No, really. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! Leo Amery (paraphrasing Oliver Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump Parliament), in reference to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 7 May 1940.
Ron Austin. The Fighting Fourth: A History of Sydney’s 4th Battalion 1914-19. McCrae: Slouch Hat Publications, 2007. Private Mulqueeney’s unit, though the poor sod was with it in the field for only a couple of months before his death. It had earlier landed at Gallipoli, on the first day; and after the Somme fought at
After Newark and Cranwell, I returned to London, for the last couple of weeks of my stay there. No longer did the summer stretch out before me. This meant that I had to start making hard choices about how to spend my time, both in terms of my research and my sight-seeing. In my gawking
I can’t say I’m terribly familiar with Lord Allenby, either the man or his career (and when I visualise him, he always looks like Jack Hawkins). But in my experience, retired field marshals are more likely to call for national service than a world state,1 so I was surprised when I came across Allenby’s Last
Philip Williamson. Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Stan, me old mucker!
What was the first post-apocalyptic film? This is something I’ve wondered for a while. First, I should define what I mean by a “post-apocalyptic film”. It’s one which posits some great global catastrophe which shatters civilisation.1 It can show that catastrophe but the focus has to be on what happens afterwards: how do people survive,
Cranwell is a RAF base in Lincolnshire (not far from Newark or Grantham, or Lincoln for that matter). It was first established as a RNAS training station in 1915, and sortied the odd anti-zepp patrol in the next few years. In the 1930s, Frank Whittle did much of his work on jet engines here; indeed,
The grave of Pte John Joseph Mulqueeney, in Courcelette British Cemetery, Somme, France. He was killed on 17 August 1916 near Mouquet Farm. I am extremely grateful to Steve John for providing me with this photograph.
It’s the 75th anniversary of Stanley Baldwin’s famous ‘the bomber will always get through’ speech. It’s an important text which is widely quoted, both in my primary and my secondary sources, as a testament to the fear of bombing in the 1930s. But I’ve never actually read it very closely, and I think I’m in
Gary Smailes has put together Military History Carnival 8, and it’s a good one. The item which, inevitably, appealed to me most was Damned Interesting’s account of incidents where the world nearly stumbled into an accidental nuclear holocaust. (But wait, there were more!) Obviously, a scenario where the survival of a significant proportion of humanity,
