The History Chap
Published 25 Jan 2023Lance Corporal Jack Jones is one of the most loved characters in the classic British comedy Dad’s Army. Constantly referring to his exploits in the Sudan, the North West Frontier (India) and the First World War.
So I thought I would make a short video exploring his long (& fictitious) military career.
The local butcher, Jack Jones, is a member of Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard during World War Two. This fictitious Home Guard unit are the stars of the classic BBC comedy: Dad’s Army.
What I found amazing is that the BBC created a back story for the character of Lance Corporal Jones. researching the medal ribbons that Jones wears on his Home Guard uniform I have put together a timeline of his military career in the 1st battalion, Warwickshire Regiment.
The story starts when young Jack Jones joins the Royal Warwickshire’s in 1884 as a drummer boy. He is to spend 31 years serving in the British army where he participates in the Gordon Relief Expedition, the re-conquest of Sudan under General Kitchener, the Boer War, the North West Frontier of India, and the First World War.
May 2, 2023
Dad’s Army: What Was The Military Career of Lance Corporal Jones?
May 1, 2023
Balm for a golfer’s soul
Alan Ashworth wants to persuade you to read the works of P.G. Wodehouse. In this installment, he appeals to the golfers in the audience:
When Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was at Dulwich College between 1894 and 1900, he was blissfully happy with school life and developed an enduring love of cricket and rugger – he went off boxing because the other blighters kept hitting him. The two sports were central to his early novels and he followed Dulwich’s results throughout his long life.
Yet when Plum began to enjoy success in the US he realised that to mine the rich comic seam of sporting obsession he had to come up with a new ball game.
During a lengthy spell in America, where he had become a big noise in musical theatre, he began to play golf at the Sound View club in Long Island with comic actors including Ed Wynn and Ernest Truex. “The golf course was awfully nice,” he recalled many years later. “However, I wasn’t any good at golf. I suppose I ought to have taken lessons instead of playing. I didn’t mind losing, because it was such good exercise walking around the holes. If only I’d taken up golf immediately after I left school instead of playing cricket.”
He never did get very good at the game. Over the years he won a single trophy, a striped umbrella, at a hotel tournament “where, hitting them squarely on the meat for once, I went through a field of some of the fattest retired businessmen in America like a devouring flame”.
However, golf was to provide the material for some of Wodehouse’s finest short stories, written mainly in the 1920s, which helped to make him a very rich man.
As one of his biographers, Richard Usborne, observed in his marvellous Wodehouse at Work to the End, “in the 1920s and 30s there were many illustrated magazines on both sides of the Atlantic paying high for good humorous short stories, five- to eight-thousand-word episodes, complete with sunny plot, a beginning, middle and end, and the young couple happily paired off in the fade-out. Wodehouse wrote for this profitable market. He became one of the golden boys of the magazines and, not necessarily the same thing, a master of his craft.”
Doctor Sketchy and the Strange Case of the Syndrome of Doom
Lindybeige
Published 24 Jan 2023I teamed up with the highly-skilled Alasdair Beckett-King and together we threw together this sketch. Can you tell that he went to film school?
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April 28, 2023
Legends Summarized: Journey To The West (Part X)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Dec 2022Journey to the West Kai, episode 7: Double Trouble
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April 20, 2023
When You Get Distracted Easily
It’s a Southern Thing
Published 19 Jan 2021Just keep nodding and try to hang in there.
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April 4, 2023
History Summarized: the Ancient Greek Post-Apocalypse
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 31 Mar 2023Turns out the “Studio Ghibli Post-Apocalypse” aesthetic has a historical basis in ancient Greek history’s Bronze Age Collapse, long Dark Age, and slow re-emergence into the Polis Age. I don’t know if I’d call the process pleasant, but it sure as hell is a vibe.
GO READ THE ILIAD: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-ilia… — We enjoy the Fagles translation, as it’s the typical classroom and library standard, but if you want a real treat, try the Alexander Pope edition from the 1700s that’s written entirely in RHYME. THE DAMN THING RHYMES!!!
SOURCES & Further Reading:
“The Age of Heroes” and “Delphi and Olympia” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney – “Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble – “Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture by Robert Garland “The Greeks: A Global History” by Roderick Beaton, “The Greeks: An Illustrated History” by Diane Cline, Metropolitan Museum “Geometric Art in Ancient Greece” https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/grg… also have a degree in Classical Studies
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April 1, 2023
“The Spaghetti Harvest” (1957) | Panorama | Classic BBC clips | BBC Archive
BBC Archive
Published 31 Mar 2022Panorama reports from Switzerland, where the combination of a mild winter and the virtual disappearance of pests like the spaghetti weevil, has resulted in a bumper spaghetti crop.
This clip is believed to be one of the first televised April Fools pranks – the original fake news, if you will. The narrator of the film is the highly respected journalist Richard Dimbleby. Back in 1957, some viewers failed to see the funny side and criticised the BBC for airing the spoof news item on what is supposed to be a serious factual programme. Others, however, were so intrigued that they wrote in to the BBC asking where they could purchase their very own spaghetti bush.
Originally broadcast 1 April, 1957.
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QotD: P.G. Wodehouse and Sir Oswald Mosley
The majority of his tales are set in country houses, replete with conservatories, libraries, gun rooms, stables and butler’s pantries. Letters arrive by several posts a day, telegrams by the hour. Trains run on time from village stations. Other than the pinching of policemens’ helmets, there is order and serenity. Necklaces are filched, silverware is purloined, butlers snaffle port, chums are impersonated, romances develop in rose gardens, but nothing lurks to fundamentally reorder society.
There was one exception. The object of Wodehousian scorn was the moustachioed leader of Britain’s black-shirted Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet. A fencing champion at school, dashing war record in the Flying Corps, and a Member of Parliament, he was the recipient of an inherited title, with a family tree that stretched back to the 12th century, a country house and a Mayfair residence. In Wodehouseland, Mosley is transformed into the equally aristocratic Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup.
Plum was intolerant of even the vaguest of threats to the established order of things. He voiced his dislike of Spode through Bertie Wooster, likening the fascist leader to one of “those pictures in the papers of dictators, with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words on the occasion of the opening of a new skittle alley”. Plum focussed his gaze on the Spode/Mosley moustache, which was “like the faint discoloured smear left by a squashed black beetle on the side of a kitchen sink”, describing its owner as “one who caught the eye and arrested it”.
The proto-dictator appeared, thought Wodehouse, “as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla but had changed its mind at the last moment”. Every reader would have known it was Mosley in the crosshairs, because Spode was the leader of a fascist group called the “Saviours of Britain, also known as the Black Shorts”. The transition of attire is because, as another of Wodehouse’s masterful creations, Gussie Fink-Nottle, observed, “by the time Spode formed his Association, there were no black shirts left in the shops”.
A different Wodehouse character warned, “Never put anything on paper … and never trust a man with a small black moustache.” Indeed, anyone “whose moustache rose and fell like seaweed on an ebb-tide” was best avoided. Plum could have been referring to Mosley or Hitler. The former, as leader of Britain’s real-life black shirts, was an unashamed admirer of the latter, and he interned in Holloway prison during the war. Afterwards, as an advocate of what we today would call Holocaust denial, he moved to Paris where he died in 1980. His political journey was interesting. Mosley started as a Conservative, drifted leftwards into the Labour Party, then further left into his own independent party, which evolved into the right-wing British Union of Fascists.
Modelled on the Italian and German fascist movements, Mosley and his supporters came to believe that “Jewish interests commanded commerce, the Press, the cinema, dominated the City of London, and killed British industry with their sweatshops”. Fascism lurking in the upper classes troubled Plum Wodehouse so greatly that Spode and his Black Shorts appeared in five of his works between 1938–74.
Peter Caddick-Adams, “Coups and coronets”, The Critic, 2022-12-13.
March 23, 2023
History Summarized: Rome After Empire
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 11 Nov 2022“It’s gonna take more than killing me to kill me” – Rome, constantly.
Rome “Fell” in 476 … but we still have Rome. How’d that happen, and what does the Pope have to do with it?
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March 20, 2023
QotD: The world of “Plum”
The maestro also knew a thing or two about politics. This is strange, for few of his nearly one hundred novels, short stories or plays betray more than a nodding acquaintanceship with the great upheavals of the 20th century. Enquiring deeper, the connoisseur will find that his eternal creation, Jeeves — the discreet, silent, valet-cum-butler extraordinaire — was named in honour of a popular English cricketer who died on the Somme in 1916. The subject himself, in a post-1945 volume, admitted to his employer Bertie Wooster that he had “dabbled somewhat in the Commandos” during the Second World Conflagration.
War and turmoil are there, lurking in the background, if successfully banished from much of his writing. Sadly, Pelham Grenville (forenames he hated, so adopted the moniker “Plum” instead) was naïve. Loafing professionally in France when the Wehrmacht knocked on his door for tea and crumpets in 1940, he and his wife were interned as enemy aliens. In 1941, Plum agreed to record five broadcasts to the USA, then neutral. Entitled How to be an Internee without previous Training, they comprised playful anecdotes about his experiences as a prisoner of the folk in field grey. I’ve read them. They are rib-tickling and harmless, and his American readers lapped them up. Alas, his British fan club took a different view.
The devotees of Bertie Wooster, Reginald Jeeves, the Earl of Emsworth, Sir Roderick Glossop and Co. were at first stunned, then vexed and finally branded the poor author a traitor. Although a post-war MI5 investigation exonerated him, a hurt Wodehouse thereafter lived in exile on Long Island. Fortunately for us, the flow of humour continued unabated, but Plum’s hard-earned Knighthood for conjuring up the essence of Bottled Englishness was long delayed until the New Year’s Honours of 1975. He died soon after, on St Valentine’s Day, aged ninety-three.
This lapse of judgement was all the more extraordinary given his ability to spot a scoundrel at one hundred paces. Threats to the serene, ordered nature of English society in which he resided — indeed helped to create — were few. In Wodehouse’s Garden of Eden, there is a definite hierarchy of earls and aunts, bishops, baronets and young blades, stationmasters and policemen.
The majority of his tales are set in country houses, replete with conservatories, libraries, gun rooms, stables and butler’s pantries. Letters arrive by several posts a day, telegrams by the hour. Trains run on time from village stations. Other than the pinching of policemens’ helmets, there is order and serenity. Necklaces are filched, silverware is purloined, butlers snaffle port, chums are impersonated, romances develop in rose gardens, but nothing lurks to fundamentally reorder society.
Peter Caddick-Adams, “Coups and coronets”, The Critic, 2022-12-13.
March 12, 2023
Jack Benny and Mel Blanc – The Man of a Thousand Voices | Carson Tonight Show
Johnny Carson
Published 18 Nov 2022Original Airdate: 01/23/1974
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QotD: Philosophy
Theodore Dalrymple, “Street-Corner Semantics”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-06-30.
March 10, 2023
Having solved all other problems, Congress now investigates … (checks notes) … the Protestant Reformation
Chris Bray respectfully outlines some of the questions the honourable Congressmen Congresspersons Congressentities Representatives would be likely to pose to the witnesses:
Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, 1517.
Painting by Ferdinand Pauwels (1830-1904) via Wikimedia Commons.
1.) Mr. Luther, you — sorry, having trouble with my reading glasses. It says here you … mailed 95 feces to a door? Do you feel that it was appropriate to put something like that in the mail?
2.) Mr. Calvin, sir, you have raised numerous objections to the elevation of the host. Shouldn’t you be equally concerned about the elevation of the hostess? Don’t you feel that gendered terms are problematic?
3.) For all the witnesses, I’m told you wish to choose your own pastures. Isn’t that a question best left to the farmers?
4.) Gentlemen, you apparently propose to dissolve the monasteries. But most of them are, in my understanding, made out of big rocks, with very solid walls. Wouldn’t that take a prohibitive amount of acid to dissolve those? Have you done an EIR?
5.) I must very candidly inform the witnesses that I cannot agree to your premise, and I frankly find it absurd to say that faith alone is the cause of salivation. Do you have credentials in the science of digestion?
March 6, 2023
QotD: The pastries of the wider paradonut family
Exhibit A: The Coffee Roll — Phasers on Star Trek have three settings: Stun, Kill, and Coffee Roll.
Exhibit B: The Eclair — From the French for “lightning”, the eclair was invented by a psychiatrist as a delicious alternative to electroshock therapy for schizophrenics. Because when you’re eating an eclair, you can’t deny the marvelous cream-filled reality you’re actually present in.
Exhibit C: The Cheese Danish — Cheese Danishes have a mix of flavors and textures that make them, in scientific terms, “a gang-bang for your face”.
Exhibit D: The Bear Claw — The bear claw is the ugly, bewarted King Pimp of the pastry shop window, with a dozen smaller, more effeminate donuts it’s turned into its sad little bitches and tricks following behind it.
Exhibit E: The Apple Fritter — The so-called “Emperor of Pastries” makes your stupid little glazed donut look sad and weak like Barack Obama’s gay arms.
Exhibit F: The Cinnamon Bun — Cinnamon Buns have been proven to be responsible for America’s obesity epidemic and diabetic crisis, and also totally worth it.
Bonus: Worst Donuts
1. Jelly Donuts — Jelly donuts are always what’s left after people eat the real donuts. Jelly donuts are consolation prizes for losers who came late. They taste like failure for a reason. If you’re eating a jelly donut, that’s because you’re not a competitor and you don’t have any friends to set aside a good donut for you.
2. Plain Donuts — Plain donuts are also called “not donuts” or “ring-shaped bread”. Plain donuts were invented for parents who don’t love their children. They are also sometimes put out as bait for poisoning rats, though they have a 75% failure rate. Rats don’t like them either. Sometimes a poisoned plain donut will be found intact, with a dead rat next to it — rats will lick the poison off the plain donut while avoiding the plain donut itself. According to Leviticus, you are supposed to pay the dowry of an ugly woman in plain donuts.
3. Powdered Sugar Donuts — Powdered sugar donuts are made primarily by mental degenerates employed by donut shops as charity hires. They are sometimes called “Retard Donuts”. To compare powdered sugar donuts to the Holocaust would be to trivialize the horror of powdered sugar donuts.
Ace, “Science Proves That The Best Donuts Are Actually Non-Donuts”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2017-06-17.
February 16, 2023
QotD: Obituaries
Most obituary notices are quite properly mealymouthed, the word “irreplaceable” being a standby. Strictly speaking, it is never false, for no one is exactly the same as anyone else, and therefore everyone is irreplaceable. “Sadly missed” is another favorite. “Yes, but by whom and for how long?” one is inclined to ask. Frankness is not the first thing that one looks for or expects in obituary notices.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Obit Snit”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-06-09.
