It is officially too darn hot today: 43° C. So naturally my thoughts turn to a colder time: the 1950s. The above image (which I found as part of x-ray delta one’s wonderful Flickr stream; he also has a suitably breathless blog, ATOMIC-ANNIHILATION) would seem to be part of a public relations exercise from Convair, […]
After Cardiff, my next base of operations was to be Conwy (above), a small town on the north coast of Wales. But getting from south Wales to north Wales by rail is surprisingly difficult: there’s no mainline route which doesn’t spend most of its time in England, and I wanted to see some of the
The war artist is Eric Thake (1904-1982), and the family is mine, although only in the extended sense: Thake’s grandparents, John and Sarah (née Prentice) Thake, were my great-great-grandparents. It was only a couple of weeks ago that my mother found this out. My paternal grandmother (who was born a Thake) did maintain that he
I recently read Sonya O. Rose’s Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), which is interesting on such subjects as anti-Semitism during the Blitz. But I kept being drawn back to the front cover, for a completely trivial reason. The illustration is from a 1941 poster
After my day of fortifications I felt it was time for a change of pace, so I headed east for Swansea. The main attraction here (other than the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, of course) is the National Waterfront Museum, which explores the industrial history and technological of Wales. Of which there is quite a
Cardiff Castle was just the first of many Welsh fortresses I visited. In fact, the next day I was at two more: Caerleon, a Roman legionary headquarters, and Caerphilly Castle, the second-largest castle in Britain.
The Electrical Experimenter was an American science magazine, founded and edited by Hugo Gernsback. These covers were published during the First World War, and illustrate ways in which science could be used to create new weapons and new defences. Many of them are just a little far-fetched, such as the land ironclad shown above.
All of a sudden, my time in Cornwall was over. But it was hard to feel too sad, because my next stop was Cardiff, capital of Wales (and, incidentally, scareship central). Cardiff is perhaps not as pretty as the places I’d seen in Cornwall, but it has plenty of culture which kept me occupied. And
Do these photos, taken early in the Battle of Britain, show a British mystery weapon? (I could just say “no”, but that wouldn’t be very interesting, would it.) The above photo appeared on the front page of an American newspaper, the St Petersburg Evening Independent, on 14 August 1940. The caption reads: This picture taken
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
