Jonathan Foster. The Death Ray: The Secret Life of Harry Grindell Matthews. Inventive Publishing, 2009. As seen here. Another find in a Welsh museum bookshop — I should go to Wales more often!
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2009.
Peter London. U-Boat Hunters: Cornwall’s Air War, 1916-19. Truro: Dyllansow Truran, 1999. RNAS airship and aeroplane anti-submarine operations: some success under pretty trying conditions.
Richard Overy. 1939: Countdown to War. London: Allen Lane, 2009. I’ve now met the author!
Robert Stradling. Your Children Will Be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. Argues that the memory of Guernica has obscured earlier atrocities, especially the 1936 bombing of Getafe near Madrid. A complete chance find in the shop at the National Museum Cardiff (though it might have been cheaper to order it over the net than fly to Wales to buy it).
This post relates to my trip to England and Wales in September 2009.
I’m flying out today for London, and from there to Exeter, Truro, Cardiff, Conwy, Leicester and then London again. I’ll probably have internet access most of the time but blog updates will no doubt become more irregular. I hope to meet some of my readers while in Blighty, especially those who have promised me pints!
Image source: Argus, 1 December 1848, 2.
I recently attended a function in the Gryphon Gallery of the 1888 Building at the University of Melbourne, where there’s a local war memorial I missed out on when I last wrote on the topic. It was dedicated in 1920 in what was then the Teachers’ College, and takes the form of three stained glass windows. The central window — seen above and below — depicts an Australian soldier, rifle to the ready, bayonet fixed. He represents all those former students and staff members who served in the Australian Imperial Force (including at least two women).
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It’s seventy years today since Britain and France declared war on Germany. At 11.15am on Sunday 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke to the nation via the BBC. At 11.28am, less than a quarter of an hour later, air raid sirens went off in London and (at differing times) across much of the country. This was in fact only a false alarm, caused by an unscheduled civilian flight from France. But as far as civilians were concerned, this looked like precisely what they had been told to expect when the knock-out blow came: mass air raids simultaneous with the outbreak of war. So their reactions to the alarms give us a little insight into their fear of bombing at the end of the scaremongering 1930s.
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While walking home tonight I saw something unexpected.
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