Middle East and then southern Europe, Wojtek grew up to be a 6-foot, 500-pound ursine, who always thought he was a human. Quintessentially Polish (if only by adoption), he loved beer and cigarettes (he also ate them, but only if lit), taking showers with the troops and riding shotgun in army trucks. Some of his war-time exploits included capturing an Arab spy in Iraq and stealing underwear from a female support unit. But Wojtek truly became a legend during the battle of Monte Cassino, when to his comrades’ amazement he volunteered to carry ammunition in his paws. He was eventually made a Private in the Polish Army, and lived until 1963, continuing to win hearts in Scotland, where the Polish troops were repatriated after the war.
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