I’ve recently come across what appears to be a new biography of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Hugh Montague Trenchard, 1st Viscount Trenchard, 1st and 3rd Chief of the Air Staff, etc: Sylvia Andrew, Lord Trenchard’s Choice (Richmond: Mills and Boon, 2002). I say ‘appears to be’ because there are serious discrepancies with the received historical account of his life, which must call into question the accuracy of the author’s research.

Here’s an extract from the book, followed by a blurb (both from here, though I’ve nabbed the cover from here):

“You leave him alone, do you hear?” The voice rang out, high and clear. Ivo winced as the sound sent his head throbbing again, and slowly turned. The next moment headache, heartache, everything was forgotten as he stared into the muzzle of a pistol, which was pointing directly at his head, not ten paces away. It was in the hands of a boy that couldn’t be more than eleven or twelve. Ivo shivered as a chill ran down his spine. Guns in the hands of children could be fatal, and this boy looked angry enough to shoot him.

“You scum!” the boy went on without moving. “I suppose you mean to sell Star at Taunton, along with the others you have stolen.”

If it didn’t rile the mind of Ivo Trenchard, of the 7th Hussars and the most polished man in Europe, to be mistaken for a simple horse thief, finding that the urchin pulling a gun on him was a teenage girl certainly did! Joscelin Morley both dressed and lived her life as a boy in a futile attempt to please her father. Her future was clear: Marriage to her neighbor Peter was to join the two estates and they would settled down to care for the land they both loved. So where did the worldly Ivo, her godmother’s nephew and a terrible flirt, fit into the equation?

I admit that I’m assuming that ‘Lord Trenchard’ here refers to the 1st Viscount Trenchard (the title was created for him), and not to either his son or grandson — though they’ve both had worthy careers in their own right, and meaning no disrespect to them, neither seems to merit a biography. The 1st Viscount has already had one written about him (I’m reading it at the moment, as it happens) and is probably overdue for another interpretation. But I don’t think Lord Trenchard’s Choice can be it. I mean, he wasn’t called Ivo (unless that’s a nickname); he was in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, not the 7th Hussars; and as for ‘the most polished man in Europe’ and ‘a terrible flirt’ — well, that’s not any Boom Trenchard I’ve ever read about. That cover art is terrible, it looks nothing like him (and what’s with the Jane Austen getup?)

Still, don’t judge a book by its cover and all that — I should at least flip through its bibliography and endnotes first. (And Trenchard was in fact born in Taunton, so that reference looks right.) So who knows, perhaps there’s room for a feisty cross-dressing pistol-wielding Somerset lass in the Father of the RAF’s life.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been using the free preview of Things, a task management application for OS X. I’ve just entered the final year of my PhD — or rather the final year of my PhD scholarship, which may not be the same thing — and so keeping track of everything I need to do is going to be critical. I’ve been looking for something like Things for ages, actually. Nearly all of this type of software seem to be based on Getting Things Done (GTD), a system for task management which is hugely popular, at least among techie types. But I’ve never been able to wrap my head around it, it seems too strict and hierarchical. The applications designed to help you follow it seem just as bad — you’re forced to fill in a bunch of text boxes or select from drop menus or whatever, and it’s all just too annoying for me.

That’s why I like Things, so far — you can fill out as little or as much info as you want for each task. The organisation of tasks is logical (at least to me), the interface is polished but unobtrusive and the program lightweight. It just gets out of the way and lets you get on with things. Apparently it does actually conform to GTD principles, but doesn’t force you to follow it if you don’t want to. The data is stored in an XML file so you can retrieve it if something happens. Tags are used throughout, which is a nice touch. Tasks can be organised by time priority (eg ‘Today’, ‘Next’) or as part of a larger project. When you’ve completed a task, you tick a box on its pane and it will eventually vanish out of sight into a log of completed tasks. It’s probably not the place for detailed notes (I use VoodooPad for that) but works well for jotting down things you need to do, when you think of them.

Things is only a time-crippled beta at the moment, but I’ve found it to be completely stable (there are features which aren’t implemented yet, however, such as collaboration with other Things users). I’ll almost certainly be buying the full version when it’s released; but I have to say the price seems a little steep at US$49 for what, after all, is not a huge program. Being able to get things done is probably worth that; but I’d rather pay US$39, which is the price you can get it for if you sign up to their newsletter before 31 January (which I did a while back and haven’t received a single email yet). Hopefully this doesn’t sound like an ad (NB: I am not connected with Cultured Code in any way), but perhaps there are some Mac users out there who need task management as much as I do right now — if so, Things is worth looking at.

A few days after Xmas, I felt like I should be getting back into reading something thesis-related, but at the same time I still felt like I was still in holiday mode. So I compromised and read something on topic, but a bit lighter than my usual academic fare, namely Waiting for Hitler: Voices from Britain on the Brink of Invasion by Midge Gillies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007). The name suggests that it’s along the lines of the ‘forgotten voices’ type of book that seem to be everywhere lately, but I couldn’t say because I haven’t actually read any of them. While it’s certainly heavy on quoting ‘ordinary’ people (Mass-Observation diarists, Dunkirk veterans, internees) and, I’m sure, doesn’t break any new historiographical ground, it’s based on a lot of research, is well-written, and easily moves between the big picture and the small one. I learned a lot about a topic I don’t know much about, namely the British home front from the start of the Norwegian campaign in April 1940, to the start of the Blitz in September. It’s easy for me to focus too much on the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, but in some ways the period leading up to them is more interesting, because people didn’t know what was going to happen next and that’s often when fears come out to play.

One of the aspects of Waiting for Hitler I appreciated was Gillies’ attention to rumours and panics as an index of the insecurity of the British people as they prepared for a possible German invasion. These are fascinating. For example, the slit trenches being dug in Hyde Park were said to be for mass burials in the aftermath of air raids, not protection from bombs. Troops practicing machine-gunning a buoy in a Cornish harbour turned into the accidental death of a boy by machine-gun fire the next day, and then the massacre of dozens of children on the beach the next, strafed by German aeroplanes. Rumours turned the deputy Labour leader Arthur Greenwood into a traitor locked in the Tower, and pencils and chocolates into the poisoned weapons of fifth columnists. In Southampton, the smell from a pickling plant was responsible for a minor panic, when somebody thought it might be poison gas:

ARP wardens paraded in gas masks, while hairdressers slammed their windows and told customers to keep their heads in washbasins.¹

It may sound silly, but it wasn’t really, because the government’s ARP literature warned people to be wary of strange smells as possible evidence of a gas attack.

Stories abounded of new German weapons. For example:

there were tales of German experiments with a cobweb-like material that they had tested over France in 1939. The substance, which they released in large white balloon-like capsules, had covered several square kilometres and clung to people’s hands and faces. In another version it was reported that the substance had appeared over Britain, but it turned out that this was gossamer produced by spiders mating in mid-air.²

Most of these weapons didn’t exist, but the rumours helped explain to those who passed them on why so many armies were crumbling so quickly before the German onslaught. One of the weapons was quite real, however: the paratrooper.

German paratroopers had featured in the invasion of Denmark and Norway, where they were used to secure airfields as forward Luftwaffe bases or to land occupation forces. Airborne units were also used to capture key fortifications and bridges in Holland and Belgium (in particular, the state-of-the-art Fort Eben-Emael). These spectacular operations seemed to provide a crucial part of the explanation for the stunning success of the German army’s blitzkrieg, and naturally the thought arose — no doubt helped along by the extensive press coverage — that paratroopers might next fall on Britain. This was particularly worrying because much of the army was in France with the British Expeditionary Force.

Hence the invention of the ‘parashot’, one of the crop of new war words. A parashot was simply somebody standing guard in a field or somewhere all night, with a weapon such as a shotgun, waiting for a parachutist to come down. Some parashots took up the task spontaneously, but most joined the Local Defence Volunteers, later renamed the Home Guard. What I didn’t realise was that the LDV was announced as early as 14 May, just 4 days after the start of the German offensive in the West. Somehow, I had it in my head that it was a post-Dunkirk affair, only a few weeks later, which would make sense: the BEF had survived, but only just; it had lost all of its equipment; the French had surrendered (or were soon about to). Invasion seemed probable and there was little to stand in the Germans’ way. On 14 May, however, the Allied forces, though shocked by the speed of the German advance, were still intact; the BEF wasn’t yet in retreat. For anyone who remembered the miracle on the Marne in 1914 (ie, all of the senior military and political leaders), to start planning for defeat might have seemed premature. It seems clear that the new menace of the paratrooper helps explain the new zeal for an army of part-timers, schemes for which had been kicked around Whitehall since early in the war. In his BBC broadcast calling for volunteers for the LDV, Anthony Eden, the newly installed Secretary of State for War, opened by discussing at length the new danger:

I want to speak to you to-night about the form of warfare which the Germans have been employing so extensively against Holland and Belgium — namely, the dropping of troops by parachute behind the main defensive lines.³

He then explained the way in which such parachute raids would be carried out:

The troops arrive by aeroplane — but let it be remembered that any such aeroplane seeking to penetrate here would have to do so in the teeth of the anti-aircraft defences of this country. If such penetration is effected, the parachutists are then dropped, it may be by day, it may be by night. These troops are specially armed, equipped, and some of them have undergone specialised training. Their function is to seize important points, such as aerodromes, power stations, villages, railway junctions and telephone exchanges, either for the purpose of destroying them at once, or of holding them until the arrival of reinforcements. The purpose of the parachute attack is to disorganise and confuse, as a preparation for the landing of troops by aircraft.⁴

As well as activities of the contemporary fifth column across the Channel, this strongly resembles the supposed plans of the secret army of German tourists or immigrants so characteristic of the invasion scare novels before 1914, but I’ll let that pass. Eden assured his listeners that plans had been made against to defend against such an attack, however just to be on the safe side …

We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain who are British subjects, between the ages of 17 and 65, to come forward now and offer their service in order to make assurance doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the “Local Defence Volunteers”. This name, Local Defence Volunteers, describes its duties in three words.⁵

That the government would feel it necessary to call for (it hoped) 150,000 or so volunteers for a second-string army shows how unnerved it was by the blitzkrieg. That 750,000 men would in fact volunteer within the first month shows how unnerved they were. There’s lots of anecdotal evidence to support this, particularly near the south and east coasts — golfers seem to have been particularly concerned that their greens might be perfect landing grounds for gliders, though perhaps this was because an invasion would interrupt their game! Rumours, urban legends practically, of spies parachuting into the country and traveling about disguised as nuns were rife (the give-away was supposedly their hairy arms).

And, on at least one occasion, paratroopers were actually seen floating from the sky:

The concept of the German storm-trooper descending from the sky was so vividly etched on people’s imaginations that it led to a nationwide optical illusion on the stormy Thursday following the invasion of Holland [16 May]. Such was the hysteria about aerial attack that several people mistook silver barrage balloons lit up by flashes of lightning for parachutists. The sightings gained credibility because the Evening Standard had reported that some Germans wore sky-blue uniforms and used transparent parachutes that allowed them to drift to earth invisibly.⁶

Unfortunately, Gillies doesn’t give any references for this, and the extent of the sightings is unclear.⁷ But such a panic fits perfectly into the precedent set by the phantom airships three decades earlier: people are told that strange new enemies are coming by air; they scan the sky anxiously, paying closer attention to it than they normally would; they then see something unfamiliar or under unusual conditions and assume it’s the terrible new weapon they’ve been warned about.⁸ And it’s an air panic too, even if it doesn’t involve Zeppelins or bombers.

So it looks like I’ve got yet more material to try and cram into my thesis somehow. Bigger is better, right?

1. Gillies, Waiting for Hitler, 159.
2. Ibid., 160.
3. The Times, 15 May 1940, p. 3. The full text is online.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Gillies, Waiting for Hitler, 60.
7. It’s ‘a nationwide optical illusion’, yet only involves ’several people’. James Hayward, Myths and Legends of the Second World War (Stroud: Sutton, 2003) has a chapter on the paratrooper panic and hairy nuns, but doesn’t appear to mention this particular incident.
8. It’s true that the phantom airships in 1909 and 1912-3 were seen in peacetime. I would argue that, coming off the back the intense Anglo-German naval rivalry, the spy mania, the invasion novels and all the rest of it, some people felt virtually under siege by Germany already. There’s a degree of circularity in that argument — but I think the loop is broken by the fact that non-existent airships were seen during the First World War itself.

Day two on the Roman frontier. This took some careful poring over the tourist bus timetable (route AD122, of course) to try and maximise the number of sites I visited while spending enough time at each one. This turned out to be be a non-trivial problem — the gap between buses varied considerably, and sometimes the buses stopped in Haltwhistle instead of going beyond, so I was having to make calculations like, ‘well, I can go to A in the morning and be there at opening time, but then the bus to B is either 45 minutes later or 3 hours 45 minutes later, which is either too short or possibly too long, but if I want to take in C as well I really need to take the earlier bus because there’s no other way to get there. Or I can go to C first, then come back to B but I’d only have an hour there …’ And so on: it did my head in! It turned out that there was really no sensible way to do more than 2 places, so I crossed the Roman Army Museum off my list and settled on Vindolanda and Housesteads. I didn’t have cause to regret this, as they were both even more absorbing than Chesters had been.

The above photo, incidentally shows Hadrian’s Wall itself, looking back towards Housesteads from the west (it’s past the big clump of trees on top of the cliffs).

I started at Vindolanda, which is one of the best-preserved castra on (actually, behind) the Wall. Several generations of forts were built here, the earliest about 90, before the Wall itself was built, the last around 300. In the third and fourth centuries, it housed a unit of auxiliary troops, the Fourth Cohort of Gauls. Today, the RAF likes to remind visitors of Vindolanda’s military past by bursting their ear-drums.

More ancient hydraulics. This is not actually in the fort itself but in the civilian settlement, the vicus, to its west. Actually there are more bits of surviving civilian stonework than there are military. Since there were several hundred men permanently stationed at the fort, they needed somewhere to spend their pay, after all. There was a bath, a few small temples, houses, and no doubt a taverna or three. A few years ago, the remains of a huge wooden building were found under the vicus, bigger than anything else found at Vindolanda. Its purpose is still unclear. Robin Birley talks about it here, according to the Vindolanda guidebook, they’ve narrowed the date down to between 101 and 112.

The civilian baths (there’s another military bath-house on the other side of the fort).

These are the foundations of huts near the north gate of the fortress, but inside it and abutting the wall. The nearby sign suggests that ‘Quae mapalia tempore expeditionis imperatoris Severi, quam contra rebelles Caledonios duxit, erecta sunt. Incertum est, quales personae mapalia habitarent, fortasse rustici propter rebellionem in discrimen adducti.’ Luckily for me there’s an English translation — the huts date to the time of the Severan expedition against ‘the revolting northern tribes’, and may have housed friendly farmers.

Outside the gate, looking east.

And the eastern wall, looking south … I seem to have picked a lot of wall photos! I suppose that’s because they were more impressive here than at Chesters or Housesteads.

The south-east corner of the fortress. Beyond is a replica of typical sections of the Wall, both the original turf and timber one and the later, more permanent stone one.

The tower of the aforementioned replica.

A view of the vicus from the top of the tower, with the fortress on the right.

A graffito from inside the tower. 3 points for the idea and 2 for carrying it out, -1 for not having heard of Dionysius Exiguus.

Vindolanda is famous for writing by people who also haven’t heard of Dionysius Exiguus, but they had the excuse of being born about four centuries earlier than him. I’m referring to the Vindolanda tablets, of course. These are an incredible survival, letters written on thin wooden tablets by the inhabitants of the garrison from the first decades of its existence, at the end of the 1st century and the beginning of the 2nd. They were discarded as rubbish and burned, but hundreds survived in anaerobic conditions in the mud for eighteen centuries. They are written in Old Roman Cursive; the archaeologists who first dug them up were so unfamiliar with this type of script that they didn’t even recognise it as Latin!

The most famous is probably that by Claudia Severa, wife of a Roman officer, to the wife of the commander at Vindolanda: a party invite. The closing two sentences were written by her own hand.

Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present (?). Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him (?) their greetings. (2nd hand) I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.

Above is the museum, which explores the tablets and their context, but also has an almost-as-amazing collection of leather goods and textiles, which have survived thanks to the same soil conditions. Some of the shoes in particular were very intricate, and must have been imported from York or even the Continent.

Outside the museum is what must be one of the more unusual war memorials in Britain. The text reads:

S.P.Q.R.
IN MEMORY OF THE SOLDIERS
WHO SERVED ROME ON THE
FRONTIER, AT VINDOLANDA,
A.D. 85-400
COHORTS: 1 TUNGRORVM
III BATAVORVM
VIIII BATAVORVM
II NERVIORVM
III NERVIORVM
IV GALLORVM
AND DETACHMENTS FROM:
COHORT: I VARDULLORVM
LEGIONS: II AUGUSTA
VI VICTRIX
XX VALERIA VICTRIX
AND OTHERS UNKNOWN

It’s even in the UKNIWM.

This is a very pretty little replica temple of the sort that might have existed at Vindolanda. There’s also a replica Roman house and shop nearby.

Archaeologists at work! To be fair, it was lunchtime by now. They were just outside the fortress, investigating the previous walls which stood here. Vindolanda is undergoing active, long-term research, and is owned by the Vindolanda Trust.

From wheelbarrows to sheep: Housesteads, Roman Vercovicium.

Sheep have probably been grazing around these ruins for the better part of two millennia.

For about three centuries, Housesteads was manned by the First Cohort of Tungrians. More recently, it was occupied by reivers! No, not that kind, the original ones — raiders and rustlers along the Anglo-Scottish border. This is a bastle house, a fortified farmhouse, built from the stones of the castrum in the 16th century, just outside the south gate.

The view through the bastle house’s window. I guess it’s just for light, it seems too deep and narrow to be much use as a gun slit or even as a lookout.

The famous latrines.

As a veteran explorer of Roman ruins (this being my third), I confidently identified this as a hypocaust. Ha! Wrong. It’s actually a granary — the raised floor is not for conducting hot air but to keep damp and rodents out.

Even after centuries of plundering by locals, there’s still a lot of dressed stone here.

Hadrian’s Wall, looking eastward from the fortress.

A slightly different view of the same direction. In the foreground is another part of the Wall, which forms the northern defences of the fortress. Contrary to what might seem common sense, the Wall wasn’t really intended as a defence against attacks from the north. The number of men needed to do that would have been enormous. Instead, it was more about regulating and controlling trade and immigration across the frontier, between the semi-Romanised tribes in front of the Wall and the slightly more Romanised inhabitants of the hinterland. The units on the wall could deal with minor security problems, but anything serious would probably require reinforcements from the reserves behind the Wall or from the provincial capital at York.

The gateway to Milecastle 37, to the west of Housesteads; looking north (i.e., away from Roman territory). A milecastle was basically a small tower, with a gate and rooms for a detachment of about 16 men. There was one every Roman mile along the wall, with two small turrets (without a gate) in between. I suppose the existence of milecastles supports the idea that the Wall wasn’t a defensive line — why put in dozens of extra gates with minimal defences if you’re worried about armies of Picts surging through?

The Wall westward of Milecastle 37.

The path through this small copse (as seen in the top photo) is actually the top of the Wall. I include it only because walking along it was about as close as I got to wilderness the whole time I was overseas!

While missing out on a Clio may have been entirely predictable, having a post included in On Line Opinion/Club Troppo’s exhibition of the best Australian blog posts of 2007 was completely unforeseen! It’s a very pleasant surprise, and the exposure is nice too (On Line Opinion has something like 145,000 readers a week, according to Wikipedia). My post is here; all of the best posts are listed here.

I have to say, though, the post in question is not something I would have picked for my best of 2007: I don’t think it’s particularly well-written or insightful. Commenter Pericles would seem to agree: ‘What a strange piece. I had thought that the practice of delving into the past and finding odd observations about “overseas” had long passed its use-by date’. Arrrgh — and here was me thinking that anything that the proper study of history was anything and everything that had happened in the past for which records still exist. Why do I never seem to get these memos? Is there some mailing list I should be on? It’s especially bad news for historians of Tocqueville and the like. And somebody should tell George Simmers that his examination of D. H. Lawrence’s opinions of Australians ‘is an entirely pointless exercise, and a stunning waste of your time and mine’, since Pericles uses that very example for our instruction. Anyway, thanks, Pericles, for letting me know — won’t happen again.

A recent post on the new science fiction blog io9 (which I’m enjoying, but is it really so hard to put in spoiler warnings?) claimed that the Vickers Velos was the ‘ugliest and most worthless plane in the world’. Sure, it’s not pretty, but I’ve seen plenty that were uglier — fuglier, even. But there were a couple of links to lists of other ugly aircraft, which are always fun to browse. The first one had some bizarre nominations (the Dragon Rapide should never be on such a list) but I thought I’d found what may be the single ugliest aeroplane ever made, the three-engine variant of the Farman Jabiru airliner (it’s French, naturellement). I was going to write this post about it. But then I clicked through to the second list.

That is where I first saw the Vedo Villi.

I can’t take my eyes off it. I honestly can’t decide whether it’s ugly or beautiful. But it is somehow deeply, fundamentally, disturbingly, horrifyingly wrong. It is eldritch. It’s like something H. P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up, if he’d been an aircraft designer and wanted just the thing for the airminded cultist to nip down from Arkham Aerodrome to the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh for the weekend.

There is a photo of the Villi below. Read on — if you dare.

I have scoured dusty bookshelves, and plumbed the depths of the infinite archive. But all I can learn of this abomination is that it is from 1911, is French, is a pusher — and, some say, that it flew. It flew. That cannot — should not — be. It undermines my faith in the laws of aerodyamics — indeed, in the essential rationality of the Universe.

It is dark outside, and almost silent. Almost. I think I can hear something circling above in the sky … an engine … it sounds like it is whispering something to me — almost in tempo with the rhythm of my breathing — no, it can’t be — ‘VE-DO VILL-I! VE-DO VILL-I!’

Long-time reader, second-time commenter Ian Evans was in the Royal Observer Corps in York at the end of the 1950s. Here he describes how the ROC, in addition to retaining something like its planespotting functions during the Second World War, took on the job of measuring the Third:

When I joined the ROC (1958) it was still pretty much an RAF auxiliary, officers with handlebar moustaches and all. We spotted, reported and plotted aircraft in a very similar manner to our WW2 predecessors, though things had been simplified and speeded up, with special procedures for fast low flying aircraft (Rats). The nuclear reporting role was just being introduced, the observer posts were given “bunkers”, a small underground room with bunks and stores, airlock and reinforced tunnel to the surface, a nuclear burst recorder (a souped-up pinhole camera), a pressure recorder to measure the blast strength, a Geiger counter to measure the fallout, and individual dosimeters (we were rather cynical about these).

The operating theory was that there would be sufficient political warning for the observers to man their posts, they would wait for the noise to stop, surface, extract the recording paper from their recorders, read off the bearing and altitude of the burst and the peak overpressure. This would then be phoned in to Group HQ where we would plot the (hopefully several) bearings, and get the position of the detonation. Then, using the reported overpressures, plus sets of tables and nomograms we woud evaluate the bomb power and report back to…..anyone still alive. After that the posts would report radiation levels at regular intervals until…

Which is quite a terrifying job description (luckily they didn’t have to do risk assessments in those days!)

But, of course, there was plenty of terror to go around. Long-time reader and commenter CK pointed out a 1982 BBC documentary called “Nuclear War: A Guide to Armageddon” (written and produced by Mick Jackson, director of Threads) about the effects of a nuclear war and how civilians should prepare for it.

(Parts two and three: `Are you prepared to use force to keep others out’ of your shelter?) One of the sources cited at the start is Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan’s classic The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Department of Defense and Energy Research and Development Administration, 1977), which is now available online.

The title of this post, of course, comes from Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s 1984 classic “Two Tribes”:¹

Aside from the general Cold War theme, the link with the rest of this post is the voice at the start of the video which says, ‘… the air attack warning sounds like. This is the sound’, followed by a siren. The voice belongs to actor Patrick Allen, who had previously said similar things as the narrator of the British government’s series of civil defence films, Protect and Survive, successors of the ARP pamphlets of the 1930s. Inevitably, the films are also all available on YouTube.

Thank you to CK and especially Ian for their comments.

1. I didn’t realise that the title comes from the opening narration in Australia’s own great contribution to the end of the world, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior: ‘For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.’

Leaving York, I took the train north to Newcastle, where I took another train heading west to Hexham, a small town in Northumberland. As nice as Hexham was, I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t there during business hours and so didn’t see much of it. Which is a shame, because there’s a fine 12th century abbey and several other medieval buildings there (I did get to see the railway station, of course, apparently one of the oldest in the world). But that was ok, because I was only there to see Hadrian’s Wall, which runs just north of Hexham on its way from coast to coast.

On my first day, I only had time to see one site, so I chose Chesters. Between the 2nd (almost immediately after the Wall was built, in fact) and late 4th centuries it was a Roman cavalry fortress called Cilurnum, sited where the Wall crossed the North Tyne.

There’s a small museum on site — really, just a couple of rooms stuffed full of old Roman statues (most of them not from Chesters, but from elsewhere along the wall). This is Neptune, possibly representing the North Tyne.

Possibly the goddess Coventina in triplicate, from a temple at Carrawbugh. The execution is crude compared to the wonderful things I later saw in Rome itself. But really, that just adds to their charm. (Yes, I’m a soft touch when it comes to classical art.)

From the same place and dedicated to the same goddess, by Titus D. Cosconianus, prefect of the First Cohort of Batavians.

A brick (sorry, ‘building stone’) with a boar carved into it.

The countryside around Chesters.

A row of barracks — those walls are about a foot high or so. The great thing about the ruins along the Wall is that you can clamber over just about all of them — try doing that in the Roman forum!

By their drainage systems shall ye know them.

One of the guardrooms beside the main east gate.

A hypocaust underneath one of the rooms in the commandant’s house, that is a raised floor, under which hot air was passed to heat the room. One thing I quickly came to appreciate after scrambling over a ruined fort or two is just how seriously the Roman army took its creature comforts.

For example, this is the (well-preserved) bath house, which must have been the most complex building on the site, what with the frigidarium, caldarium, tepidarium … but I suppose such luxury was a necessity in such a cold, wet climate.

These niches are in the changing room. The obvious thought is that they were lockers for clothes, but apparently there’s no evidence that doors could have been fitted to them. Instead, they probably held statues of deities, representing the days of the week (as there are seven niches).

The south-east angle tower (a fancy way of saying it’s in the corner of the fort). That doorway is surprisingly narrow. I wouldn’t say I’m particularly broad-shouldered, but the soldiers who used the tower must have been less so than me. And they were wearing armour, so it still would have been a tight fit. Or else they squeezed in sideways!

The North Tyne, which is swift and cold (it looked it, anyway!) The Romans built a big bridge here at Chesters, some of which still survives.

Another view across the rolling hills.

Military History Carnival #10 has been posted over at Walking the Berkshires. This month, the post I enjoyed the most was at Boston 1775, about various improvised weapon systems which ragtag insurgents hoped would turn the tide against the overwhelmingly superior forces of a colonial power. Ok, it’s a stretch to call these first submarines ‘improvised weapon systems’, as they were pioneering attempts at an entirely new mode of transportation. (The post is more about other proposed weapons, such as ‘Row-Gallies’. I want to talk about submarines though :) But they were also weapons of desperation, of the weak against the strong. The British didn’t need to invent submarines because they already ruled the waves. Why bother with such frail contraptions, more of a danger to their own crew than anyone else? Submarines have come a long way since then. They are integral parts of big navies, though for very different purposes than the Turtle (platforms for SLBMs, for example). Middle powers such as Australia like to have a few around to lurk about and deter any potential aggressors, and to add some heft to their offensive capabilities. It’s in small, coastal defence navies that submarines retain something like their original purpose, as force equalisers. It’s in the North Korean navy and its like that the true heirs of the Turtle are to be found today.

The winners of the 2007 Cliopatria Awards have been announced. These are awarded for the best history blogging in the last year. If they’re not already there, I like to add the winning blogs to my sidebar and to my RSS reader, both as a very mediocre reward to the victors, and to diversify my reading. This year, that means adding four blogs: In the Middle (best group blog), Religion in American History (best new blog), Zoom (best series of posts, which have featured here before), and Steamboats are Ruining Everything (best writing). They join Cliopatria (best post, by Timothy Burke) and Civil War Memory (best individual blog), both already there.

I’m very pleased about that last one — even though Airminded was also nominated in that category — because Kevin’s passion for his subject and for his teaching makes Civil War Memory one of my favourite blogs. I’ll also note that this means that military history blogs have won best individual blog two out of three times (Blog Them Out of the Stone Age won the inaugural award). And another military history blog (Civil Warriors) won best group blog last year. The military historioblogosphere continues its irresistable advance!