On my third day in Cornwall I avoided the usual tourist traps entirely, because I was in search of my ancestors’ home: a tiny little place called Tremayne, which is towards Land’s End, in the hundred of Penwith. To get there I caught a train to Camborne, then a bus to Praze-an-Beeble (no, really!), and […]
After my little misadventure at Camelford, I started the next day out of position, and had a long way to go just to get back to my real hotel in Truro for a change of clothes. So for my day’s excursion I didn’t want to go too far from Truro, and luckily Falmouth is only
This is an advertisement from The Times, 26 May 1915, 5, for the ‘Life-Saving “CAVENDISH” Anti-Gas INHALER’ — in other words, a gas mask. It’s a surprisingly early attempt to combine (and to cash in on) the twin threats of aerial bombardment and chemical warfare — that is, ‘The Danger of GAS BOMBS’: You can
After the Exeter conference my holiday proper began. I travelled by train down to Cornwall, to Truro where I made my base for the next few days. Truro is the county seat, though it’s not a big town by any means. (Nowhere in Cornwall is, which is part of its charm.) It does have the
An advertisement for Imperial Airways from the Daily Telegraph, 30 January 1935, emphasising its role in delivering airmail to the Empire: twice weekly to ‘the East’ (presumably India, Singapore, Hong Kong), once a week to Australia (a service which had only just begun the previous month), and twice weekly to Cape Town. A lot of
Later the same day that I arrived at Heathrow and visited Salisbury, I was down in the southwest of England — Exeter, to be precise. I was there for a conference but arrived a day early so I could have a poke around. There are indeed some things very worth seeing in Exeter, although the
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] While in Wales recently I chanced upon a copy of Robert Stradling’s Your Children Will Be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). My description at the time was that this book ‘Argues that the memory of Guernica has obscured earlier atrocities, especially
It must be about to time to start posting photos from my trip (blame Alan!) My first destination was in Wiltshire, and is best introduced by Nigel Tufnel: In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people: the Druids. No one knows who they were, or what
William le Queux‘s The Invasion of 1910 is today one of the best-remembered of the Edwardian invasion novels (at least to anyone interested in the topic). Not because of any literary value — very few people read it today, and I can’t blame them — but because of its contemporary success. It was commissioned by
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
