Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 23 Nov 2024Hello all!
In something a little different from cars, trains and planes, we take a look at what has often been considered the Concorde moment for cross-channel ferry operations, the introduction of routine hovercraft services between Britain and France by the Hoverlloyd and Seaspeed companies, and later the Hoverspeed firm following their merger.
Hoverspeed was a truly exceptional mixture of speed and technological prowess, skirting across the surface of the English Channel and reducing journey times to but a fraction of what they were aboard regular ferry boats, but due to increasing costs, a fragile business case, and the arrival of the Channel Tunnel, Hoverspeed, much like Concorde, is now but a fading memory of a bygone era for international travel.
Chapters:
0:00 – Preamble
0:44 – Rise of the Hovercraft
3:04 – Tapping an Untapped Market
7:15 – Into Service
10:33 – Heyday of the Hovercraft
13:05 – Fragile Foundations
17:21 – Coming to the End
21:55 – Conclusion
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March 24, 2025
The Concorde of the English Channel – Hoverspeed
March 6, 2025
HMCS Bonaventure – The Pride of Canada’s Fleet
Skynea History
Published 22 Oct 2024For today’s video, we’ll be looking at the last of Canada’s aircraft carriers. Not typically a navy you associate with that kind of ship, but the Canadians actually operated three during the Cold War.
The third, HMCS Bonaventure, is an interesting one. A small ship, that operated aircraft at the very edge of her capability. And routinely baffled American pilots in the process.
Yet, she was also a ship that came to an end before her time. Decommissioned and scrapped, right after an expensive (and extensive) mid-life overhaul. In what is generally seen as a bad political move, more than anything to do with her capabilities.
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February 8, 2025
A Love Supreme after 60 years
John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme was one of the first four jazz albums I ever bought. It quickly became my favourite and led me to listening to a lot more of Coltrane’s work. Some I loved nearly as much (Giant Steps, Blue Train, The Complete Africa/Brass Sessions) while others I just bounced off (Sun Ship, Interstellar Space, Stellar Regions), but most became fixtures of my various jazz playlists.
Ted Gioia notes the moment as A Love Supreme hits 60 years after release:
Ivy League theoretical physicist Stephon Alexander will even tell you that John Coltrane has a lot in common with Albert Einstein. People still consult the saxophonist’s mathematical analysis — the so-called Coltrane Circle — as if it were a source of esoteric wisdom.
But in 1964, John Coltrane was also a father. John Coltrane Jr. was born on August 26, 1964 — the first of his three children. Ravi Coltrane arrived in 1965, and Oran in 1967.
You wouldn’t think that Coltrane could find time for anything else at the close of the Summer of 1964. But he did.
At that juncture, he disappeared into an upstairs guest room at his home. And spent day after day with just a pen, some paper, and his horn.
He emerged five days later. “It was like Moses coming down from the mountain,” Alice later recalled. “It was so beautiful. He walked down and there was that joy, that peace in his face, tranquility.”
“This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record,” he told her.
Note that word: Received. He didn’t say composed. He didn’t say created. It was a gift from something larger than himself.
This was the music John Coltrane would perform in the studio three months later. It’s know today as A Love Supreme.
Coltrane said that his music was his gift back to the Divine.
He made that clear in his liner notes, which opened with an invocation in capital letters: DEAR LISTENER: ALL PRAISE BE TO GOD TO WHOM ALL PRAISE IS DUE…
But if there were still any doubt, Coltrane also included a devotional poem — which began:
I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord.
It all has to do with it.
Thank you God.
Peace …Needless to say, this was not typical for jazz liner notes in the mid-1960s. Or at any time, for that matter.
Not your typical liner notes.
Photo by Ted GioiaAnd it almost certainly would limit sales — or so the conventional wisdom went back then. A few months later, Capitol Records execs had a meltdown when Brian Wilson wanted to give the name “God Only Knows” to a song. But that was nothing compared to the full-blown ritual that Coltrane was now unleashing on the hip jazz audience.
I use the word ritual advisedly here. I’ve heard other people describe A Love Supreme as a suite, but they’re missing the whole point. I have no doubt that Coltrane intended this ritualistic effect.
He even starts chanting toward the end of the opening track.
This was first time Coltrane’s voice had ever been featured on a studio recording. And he didn’t sing a love song or belt out a blues. Instead he was chanting:
A love supreme
A love supreme
A love supreme
A love supreme
A love supreme …He chants that phrase nineteen times in a row.
January 26, 2025
The FAL in Cuba: Left Arm of the Communist World?
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Oct 2024The full version of this video, including the fully automatic fire not permitted on YouTube, is available on History of Weapons & War here:
https://forgottenweapons.vhx.tv/video…
In 1958, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista ordered some 35,000 FAL rifles from FN, including both regular infantry rifles have heavy-barreled FALO light machine guns. Before any of them could arrive, however, Batista fled the country and his guns were delivered to Fidel Castro beginning in July 1959.At this time, the FAL was still a fairly new rifle, having been first adopted by Venezuela in 1954 and Belgium in 1954/55. A few changes had been made by the time of the Cuban contract (like the slightly taller sights requested by the Germans), but these were still Type 1 receivers with early features.
The first consignment of rifles arrived from Belgium to Havana July 9, 1959 and this consisted of 8,000 rifles and ten LMGs. A second shipment of 2,000 rifles arrived October 15th, and a third of 2,500 rifles and 500 LMGs on December 1st. The final ship bringing FALs to Cuba (the French freighter La Courbe) docked in Havana March 4th 1960, and suffered a pair of explosions while bring unloaded. Several hundred people were killed or injured, and Castro blamed the CIA for the event. In total, the Cubans received 12,500 FAL rifles and 510 FALO light machine guns.
The FALs were used, but many ended up being exported to other parties, as Cuba generally moved to Soviet bloc small arms starting in 1960 (when they began receiving weapons from the USSR and Czechoslovakia). These were often scrubbed of their Cuban markings before shipment, and can be found with a round hole milled in the magazine well where the Cuban crest originally was, similar to how some South African FALs were scrubbed before being sent to Rhodesia.
Thanks to Sellier & Bellot for giving me access to this pair of very scarce Cuban FALs to film for you!
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January 24, 2025
QotD: Star Trek‘s transporter
Some great men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have great catchphrases said to them. James Doohan is an honorary member of that last category. He was the guy who spent four decades on the receiving end of the request to “Beam me up, Scotty” – if not on TV, where no character on Star Trek ever actually uttered the words, at least in real life, where fans would cheerfully bark the injunction across crowded airport concourses in distant lands, and rush-hour freeway drivers would lurch across four lanes of traffic to yell it out the window at him. Elvis is said to have greeted him with the phrase, and Groucho, too. There are novels with the title, and cocktails. On Highway 375 to Roswell, New Mexico, you can stop at the Little A-Le-Inn and wash down your Alien Burger with a Beam Me Up, Scotty (Jim Beam, 7 Up and Scotch).
It wasn’t supposed to be the catchphrase from the show: that honor was reserved for Gene Roddenberry’s portentous sonorous orotund grandiosity – the space-the-final-frontier-boldly-going-where-no-man’s-gone-before stuff. The beaming was neither here nor there: it was a colloquialism for matter-energy transit, or teleportation – or, more to the point, a way of getting from the inside of the space ship to the set of the planet without having to do a lot of expensive exterior shots in which you’ve got to show the USS Enterprise landing and Kirk, Spock et al disembarking. Instead, the crew positioned themselves in what looked vaguely like a top-of-the-line shower, ordered Scotty to make with the beaming, and next thing you know they were standing next to some polystyrene rocks in front of a backcloth whose colors were the only way of telling this week’s planet from last week’s. “Beaming” was the special effect – the one that saved Star Trek from having to have any others.
Mark Steyn, “Beam Movie Actor”, Steyn Online, 2020-02-15.
January 9, 2025
Forgotten Armies of the Vietnam War: Australia, Korea, China, USSR
NR: Sorry about this … RTH must have taken this video down at some point between me scheduling it to appear and today.
Real Time History
Published 16 Aug 2024The Vietnam War is mainly remembered as a conflict between the Vietnamese and the United States. But both sides received direct and indirect support from other countries.
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January 3, 2025
The Boomers and “reset to Year Zero”
On Twit-, er, I mean “X”, ESR responds to a post from Devon Eriksen decrying the Baby Boomers for effectively destroying the culture of the postwar “American Dream”:
… I’m a late Boomer, born in ’57. I can dimly remember the day JFK was shot. I watched the moon landing. My teens and early twenties coincided with the 1970s. I was there for it all.
And even then, even in the 1970s, feeling a sense of subtle disintegration all around me, I already dimly grasped that we weren’t just falling. We were being pushed.
But I was very young then; I wouldn’t come to fully understand why, and by whom, for almost another 30 years
We Boomers didn’t burn down our heritage in a fit of thoughtless hedonism. I mean, we did some thoughtless hedonism, yeah, but that’s not where the real damage came from.
If you want to know where the damage came from, look up Yuri Bezmenov. Listen to him explain “demoralization” and the long game of Soviet culture-jamming against the West in general and the U.S. in particular.
Reset to year zero was a Marxist idea. It was part of a suite of memetic weapons, infectious propaganda bombs deployed against the social and cultural cohesion of the “main enemy”.
Often, they were successful in damaging us by leveraging not our vices but our virtues. Valorizing tolerance and liberality until they became helplessness in the face of more and more extreme forms of deviance was one of their attacks.
We didn’t fall on our own. We were pushed. The Boomer fault wasn’t that we were hedonists or nihilists, it’s that we didn’t have sufficient cultural immune defenses against what was being done to us.
Why that is exactly is a long sad story that I’m still not sure I completely understand. But I can hit some highlights.
One is that religion failed us. This is nobody’s fault and I don’t think it could have gone differently; it’s a failure that had been on the cards ever since the mechanistic worldview reached effective completion by Darwin. One of the things the Marxists did was work to accelerate the inevitable decay of religious authority.
Secular conservatives failed us, too. They had one job — just one job — which was to explain why all those Chesterton’s fences shouldn’t be torn down. They utterly flubbed that on all three levels of awareness, analysis, and persuasion. That could have gone differently.
It didn’t help that after the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 conservatives developed a severe case of cowardice about calling out Communist subversion.
That may have been their single greatest dereliction of duty. The result was that over the next 50 years Communist institutional capture of academia and other institutions went almost unopposed. Which is why today we struggle with “woke”.
Most of us Boomers weren’t wreckers, even by accident. Most of us were duped. It’s easy to say in hindsight we should have done better, but the enemy was very clever and determined.
Try not to judge us too harshly, kids. It’s nice to think that a later generation might have done better, but … I haven’t seen it happen yet.
December 5, 2024
Look at Life – The City’s for Living In (1968)
Classic Vehicle Channel
Published Apr 19, 2020Traffic was still an issue in the 60’s. Residents discuss how they can divert to traffic from the city. This film features great archive of city traffic in the late 60s
November 30, 2024
QotD: Unrealized promises of a “Great Society”
Amity Shlaes, Great Society: A New History, 2020.
November 21, 2024
1966: Chieftain Tank Simulator | Tomorrow’s World | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
BBC Archive
Published Jul 15, 2024“All the tension, the excitement, and indeed the technical demands of driving a modern tank into battle … but, in fact, I haven’t moved a yard.”
Raymond Baxter test drives the British Army’s Chieftain tank simulator, used for training tank drivers. The illusion is created using a large 1:300 scale model of the battlefield, a computer, and a roving mirror connected to a television camera. The battlefield can be altered simply by swapping out the model trees and buildings.
Mr Baxter can attest to how realistic the experience is, and it costs just one tenth of the price of training in a real Chieftain tank.
Clip taken from Tomorrow’s World, originally broadcast on BBC One, 28 September, 1966.
October 23, 2024
The Last Surviving Giant Passenger Hovercraft
The Tim Traveller
Published Jul 2, 2024In early 1968, Britain launched a revolutionary new form of sea transport: the giant SRN4-class hovercraft. They are the largest passenger hovercraft ever built, and they could fly between England and France in just 30 minutes — three times faster than anything else on the water. So why don’t we have anything like them any more?
MORE INFO
The Hovercraft Museum: https://www.hovercraft-museum.org/
The museum’s “Support Us” page, if you’d like to help them out: https://www.hovercraft-museum.org/sup…
October 20, 2024
QotD: The “Spirit of the Sixties”
Not to get all Classical Rhetoric up in here, but for prior generations, things like “The Beatles” are synecdoche. They’ll go to their graves insisting that The Beatles were “the greatest band ever”, but if you press them on it, most of them are honest enough to admit that Ringo et al weren’t such great shakes, musically. At their best, The Beatles’ songs are musically simplistic and lyrically gibberish; at their worst, they’re “Rocky Raccoon”. The Beatles are “great” because they were innovators, not so much musically but because they were so goddamn pretentious. They wanted to be not mere entertainers, but artistes, and we indulged them, and that combo — pretentiousness and indulgence — became The Spirit of the Sixties.
Thus if you answer “The Beatles” to the question “What’s so great about The Sixties?”, it’s a synechdoche for “the spirit of the age”.
Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
October 8, 2024
Hats off to the brilliant negotiators of the Mauritian government
At The Critic, Yuan Yi Zhu salutes the negotiators who managed to get an amazing deal from the British government for the Chagos Islands (which contain the strategic US naval base of Diego Garcia):
In the middle of that map is Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory and home to one of the most strategic airfields and anchorages on the planet. […] The red circle is 2,000 nautical miles from the island. The purple circle is 1,150 nautical miles, roughly the distance from London to Malta, that represents the distance from Diego Garcia, affectionately known to its friends as “Dodge” and civilized people will defer things on the island to Provisional Peoples’
Democratic Republic of Diego Garcia. That circle is also the distance from Diego Garcia to the island of Mauritius.
Caption and image from CDR Salamander.
Donald Trump likes to brag about his prowess as a negotiator, but he has nothing on the government of Mauritius, which pulled one of history’s great diplomatic heists yesterday, when it announced that the British government had agreed to give it the Chagos Islands, which have been sovereign British territory without interruption since 1814.
To add insult to injury, not only will Mauritius gain a new colony, but it will collect large rents from the Americans for the military base on Diego Garcia, while the British government will pay hefty financial support to Mauritius (Africa’s third richest country on a per capita basis) for the honour of handing over to Mauritius one of the world’s most strategically valuable territories.
In other words, not only is Mauritius having its cake and eating it too, it has also extracted from the British taxpayer a new cake, to be savoured while it smugly lectures the world about the importance of decolonisation.
Never mind that Mauritius sold the Chagos Islands to the United Kingdom in 1965 for the-then astronomical sum of £3 million and a valuable British security guarantee. Its prime minister had described the islands as “a portion of our territory of which very few people knew … which is very far from here, and which we had never visited”, so it was no big loss.
In the 1980s, a new government changed its mind and decided to get the islands back. It alleged the British had threatened to withhold independence from Mauritius unless it agreed to sell the territory. The small problem was that every single surviving Mauritian negotiator cheerfully admitted that they didn’t care about the Chagos, whose inhabitants they regarded as half-civilised savages.
And the blackmail thesis suffered from the fact that Britain in the 1960s could not get rid of its remaining colonies fast enough — Mauritius had to wait a few more years for independence because part of its population wanted it to remain a British territory.
Mauritius then decided to wave the bloody shirt of the Chagossians, who had been callously expelled by the British to make way for the air base and dumped on Mauritius. The fact that the Mauritian treated them terribly — so terribly, in fact, that thousands of them left for the UK, the country which had deported them in the first place — was but a minor detail.
In 2019, Mauritius managed to get the International Court of Justice to say that the islands should be given to Mauritius. The ruling was not even legally binding, but Mauritius was somehow able to convince gullible Whitehall functionaries that Britain had no choice but to give the islands to Mauritius.
So far as I am aware, there is no truth to the rumour that Spain and Argentina are in negotiation with Mauritius to take over their respective territorial claims on Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.
October 6, 2024
Look at Life – The Big Takeoff (1966)
Classic Vehicle Channel
Published Apr 19, 2020The 1966 airshow. Prince Phillip attends via helicopter.
September 28, 2024
QotD: Doom! Doom! And more Doom!
Monty used to use this image at Ace of Spades H.Q., and I certainly think it’s appropriate to include it here.
Lately I’ve become an awful old woman. My reaction, during the con, to the little card hotels leave in your bathroom, in the hopes that you’ll save them laundry money — you know the one that says that if you want to help save the Earth or the Environment (I don’t remember which, precisely, these pagan divinities all run together in my head) you’ll hang up your towel and use it another day — was to sigh and say: Deary, the Earth has been here for billions of years before I was born. It will be here for billions of years before my very atoms have been dispersed in its general Earthness. I can’t save it. There isn’t a tupperware large enough. And besides where would I put it? Who would dust it?
In the event, the only audience for my musings was my husband who consented to chuckle at it, as he went on. And we didn’t hang up the towels. We might have, had they made a sensible business appeal “if you save us money, we’ll be able to keep our prices lower” but we’re not at home to religious pandering to religions not our own. As far as I’m concerned they might as well ask me not to use electricity so as to spare the feelings of Zeus, god of thunderbolt.
So, yes, you see, I have become an awful woman. Or if you prefer, I’ve become a fool or a sadist in Heinlein’s definition of such: Someone who tells the truth in social situations.
But you see, I am so very tired of all the genuflecting and bowing to the doom du jour, as well as the market distortions, worsening of problems and outright damage to people and deaths or grievous arm (not to mention not being born) while trying to avoid largely imaginary dangers and issues.
What do I mean? Well, how many people had no children because they were pounded about the face and head with the impending doom of “overpopulation”? How many of those people, now nearing their last decades, bitterly regret the childlessness? Worse, how many people in how many third world countries were encouraged to be sterilized due to both the “coming doom” of overpopulation, and the horrific mid-century misapprehension that children caused poverty? How many women in China were forcibly aborted? How many toddlers confined to dying rooms? How many women in India were strongly persuaded to abort female children, or expose unwanted ones newly born? (Yes, I know it might have happened anyway, but the westerners were encouraging people to have fewer and fewer children, which only fed that nonsense.)
Other dooms? So many dooms, so little time to catalogue them. When I was little, I knew I’d probably starve or die of thirst due to overpopulation. What was worse, it was overpopulation far away, since most people near me couldn’t afford more than one or two kids, if they ever hoped to live a middle class life. (Spoiler: it was taxes, requiring work from both parents that caused poverty, not an excess of children.) I also expected to freeze in the coming ice age, caused by all the pollution, from people making things in factories, having cars, and using electrical light. Also, as it happened, in the seventies we were told fossil fuels were running out, so while we were freezing, we wouldn’t even be able to take a flight somewhere warmer, to escape the advancing glaciers. But that was all right, because we were all going to die in a nuclear exchange that would happen any day now, in a conflagration between the USSR and the US, whom we were assured were absolutely equal in morality, and both just wanted supremacy for … no reason really.
Of course, the things urged to stop all of this ranged from criminal — the aforementioned forced abortions and killing of children — to the merely dangerous — urging the nuclear disarmament of the West (mostly propaganda from the Soviet Union, mind) which we were assured would bring about peace and not world communism (which in the way of such things would shortly after be followed by world famine and world depopulation.)
By the time the Gaia cultists flipped from a fear of freezing to a fear of boiling, I only half went along, and only until I realized once more it made no sense whatsoever.
Sarah Hoyt, “Doom Doom Doom!”, According to Hoyt, 2024-06-26.
