At the going down of the sun

World War One has been jogged back into the UK’s collective consciousness once more with the Third Battle of Ypres,aka Passchendaele getting its own Royal Command Performance on British TV. Two thoughts; one pretty much universal and the other pretty much local. The local first. There is a tiny village in Suffolk named Bildeston. A… Continue reading At the going down of the sun

Row, row, row your boat

It was January 100 years ago when things turned badly wrong for 28 or so British Antarctic explorers under the command of Ernest Shackleton. Nowadays people jog up Kilimanjaro for charity and text home while they are doing it, but at the turn of the century there were still mountains unclimbed and places in the… Continue reading Row, row, row your boat

“Useful present for a soldier”

Napoleon called the British a nation of shopkeepers. As the first Christmas of the 1914-18 war neared, those shopkeepers of Britain were concerned the country might be distracted from being a nation of customers. To remedy it for that year and throughout the war, much marketing effort was put into keeping the home tills ringing.… Continue reading “Useful present for a soldier”

“War is no sport”

Inevitably there will be many more words written over Christmas about that unofficial truce during the first year of the First World War, when, to the dismay of their senior officers, British and German soldiers left their trenches swapped cigarettes and played football on Christmas Eve. It has entered the pantheon of sentimental mythology and… Continue reading “War is no sport”

A million men died — and it wasn’t in World War One

A cynic could play cliché bingo in Britain today. “Ultimate sacrifice”, “pals’ battalion”, “over the top”, “the mud”, “No Man’s Land”, “over by Christmas”, “lions led by donkeys”, “four years of trench warfare.” We are treating 100 years’ tick tock like a sentimentalist Victorian treated the deserving poor. It’s like one of those signs as… Continue reading A million men died — and it wasn’t in World War One