Comedian Jim Davidson is a patron of Care after Combat, which works with veterans who have been sent to prison and is calling for more to be done to support them.......
Noble retired in 2011 when he finished as the commanding officer of RNAS Yeovilton, the UK’s busiest military airport. He has been Royal Marines Charitable Trust Fund chief executive............. Noble, now of Owls Road, Verwood, Dorset, has two previous convictions for battery on his wife and one of criminal damage when he broke her glasses..........
He was sentenced to 14 months for the ABH and one month consecutive
for breaching a conditional discharge for the previous criminal damage.
He must complete a 25-day rehabilitation activity requirement and pay
£400 costs.
UNQUOTE
The good brigadier is now departed so he will not do it again. The
Telegraph tells us about QUOTE His wit, charm, keen intellect and
tact enabled him to circumvent obtuse senior officers and obstinate
civil servants. UNQUOTE. Does it mention the other details? Pass.
Giles Auty RIP
Was a thoroughly decent Englishman, artist and lately the cultural critic of
The Spectator. He went to Australia and wrote
for The Australian, once run by Rupert Murdoch.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg [ 18 September 2020 ]
Ginsburg was a
Marxist Jew on the American
Supreme
Court. The world is a better place without her. The
Hard Left have threatened to destroy America if Don appoints an honest
replacement. There is more on her evil at RBG.
Clive Ponting RIP
[ 5 August 2020 ]
Clive was the senior civil servant who exposed
the lies told by Her Majesty's
Government about the
Sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War.
He fed Tam Dalyell MP
the right questions to ask. In fact HMG did not need to lie; it was an act
of war. Belgrano's captain said after that he was not returning to port,
Mainstream Media liars notwithstanding. The effect was
very good; the Argentinian navy bottled out, staying in port for the duration. Maggie was
very annoyed with Clive so he was charged under Section 2 of the
Official
Secrets Act 1911, a disgraceful bit of law. She used a thug called
McCowan J as the
judge to guarantee a conviction but he overplayed his hand. The
Jury refused to do what he wanted. It was
Jury Nullification at its best; thank God for
it. It slowed his promotion down.
Jean Raspail, The Prescient Author Of Camp Of The Saints
QUOTE
Jean Raspail, who has died aged 94, was a French writer
and eccentric whose Le Camp des Saints (1973, “Camp of
Saints”), a dystopian novel foretelling an imminent
“swamping” of Europe by “brown people” from the Orient,
articulated a nightmare which became fashionable not only
with the French Right, but among American neo-conservatives.
But Raspail, who styled himself “King”, or sometimes “Consul General”, of Patagonia (via a claimed kinship to an unhinged French adventurer named Antoine de Tounens, who was proclaimed King Orelie-Antoine of Patagonia by the native population for a few weeks in 1860 – until the Chileans saw him off), was also guilty of some “swamping” of his own.
A practitioner of elaborate practical jokes or, as he put it, “games that are not entirely games”, Raspail was behind the “invasion”, on three occasions, of the Minkies Reef, known in French as Les Minquiers, a tiny uninhabited rocky archipelago in the St Malo bay, part of the Bailiwick of Jersey, by intruders who claimed the territory for Patagonia.
In June 1984 Raspail led a force consisting of what one British newspaper called “sozzled French students”, who renamed the territory Northern Patagonia in response to Britain’s “unacceptable and prolonged occupation of the Malouines [ie Falkland] Islands, a territory of Patagonia”, and fled when the coastguard was alerted.
The invasion was repeated in 1998 when the intruders lowered the Union flag from the islands’ solitary flagpole, replacing it with the Patagonian flag and painted the islands’ one lavatory – a small wooden hut – in the Patagonian national colours of blue, white and green.
The invaders were sent packing a day later thanks to the intervention of the Sun which dispatched an inflatable dinghy, skippered by Jersey gendarme PC Fitchett, to reclaim the “Minkies” for Queen and Country. However the British Embassy in Paris ended up having to intervene to get Raspail to return the Union Jack, which he initially said he would only do on return of the Patagonian flag on “neutral” territory – a Parisian bar – before agreeing to present the captured flag to the Embassy.
In October last year, probably at Raspail’s instigation, the so-called “Special Forces of the Kingdom of Patagonia” once again hoisted the Patagonian flag on the islands and repainted the lavatory hut, this time in retaliation for Brexit, before retreating upon the arrival of the hut’s owners.
Jean Raspail was born on July 5 1925 in Chemillé-sur-Dême, in the Indre-et-Loire department of west-central France, the son of a factory manager, and educated at private Catholic schools.
As a young man he was a tireless traveller, leading an overland expedition from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska in the early 1950s and a research expedition to the land of the Incas in 1954. In 1956 he spent a year in Japan. He published several works of travel and adventure, for which he was awarded the Jean Walter Prize of the Académie française in 1970.
Le Camp des Saints was initially panned by the French press. Even France’s biggest right-wing newspaper, Le Figaro, to which Raspail was a contributor, tore into his tale of Europe being overrun by dark-skinned, faeces-eating, sexually predatory invaders bent on overpowering the white population. The book sold only 15,000 copies in its first year.
Its fortunes were transformed from 1985 when an English language edition was published in the United States, sponsored by the Right-wing Laurel Foundation, and it became a best seller.
The more charitable saw the work as a satire of white European privilege and colonial guilt, but that was not how it was interpreted by the far Right. In France Jean-Marie Le Pen took to peppering his speeches with references to “Jean Raspail’s famous work”; the book also found a powerful advocate in the leading American neo-conservative Daniel Pipes, who proclaimed The Camp of Saints to be true prophecy.
The former Trump confidant Steve Bannon also cited the book as key to understanding the European migrant crisis and the failure of political elites to respond with the necessary resolve to preserve what he called the “underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West”. Raspail found himself hailed as a prophet – “the Frantz Fanon of the White Race”.
Raspail wrote other novels, including Moi, Antoine de Tounens, roi de Patagonie (“I, Antoine of Tounens, King of Patagonia”) which won the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie française in 1981.
His traditional Catholicism and monarchism also inspired Sire (1990) a novel in which the ideologies of communism and liberalism are vanquished by a restored French monarchy – as well as an attempt to hand back the Comtat Venaissin, the region round Avignon, to the Vatican on the grounds that it had belonged to the Pope until the French Revolution.
Raspail was a candidate for the 40-member Académie française in 2000, for which he received the most votes, but failed to obtain the majority required for election to the vacant seat.
He was a Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur.
UNQUOTE
The
Telegraph sneers at a better man than any of them. But then it is
The Quislinggraph. M Raspail was right in his
Camp Of The Saints. Europe is being overrun
by Third World savages but the Quislinggraph hates
the truth; it sides with the traitors importing them with malice aforethought.
Mieczyslaw Stachiewicz RAF Bomber Pilot
After 33 operations he was rested in November 1942. He was awarded Poland’s
highest award for gallantry, the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari, and
he was awarded the Cross of Valour three times.
Mieczyslaw Jozef
Stachiewicz was born on May 21 1917 in Warsaw. His father was the son of
General Julian Stachiewicz, an officer of the Polish Legions and a close
associate of Jozef Pilsudski.
He visited Cologne on the first “Thousand Bomber” raid as well as Stuttgart, the Krupps works at Essen and the ports of Emden, Wilhelmshaven, Bremen and Turin.
Lord Patrick Beresford [ 29 March 2020 ]
Lord Patrick Beresford,
the Waterford-born aristocrat, polo player and major in the SAS [ R Squadron
], who died on
Wednesday, March 18, had very close ties with the British royal family and a
brief but well publicised dalliance with Queen Elizabeth's younger and
wilder sister, Princess Margaret.
As a 23-year-old with the Royal Horse Guards, Beresford, whose elder brother Lord Tyrone became the 8th Marquis of Waterford, was a guest at Windsor Castle during ''the season'' of 1957 and squired 27-year-old Princess Margaret to nearby Royal Ascot, as well as dining and dancing with her at elaborate post-race celebrations.
Such was the furore in the press that his then girlfriend, socialite Joanne Smith-Bingham, told one newspaper that she was "mortified" by the attention his relationship with the princess was getting in the media. In return, Beresford said he and the 21-year-old Miss Smith-Bingham "were just good friends". See more at Paradata.
Freeman Dyson RIP [ 3 March
2020 ]
Mike Hoare The
Irish Mercenary RIP
[ 3 February 2020 ]
Paul Farnes - The
Last Of The Few RIP [ 30
January 2020 ]
Sir Roger Scruton RIP [ 13 January 2020 ]
As one of the most contentious figures in British public
life, Scruton operated as an academic, journalist and
prolific writer, and a lightning rod for criticism and abuse
from the political Left. He was regularly shouted down in
universities and prevented from speaking, yet he enjoyed a
reputation as a first-class professional philosopher among
academics of all political persuasions. Scruton was a man of parts, some of which seemed
irreconcilable: barrister, aesthetician, teacher at Birkbeck
College (part of London University with a tradition of a
working-class intake), editor of the ultra-Conservative
Salisbury Review, and enthusiastic fox hunter. He used to
ride to hounds wearing Enoch Powell’s old hunting clothes,
although the jacket split the first time he used it........... Predictably,
his views
on hunting
caused indignation. “I do ask myself
why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I
think,” Scruton observed. “And while I know it might not be
everyone’s point of view, that doesn’t seem particularly
intolerable to me.” But
he had a wide and deep understanding of the history of
western philosophy as a whole, and some of his best
philosophical work consisted of explaining much more clearly
than is often the case how different schools of western
philosophy relate to one another. Scruton
could date his own conservative convictions to the Paris
riots of May 1968, when he watched from a window in the
Latin Quarter as students tore up the cobblestones to hurl
at riot police. “I suddenly realised that I was on the other side,” he
said. “What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent
middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they
wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was
this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook. “I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way
back to the defence of western civilisation against these
things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted
to conserve things rather than pull them down.”........... But it was the issue of national identity that provoked
the most venomous attacks. Where most commentators avoided
involving themselves in the incendiary debates about
nationality, race, history and culture, Scruton weighed in. In 1984, as editor of The Salisbury Review, he published
an article headed “Education and Race” by a Bradford
headmaster,
Ray Honeyford, who argued that multicultural education
was harmful for immigrant children. All hell broke loose,” Scruton recalled. “But then, in
the 1980s, any questioning of the Left-liberal orthodoxy
could only have a racist motivation, or be seen to give succour to racists. I’d argue that not addressing these
issues gives succour to racists. But it got us into terrible
trouble.
The New Statesman
published some malicious and fraudulent quotes, which prove their hatred but then
it was a tool of the KGB. Sir Roger published an
article by a headmaster in
Bradford on
the evil that is Multiculturalism; it is
at
Ray Honeyford.
Yes, of course he was right - comment is at
The Man Who Predicted the Race Riots. Various Left Wing thugs turned very nasty. The
same criminals are keeping very quiet about the wholesale Rape
of English girls by Pakistani Perverts,
about the Pakistani Rape Epidemic
being eagerly ignored by corrupt politicians like
Boris Johnson,
Blair,
Brown, Cameron, Heath, May et
cetera ad nauseam. Where do you stop with a list like this?
John Sturgis MC
Vladimir Bukovsky, A Soviet Dissident
Johnny Johnson Of 6 PARA Was There On D Day
General Sir John Wilsey
Sydney
Jary MC
Dick Hargreaves MC - Major Of 4 PARA
Ross Perot dead Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate was 89
Ralph Benjamin
Iris Bower Was There On D Day
Colin Gubbins [
1896 - 1976 ] Gubbins was also responsible for setting up the secret
Auxiliary Units, a commando force based around the Home Guard, to
operate on the flanks and to the rear of German lines if the
United Kingdom were invaded during
Operation Sea Lion, Germany's planned invasion. The kind of man who
makes a real difference - for the better.
Glubb Pasha [
1897 - 1986 ]
Joe Bertony, Designer Of Sydney Opera House Roof
A Bletchley Man Departs This World
[ 12 March 2019 ]
Zhores Alferov
[ 2 March 2019 ]
Last Of The Great Escapers Dies Aged 99 [ 19 February 2019 ] The former squadron leader was one the designated diggers in a group
of 76 who escaped from the
Stalag Luft III camp in Germany in 1944. The site now stands in Poland. Their feat of courage went on to represent one of the most-told
stories from the Second World War, immortalised in the 1963 Hollywood
film starring Steve McQueen. Mr Churchill, who lived in Crediton, Devon, died on Wednesday.
Wing Commander
Elkington RIP
[ 4 February 2019 ]
A
Dambuster Dies
[ 23 January 2019 ]
Guy Byam - BBC War Correspondent
Due to his injuries Byam was released from his duties and worked for an
engineering company before joining the
BBC in November 1942 as a sub-editor in their
French Service. In April 1944 Byam joined the BBC's War Reporting Unit which
covered
Operation Overlord.[1]
On
D Day Byam jumped with paratroopers into occupied France.[2]
[
Stirlings in Action With the Airborne Forces: Air Support to Special Forces
and the SAS During WW11.
]
Byam was later part of the Public Relations team under Major R. W. Oliver
that was present at the
Battle of Arnhem alongside fellow BBC reporter
Stanley Maxted and newspaper reporters Alan Wood of the
Daily Express and Jack Smyth of
Reuters.[4]
[
Shrinking Perimeter ] Byam was killed when the plane he was reporting from, the Rose of York,
was shot down over Germany during a daylight air raid on Berlin in February
1945. Byam was one of two BBC reporters who were killed during the Second
World War.
Lord Carrington MC Dies Aged 99
[ 11 July 2018 ] The peer served in every Conservative
administration from Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher, before resigning on
principle in 1982 after failing to anticipate the Argentine invasion of the
Falklands........................ He served as the 6th Secretary General of NATO
between 1984 and 1988, and is credited with stopping a war between Greece and
Turkey in 1987. He had previously chaired the Lancaster House talks in 1979
which led to the establishment of the state of Zimbabwe, and later served as
secretary general of NATO from 1984-88. The Eton-educated hereditary peer was a tank
commander in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War, winning the
Military Cross in the North-Western Europe campaign........ Lord Carrington
served with distinction during the Second World War. As a major in the Grenadier
Guards, he was awarded the Military Cross for his role in the capture of a
strategically vital bridge at Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.......... He said: 'I remember serving alongside men in my
tank during the war, and hearing their thoughts. ‘These were young men who
had joined up in the hope of getting a square meal. Most had been unemployed
before the war. In my squadron, not one single man voted Conservative in 1945.’
Lady Dunn, debutante who worked for MI6 at Bletchley Park
Mary Wilson
Bernard Lewis
Lt Col Andrew Houstoun MC
Ted Stocker DSO, Flight Engineer
Wing Commander Reg Reynolds
Oscar Owide - Jew, Pimp, Thief, Windmill Club Owner
The Rev Dr Anthony Harvey
Christine Keeler, The Model At The Heart Of The Profumo Affair
Bronwen Astor Dies
Peter Montagnon, Intelligence Man And Television Director
Cardinal Bernard Law
Kazimierz Piechowski, Pole Who Escaped From Auschwitz
Charles Jenkins, defector to North Korea
Air Chief Marshal Sir Peter Terry
[ 26 December 2017 ]
Janet Reno - Clinton's Attorney General
Brigadier Dauncey DSO [
13 September 2017 ]
Rob Ford - Canadian Politician & Fun Lover
Major General Eberhardy MC
Brigadier Stewart-Richardson Departs When Stewart-Richardson retired from the Army in 1981,
his original plan was to join the Afghan Mujahideen in their
fight against the Soviet invaders. But the British
authorities would not give him security clearance and it was
not until some time after the Soviet Union pulled out its
forces that he was able to go to Afghanistan......... In 1967 he took command of 10th (Volunteer) Bn The
Parachute Regiment (10
PARA), based at White City, London.
Attachment to 3 Para resulted in him becoming known to many
in the Airborne Forces and he channelled his energies into
ensuring that his unit could fight alongside its
counterparts in the Regular Army.......
Besides his courage and dedication to helping people, he was
a kind and inspiring leader. [ Believe that if you want
- Editor ].
Jack Chaffer MM RSM
Lieutenant Commander Freddie Martin
Major-General Reynolds
Major-General John Chester
Group Captain Allan-Wright
Sir Mervyn Davies MC
Major James Dunning
Robert Conquest - Historian Of Evil Robert Conquest, the writer on Soviet Russia who has died
aged 98, was a polemicist and a serious, published poet; but
above all he was an historian, one of the outstanding
scholars of his time, whose books did as much as any other
man's to alter our view of the communist experience. Conquest personified the truth that there was no
anti-communist so dedicated as an ex-communist. His career
illustrated also what the Italian writer Ignazio Silone,
another former communist, meant when he said to the
communist leader Palmiro Togliatti that �the final battle�
of the 20th century would have to be fought between the two
sides they represented.
Squadron Leader Les Munro - The Last Dambuster Pilot Munro's Lancaster was one of the first to take off on the night of
May 16. Their target was the Sorpe Dam. Flying at very low level over
the Dutch island of Vlieland, the bomber was badly damaged by
anti-aircraft fire. The radios and electrical system were disabled but,
crucially, so was the intercommunication system between members of the
crew. Without this it was impossible to carry out the precise attack
from a height of 60 feet, so with great reluctance, Munro turned for his
home base at Scampton, near Lincoln, still with his �bouncing bomb� on
board. The raid against the Ruhr dams was successful, with the main targets,
the Mohne and Eder Dams, both breached. But the cost was high with eight
of the 19 Lancasters failing to return, with the loss of 53 airmen. The
leader of the operation, Wing Commander Guy Gibson, was awarded the
Victoria Cross.
Kyril Zinovieff - Russian �migr� Although the family fled into exile after the Revolution, when Kyril
was seven years old, both he and Elena retained vivid memories of the
last days of Tsarism � including a chance encounter with the �Mad Monk�,
Grigori Rasputin, in 1916. Kyril recalled how, when walking in St
Petersburg with their nurse, they saw a tall figure in black, �white
teeth gleaming in a black expanse of beard�, emerge from a carriage.
� 'Look,� said my nurse, 'Rasputin � smiling at us!�, � Zinovieff
recalled. � 'Who,� I asked, 'is Rasputin?� � By the end of the year
Rasputin was dead, murdered by nobles who hoped to save Tsarism by
ending his sway over the royal family. It did no good: A few months
later the Bolshevik Revolution put an end to the imperial regime.
Norman Poole 1 SAS
The Dowager Marchioness Of Reading She was one of the first British women to get a pilot's licence,
competed on the prewar stock car racing circuit, and became a rally
driver in the 1950s. In later life she became a campaigner for animal
rights and an outspoken English nationalist. As
Harold Brooks-Baker, the former
publishing director of Burke's Peerage, once observed, Margot Reading
had views �diametrically opposed to most sane people�. At no time was
this more clear than in 1998 when, after the maverick Tory politician
Alan Clark paid tribute to the �martial spirit� of English
football supporters who had gone on the rampage in Marseille, she wrote
a letter to The Spectator in which she observed: �We are a nation of
yobs. Now we don�t have a war, what's wrong with a good punch-up?� In a later interview she elaborated on her views. �I love England so
much and I just feel that the so-called hooligans are just sort of
over-enthusiastic. How is it that we conquered the world and that our
armies went over the top? It is because we are a nation of fighters �
What an English tough guy does is to fight with his fists, which is a
good clean fight� With so many milksops, and Left-wing liberals and
wetties around, I just rejoice in the fact that there are people who
keep up our historic spirit.�
Joshua Leakey VC
Jerry Wiggin MP
Hugh Pond
Lee Kuan Yew
Squadron Leader Sweetman
Professor Miller Palaeontologist
Sonia d'Artois - SOE
Mandy Rice-Davies
John Maling MC
Anne Sorby ex MI6, ex SOE
Sir Arthur Bonsall
Tommy Macpherson MC
Tommy Collett RSM Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders MM
Pierre Ryckmans
Candida Lycett-Green
Wing-Commander Bob Foster
Tanky Challenor or as
ARRSE put it
Soldier Copper And Nutter
Tresham Gregg, Colonel of 3 RTR
Mad Jack Churchill
Bob Millard
Mikhail
Kalashnikov Dies Aged 94 RIP [ 24 December 2013 ]
Mikhail said:-
Lewis Collins
Bhanubhakta Gurung
Victoria Cross
Agansing Rai VC
Gaje Ghale VC
Ganju Lama VC
Ray Dolby PhD
Helie de Saint
Marc
Ed Freeman, Medal Of Honour Beyond his service in the Navy in
World
War II,[4]
he reached the Army rank of
first sergeant by the time of the
Korean War.
Although he was in the
Corps of Engineers, he fought as an infantry soldier in Korea. He
participated in the
Battle of Pork Chop Hill and earned a
battlefield commission as one of only 14 survivors out of 257 men who made
it through the opening stages of the battle. His
second lieutenant bars were pinned on by General
James Van Fleet personally. He then assumed command of B Company and led
them back up Pork Chop Hill. The commission made him eligible to become a pilot, a childhood dream of his.
However, when he applied for pilot training he was told that, at six feet four
inches, he was "too tall" for pilot duty. The phrase stuck, and he was known by
the nickname of "Too Tall" for the rest of his career.[5] In 1955, the height limit for pilots was raised and Freeman was accepted into
flying school. He first flew fixed-wing Army airplanes before switching to
helicopters. After the Korean War, he flew the world on mapping missions. By the
time he was sent to Vietnam in 1965, he was an experienced helicopter pilot and
was placed second-in-command of his sixteen-craft unit.[5]
He served as a
captain in Company A, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion,
1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile).[6] On November 14, 1965, Freeman and his unit transported a battalion of
American soldiers to the
Ia Drang Valley. Later, after arriving back at base, they learned that the
soldiers had come under intense fire and had taken heavy casualties. Enemy fire
around the landing zones was so heavy that the landing zone was closed to
medical evacuation helicopters. Freeman and his commander, Major
Bruce Crandall, volunteered to fly their unarmed, lightly armoured
UH-1 Huey in support of the embattled troops. Freeman made a total of
fourteen trips to the battlefield, bringing in water and ammunition and taking
out wounded soldiers under heavy enemy fire in what was later named the
Battle of Ia Drang. By the time they landed their heavily damaged Huey,
Captain Freeman had been wounded four times by ground fire.[5]] Freeman was subsequently promoted to the rank of
Major,
designated as a Master Army Aviator, and was sent home from Vietnam in 1966. He
retired from the military the next year.[5]
Freeman and his family settled in the
Treasure Valley area of
Idaho, his wife
Barbara's home state,[4]
and continued to work as a pilot. He flew helicopters for another 20 years,
fighting wildfires, conducting animal censuses, and herding wild horses for the
Department of the Interior[5]
until his second retirement in 1991.[2]
By then, he had 17,000 flight hours in helicopters and 8,000 in fixed-wing
aircraft. Freeman's commanding officer nominated him for the Medal of Honor for his
actions at Ia Drang, but not in time to meet a two-year deadline then in place.[5]
He was instead awarded the
Distinguished Flying Cross.[2]
The Medal of Honor nomination was disregarded until 1995, when the two-year
deadline was removed. He was formally presented with the medal on July 16, 2001,
in the East
Room of the White House by President
George W. Bush.
Diana Mosley
Margaret Thatcher The resulting change was also political. But by discrediting socialism so
thoroughly, she prompted in due course the adoption by the Labour Party of
free market economics, and so, as she wryly confessed in later years,
�helped to make it electable�. As for the effects of the Thatcher phenomenon upon British society, these
were both more ambiguous and more debatable. Her remark �there is no such
thing as society� was wrenched altogether out of the context of the
interview in which it was made, and made to seem to be an advocacy of naked
individualism, when she was really calling for more personal responsibility.
Yet, rightly or wrongly, the 1980s came to be seen as a time of social
fragmentation whose consequences are still with us. Margaret Thatcher was the only British prime minister to leave behind a
set of ideas about the role of the state which other leaders and nations
strove to copy and apply. Monetarism, privatization, deregulation, small
government, lower taxes and free trade � all these features of the modern
globalized economy were crucially promoted as a result of the policy
prescriptions she employed to reverse Britain's economic decline. Above all, in America and in Eastern Europe she was regarded, alongside
her friend Ronald Reagan, as one of the two great architects of the West's
victory in the Cold War. Of modern British prime ministers, only Margaret
Thatcher's girlhood hero, Winston Churchill, acquired a higher international
reputation.
Margaret Thatcher Let Us Down Big Time
Major Ian Dawson
Colonel Peter Goss During this period, the missions of the armed services
changed radically, as did equipment, communications and tactics.
These changes were particularly marked in the intelligence and
security spheres , drawing on the new possibilities afforded by
satellite imagery and electronic eavesdropping, and the use of
clandestine surveillance equipment by agents in the field
charged with combating terrorism. Peter John Goss was born on May 26 1924 in Streatham, south
London, and went to Brentwood School in Essex, where he was
above average at sport and languages (he later became fluent in
Russian, French and Czech). In 1942 he enlisted in the Royal
Norfolk Regiment, and the following year was commissioned into
the 8th Gurkha Rifles, Indian Army. He subsequently served with
the 4th Battalion in Burma and took part in the battles of
Arakan and Imphal.
Edward Pool MC 7 PARA At first light, Paras deployed in the area came under fire from a group
of German snipers ensconced in the church tower at Le Port. An anti-tank
grenade was fired, blowing a hole in the tower and silencing the snipers,
but not before one of the Paras had been shot in the head. As the invasion forces consolidated their position during the ensuing
days, more attacks were made by the battalion to dislodge pockets of
defending Germans. On June 18, while trying to knock out a machine-gun post
in the Bois de Bavent, Pool was hit in the leg, hip and groin, and a
phosphorus grenade in his ammunition pouch was ignited by one of the shots. He was dragged to safety by Sgt McCambridge and some riflemen, and
endured weeks of great pain and semi-consciousness until he found himself
back in a recuperation centre in England having lost a leg. He was awarded a
Military Cross for his inspirational leadership and courage in holding an
outpost on the western bridgehead for 21 hours while under constant attack
by superior forces........ His father � the owner of a prosperous wholesale meat business � had died
in 1942, and his elder brother had been killed during the war flying
Spitfires; so it fell to Ted Pool to take over the enterprise. He had,
however, a profound distaste for the abattoirs and the business was sold.
Tony
Rogers VM, RAF Pilot
Vidal Sassoon, Jew, Barber And Thug
�I wanted to eliminate the superfluous and get to the
basic angles of cut and shape,� he reminisced in Craig Teper's 2010
film, Vidal Sassoon, The Movie. Indeed, the word �hairdressing�,
associated with formally-arranged �helmet� hairdos of the post-war
years, held in place with stiff perms and lacquers, was anathema to
Sassoon, who wanted his smooth, flat hairstyles to emphasise the face.
A Peter Pan-like figure, Sassoon kept forever youthful
by practising Pilates and yoga. But besides an interest in aesthetics
and physical wellbeing, he also had a deep-rooted sense of justice [
which did not extend to Palestinian
Untermenschen -
the
Nazi term for subhumans - Editor ]. He
fought against anti-Semitic yobs rampaging around east London after the
Second World War and set up a research centre for gathering information
about anti-Semitism. He was also generous to charities, such as the
Katrina Fund, which gives money to victims of the hurricane that
devastated New Orleans.
Jimmy Storie - The Last Of The First - SAS
Lieutenant Colonel
John Williams DCM
In March 1965, 2 PARA, under command of Lt. Col.
Eberhardie, relieved the 1st Battalion Argyll & Sutherland
Highlanders. B Company's forward base at Plaman Mapu was a strong point of
linked trenches defended by two 3 inch mortars and three GPMGs, supported by
105mm guns but overlooked by the border ridge 1000 metres away. The Company
had just received a young platoon direct from training. The small and
vulnerable outpost posed an attractive target and increased enemy activity
within the Company's area soon became evident. On the night of 27 April, when
the new platoon was deployed in the forward base, a battalion of Indonesian
parachute troops launched an attack at 1.15 am in pitch darkness. This first
assault succeeded in taking part of the position, including one of the
mortars. Amid considerable confusion, CSM Williams, bare to the waist,
organised a speedy counter-attack. Running over open ground laced with fire
the ad-hoc force engaged the assaulting enemy in a savage close-quarter battle
and forced them back................ Despite appalling head
injuries, and being blinded in one eye, he continued to move casualties,
re-supply ammunition and encourage the remaining soldiers. A third and final
assault just before dawn was not pushed home with the vigour of the preceding
two and the Indonesian forces began to withdraw. CSM Williams organised and
led a clearance party with volunteers from the remaining soldiers. Upon return
to the camp he was immediately ordered to a
casevac helicopter by the doctor.
CSM "Patch" Williams was awarded a DCM for his bravery and leadership that
morning. The Indonesian forces never again attempted a concentrated attack
across the border.
George Moodie 9 PARA
Tex Banwell
He was ordered to reveal the names of the members of the Dutch Resistance he
had been in contact with, and his refusal to talk led to him twice being
brought before a firing squad. However the threat of execution was a bluff
which he successfully rode out, and so Banwell was sent to sit out the war at
Auschwitz concentration camp, where for the next four months he existed on a
serving of water and sauerkraut per week. The Red Army reached
Auschwitz in
March 1945, by which time Banwell's weight was down to 90 pounds, half what it
should have been. Returning home,
Banwell continued to serve in the army until during the 1970's, and was likely
to have been amongst Britain's most senior parachutists. At the 25th
anniversary of Arnhem in 1969, Banwell stood alongside present day
paratroopers in a Dakota and jumped once more over Ginkel Heath, formerly DZ-Y.
It was his 650th jump, and far from his last because he felt the experience of
parachuting kept him "mentally alert". He donated his battle dress jacket to
the Airborne Museum Hartenstein, where it is presently on display.
Dennis
Ritchie, The UNIX Designer Dies [
14 October 2011 ] The origins of Unix go back to the
1960s, long before the microchip and personal computers had been
invented. The nearest thing to personal computing was the so-called
computer utility. This consisted of a large mainframe computer that
was used simultaneously, and at great expense, by a couple of dozen
users sitting at typewriter terminals...........
Peter
Drucker
Patrick Leigh Fermor Though he at first kept to his aim of
travelling "like a tramp or pilgrim", sleeping in police cells and beer halls,
by the time he reached Central Europe his charm led to his being passed from
Schloss to Schloss by a network of margraves and voivodes. The architecture,
ritual and genealogy of each halt were later recalled with a loving eye........ On the outbreak of war Leigh Fermor first
joined the Irish Guards but was then transferred to the Intelligence Corps due
to his knowledge of the Balkans. He was initially attached as a liaison
officer to the Greek forces fighting the Italians in Albania, then � having
survived the fall of Crete in 1941 � was sent back to the island by SOE to
command extremely hazardous guerrilla operations against the occupying Nazis.
For a year and a half Leigh Fermor,
disguised as a Cretan shepherd (albeit one with a taste for waistcoats
embroidered with black arabesques and scarlet silk linings) endured a perilous
existence, living in freezing mountain caves while harassing German troops.
Other dangers were less foreseeable. While checking his rifle Leigh Fermor
accidentally shot a trusted guide who subsequently died of the wound........... Dressed as German police corporals, the pair
stopped the car belonging to General Karl Kreipe, the island's commander,
while he was returning one evening to his villa near Knossos. The chauffeur
disposed of, Leigh Fermor donned the general's hat and, with Moss driving the
car, they bluffed their way through the centre of Heraklion and a further 22
checkpoints. Kreipe, meanwhile, was hidden under the back seat and sat on by
three hefty andartes, or Cretan partisans.
Martin Birnstingl - an honest Jew who
did not swallow the claim that
David Kelly
was not murdered In the 1960s he travelled to Hanoi during the American
bombing of North Vietnam and collected evidence of the use of
indiscriminate anti-personnel weaponry by the United States military,
including so-called "pineapple" bombs, which on impact sprayed out
pellets over a huge area, maiming or killing hundreds of civilians. The "Ham and High" printed his report, and in 1967 he
gave evidence to Bertrand Russell's unofficial "International War
Crimes Tribunal". His experience and campaign against the war led to
his making an appearance in Peter Brook's 1968 drama-documentary about
British responses to the war, Tell Me Lies............. In 2004 he was one of the group of physicians who
challenged Lord Hutton's decision to classify documents about the
death of chemical weapons expert Dr David Kelly and took issue with
Hutton's conclusion that Kelly's death was a suicide. Birnstingl and his colleagues maintained that it was
"highly improbable" that the primary cause of death was haemorrhage
from transection of a single ulnar artery, as stated in the Hutton
report. In 2010 the incoming coalition government made the proceedings
public, although the verdict remained unchanged.
Mario Traverso At this crucial point the third squadron launched a second
diagonal attack, similar to that which had opened the battle, and Soviet
resolve crumbled. As the smoke cleared, their losses stood at 150, with a
further 500 captured. The Savoy Cavalry had lost fewer than 40 men. �You were magnificent,� a German officer remarked to the
Italians afterwards. �We no longer know how to do these things.�
Lieutenant Colonel Ron Reid-Daly
John Herivel After being trained on how to break Enigma
by Alan Turing, Herivel was put to work, and soon proved his worth by finding
an imaginative way of breaking the Enigma ciphers by hand � this became known
as the Herivel Tip, or "herivelismus", and relied on lazy operators setting up
their machines in the morning according to the daily keys and carelessly doing
as little as possible before sending their first message.
David Hart The property boom of the late 1960s earned Hart his
first million, but his extravagance ended with the bust of the
mid-1970s, debts of �959,229 and an appearance in the bankruptcy court
in 1975. The court heard that Hart kept two mistresses, each of whom had
his child, in separate London flats, paying them each �250 a month as
well as money for things like telephone bills and school fees......... The official receiver castigated his �delusions of grandeur�
and took exception to the fact that many of Hart's creditors were small
tradesmen (including, reporters were delighted to discover, his gamekeeper's
tailor).
Gerry Rafferty
But it was the haunting Baker Street � with its
searing saxophone riff � that propelled Rafferty into the pantheon of
British rock legends. The song has remained a staple of soft-rock and
easy-listening stations for more than 30 years � by 2004 it was reckoned
to have received four million airplays � and at the time of his death
continued to earn Rafferty around �80,000 annually in royalties.
Famously publicity-shy, Rafferty refused to promote
the song in the United States, where the album from which it was taken
had topped the bestselling charts and gone platinum. Instead he turned
inwards, recording only sporadically and leading the life of an
increasingly eccentric multi-millionaire rock recluse, last performing
in public more than seven years ago......... His Irish-born father was a heavy-drinking miner and
lorry driver who died when Gerry was 16. Inspired by his Scottish
mother, who had taught him Irish and Scottish folk songs as a boy, and
heavily influenced by the music of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, the young
Gerry started to write his own material..
Havildar Lachhiman Gurung VC
When the Japanese arrived, the two Gurkha companies were
surrounded and their lines of communication cut. On the night of May 12,
Rifleman Gurung was manning the forward post of his platoon almost 100
yards ahead of the main company. At 1.20am, more than 200 Japanese attacked the company
position. The brunt of the assault fell on Gurung's section and, in
particular, on his post, which dominated a jungle track leading up to
his platoon's position. Had the enemy been able to overrun it and occupy
Gurung's trench, they would have secured control over the whole of the
field before them.........
The following morning, of the 87 enemy dead found in
the company's immediate locality, 31 lay in front of Gurung's section.
The Japanese made repeated attempts to break through, but the 4th/8th
held out until May 15, when they were relieved.
Lionel Queripel VC Lionel Queripel came from a well established
and highly decorated military dynasty; his father, Colonel LH Queripel who was a
CMG and had been awarded the
DSO had served during the
Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and later in Mesopotamia, France and Russia during
the First World War. His grandfather who was awarded a CB and great grandfather
were also soldiers. By 1400 hrs on 19th of September the confusion
and heavy casualties saw Captain Queripel acting as commander of a company
comprising of the men of three parachute battalions. As they advanced along a
main road on an embankment towards Arnhem they came under continuous machine-gun
fire. At one point, the fire became so heavy that the company was split up on
either side of the road and suffered considerable losses. Captain Queripel
immediately began to reorganise his troops, crossing and recrossing the road
while doing so, under extremely heavy and accurate fire from a strong point
consisting of a captured British anti-tank gun and two machine guns. Whilst
carrying a wounded sergeant to the regimental aid post under fire he was himself
wounded in the face. Having reorganised his force, Captain Queripel personally
led a party of men against the strong point holding up the advance. Despite the
extremely heavy fire directed at him, Captain Queripel succeeded in killing the
crews of the machine-guns and recapturing the anti-tank gun enabling the advance
to continue. Later Captain Queripel was ordered to defend some woodland near the
Wolfheze
level crossing which was vital to the allied advance (Wolfheze is about 12km to
the northwest of Arnhem Bridge but only a few hundred metres from the Drop and
Landing Zones used). By this time he had received further wounds in both arms,
was cut off with a small party of men and took up a position in a ditch.
Disregarding his injuries and the heavy mortar and machine gun fire, he
continued to inspire his men to resist with hand grenades, pistols, and the few
remaining rifles. On at least one occasion he picked up and threw back an enemy
stick grenade which had landed in the ditch. As the enemy pressure increased,
Captain Queripel decided that it was impossible to hold the position any longer
and ordered the men to withdraw. Despite their protests, he insisted on
remaining behind to cover their withdrawal with his automatic pistol and a few
remaining hand grenades. This was the last occasion on which he was seen.
Staff Sergeant Barkway
Bill Millin - Lord Lovat's piper on D Day Once ashore Millin did not run, but walked
up and down the beach, blasting out a series of tunes. After Hieland Laddie,
Lovat, the commander of 1st Special Service Brigade (1 SSB), raised his voice
above the crackle of gunfire and the crump of mortar, and asked for another.
Millin strode up and down the water's edge playing The Road to the Isles. Bodies of the fallen were drifting to and
fro in the surf. Soldiers were trying to dig in and, when they heard the
pipes, many of them waved and cheered although one came up to Millin and
called him a "mad bastard".
Group Captain Dennis Lyster DSO, DFC Lyster attacked Scharnhorst at Kiel on July
1, but once the Battle of Britain was under way the Hampdens were increasingly
allotted targets associated with an anticipated German invasion of England.
Lyster laid mines at the entrance of the port of Lubeck, bombed the docks at
Stettin and Hamburg, and the submarine base at Lorient.
Claude de Baissac His first mission came on 30 July 1942, when he and his
radio operator Peulev� were parachuted in from a
Halifax near
N�mes to set up and head the SCIENTIST network. However, they were dropped
from too low an altitude and landed badly - de Baissac broke his ankle and
Peulev� was so badly hurt he had to return to England. In the following
months, de Baissac developed the SCIENTIST network in the Bordeaux region,
receiving reinforcements in the form of
Roger
Landes (codenamed Stanislas, his new radio operator, dropped on 2
November) and
Mary Herbert (codenamed Marie-Louise, his liaison officer, landed
by boat on 8 November). Certain resistance group concentrated their efforts
for a joint attack on the submarine pens in the port and other operations in
the
Landes countryside.[citation
needed] De Baissac worked closely with
Francis Suttill and his
Prosper-PHYSICIAN network in Paris, before briefly returning to
London on the night of 17/18 March 1943 in a
Lysander[1]
to announce that the network had 11,000 men at its disposal. In May 1943, Suttill warned de Baissac that he thought
Henri D�ricourt, a member of SCIENTIST, was working for the Germans just
before de Baissac was parachuted back in at the full moon with new instructions.
The parachute drops of men and supplied intensified, but on 23 June the Gestapo
captured Suttill and hundreds of other agents and Resistance workers from
Prosper-PHYSICIAN and other networks and attached groups. The SCIENTIST
network was caught up in PHYSICIAN's fall and on the night of 16/17 August,
Claude, Lise and
Nicholas Bodington returned to England by
Lysander, with
Roger
Landes (Aristide) replacing Claude at the head of SCIENTIST until
November 1943. In February 1944 de Baissac was parachuted in to
Mayenne with
an all-Mauritian team made up of his sister Lise, captain
Jean-Marie Renaud-Danticolle (codenamed Ren�) and the radio operator
Maurice Louis Larcher (code named Vladimir). His new mission was to
amalgamate, arm and energise the Resistance groups in the region stretching from
Caen to Laval. When
D-Day came, he joined
George Starr and his WHEELWRIGHT network in the south-west.
Lieutenant General Peter Walls
Walls seemed to adapt readily to the
prospect of black majority rule. At Mugabe's request he undertook to
help supervise the moulding of his own armed force with the motley
legions of guerrilla fighters who had emerged from the bush after the
protracted and ugly war.
But Mugabe was soon increasingly
perturbed by reports that Walls was plotting a coup against him and his
new regime. When he summoned Walls to ask him why he was planning to
kill him, the general denied the reports vehemently, offering the most
obvious evidence that any plotters were nothing to do with him: "If they
had been my men you would have been dead."
The mood of suspicion prevailed, and
Walls found his position in the new Zimbabwe untenable. He took himself
into exile in South Africa, where he found groups of his disgruntled
former Rhodesian security forces openly accusing him of having
personally thwarted two attempts by special forces to assassinate Mugabe
shortly after he had been elected. A further bitter blow was the
revelation that Ian Smith, a man he had supported throughout the lead up
to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) and who had
appointed him to lead the Rhodesian forces through the war, had been
blaming Walls for many of the failures of the transition and had
actually accused him of "traitorous activities". Peter Walls was born in Rhodesia in
1927 into family with military tradition. His father, George, had been a
pioneer pilot in the colony and had volunteered for service with the
Royal Air Force shortly after its formation. When Peter left Plumtree
school, one of the most distinguished in Rhodesia, he already had his
sights set on an army career. He volunteered for the British Army
during the Second World War and attended the Staff College at Camberley,
which welcomed students from the Commonwealth. When the war ended he
joined the Black Watch and was appointed Assistant Adjutant in the
Highland Brigade Training Centre. He resigned his commission when the
Army decided to transfer him, choosing, in his own words, "to return to
my beloved Rhodesia rather serve in any regiment other than the Black
Watch". He could not stay away from soldiering for long, joining the
Southern Rhodesian Staff Corps in the rank of corporal. With his
experience and application he was promoted rapidly through the ranks and
was soon commissioned again. He went to Malaya during the military
operations against the communist insurgency from 1951 to 1953 as a
commander of what was known as "The Far Eastern Volunteer Group" (which
became "C" Squadron of the British SAS). It was composed entirely of
Rhodesian officers and men, who gained much valuable experience in
fighting a guerrilla war in wild and hostile terrain. Walls continued to shine, and in 1964
assumed command of the 1st Battalion, the Rhodesian Light Infantry (RLI),
a unit of tough young professional soldiers which was to become famous
in the bush war. He was the ideal commander for "troopies", as the
soldiers of the RLI were known. Walls was tall, broad-shouldered and a
man of action who liked to lead from the front. He was also a convivial and personable
man who surprised those who served under him with an amazing memory of
names and family circumstances. The sentiment in favour of UDI was
growing among whites, alarmed by what they perceived as determination by
the colonial power to hand over power to black majorities throughout its
African territories. Walls shared the mood, and allowed his
men to wear paper hats inscribed with the words "RLI for UDI" on them,
an act which won him a rare reproach from Brigadier Rodney Putterill,
his commander at the time. The move made him even more popular,
particularly among the politicians of the newly-elected Rhodesian Front
party led by Ian Smith. When the first tentative incursions were made by
nationalist guerrillas crossing from Zambia, the RLI went into action
with swift success. In 1972 Ian Smith approved the
appointment of Walls as General Officer Commanding the Rhodesian Army, a
promotion that came as no surprise. Smith liked Walls and, as a former
RAF pilot himself, had known his father. In any event, he was preparing
for his momentous declaration of independence and needed an army
commander he could trust to support him. Walls was quick to realise that UDI
would mean an intensification of the guerrilla war from neighbouring
countries, specifically from Zambia and Botswana by Joshua Nkomo's
largely Matabele ZIPRA, and from Tanzania and Mozambique by ZANLA, drawn
from the majority Shona people. He put his troops on full
counter-insurgency readiness. He knew from his Malayan experience
that a key element in any anti-guerrilla war strategy would be the
gathering of intelligence from within the enemy ranks. He summoned his
old friend and colleague from the Malayan emergency and the RLI, Ron
Reid-Daly, and asked him to form the Selous Scouts, a unit that
ostensibly would be for tracking but would operate clandestinely behind
and within guerrilla ranks. It was a crucial move as, the
following year, following a bloodless coup in Lisbon, Portugal withdrew
from its two vast African territories, Angola and Mozambique, leaving
Rhodesia's eastern and western borders open to mass infiltration by
black nationalist forces trained and fully equipped by the Soviet Union
and Cuba. Efficient and experienced as they were, the Rhodesian forces
knew that sooner or later they would be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers
of the nationalists, backed by a world which perceived them to be
gallant freedom fighters opposed to an oppressive white supremacist
regime. Walls was made head of Joint
Operations Command (JOC) in 1977 and, as Rhodesia desperately tried to
bolster its numbers, assumed command of more than 45,000 men. It was not
enough, and he knew it. Many farms were attacked, villages were
infiltrated throughout the rural areas, landmines were laid in the dirt
roads and military convoys were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades.
Two civilian airliners were brought down by SAM-7 missiles. The bush war
turned increasingly ugly, with atrocities being committed by both sides. For a time, Rhodesian special forces
attempted to take and hold key areas of Mozambique to halt the unceasing
flow of guerrillas into Rhodesia. Walls, typically, once parachuted into
an area of northern Mozambique at Christmas with a consignment of roast
turkey for his men. The turkey helped to bolster the troops morale � as
did the fact that the general landed in a large deep puddle and emerged
covered in mud. Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front
party also realised that their only hope of survival rested in political
negotiations. With Margaret Thatcher in power in Britain, anxious to rid
herself of "this tiresome Rhodesian problem", Smith sought British
mediation in the hope of political salvation. The resulting Lancaster House
conference resulted in a British interregnum in Rhodesia, with Lord
Soames as governor backed by a team of top Foreign Office officials and
a small force of British troops. Walls, as head of the highly-trained
and experienced Rhodesian forces, found himself drawn inexorably into
the political process. Contingency plans for the elections
which resulted from the Lancaster House agreement were drawn up by the
military in consultation with the Lord Soames. The hope was that Bishop
Muzorewa, the moderate Shona politician who had surprisingly won a
previous election, would be able to hold Mashonaland while Joshua Nkomo,
the moderate leader of the Matabele people, would comfortably hold his
homeland in the west of the country. The officially-approved safety net
beneath this hastily-arranged scheme was that Robert Mugabe would be
"eliminated" should he win the election. But the contingency plan was
never implemented in the confusion that arose after Mugabe's ZANU party
swept the board with a convincing majority. Walls immediately wrote to Mrs
Thatcher calling for a new election, claiming that the imperfect
"assembly point" plan for guerrillas to gather and hand in their weapons
had not worked and that the insurgents had infiltrated most rural areas.
His plea was in vain. Mrs Thatcher wanted the long-running issue solved
quickly, and Lord Soames was instructed to embrace and welcome a new
black leader of an independent Zimbabwe. Salisbury was suddenly awash with
recriminations among white political and military leaders and most of
the white population. As Mugabe's guerrillas rode through the streets of
the capital brandishing their weapons, Walls became a main target for
the blame. The beleaguered general decided that the best option was to
opt immediately to serve the Mugabe regime by organising the
amalgamation of the rival armies, believing this would offer the best
future for the many thousands of professional officers and men who had
fought for him for so long and with much sacrifice. Mugabe, in the spirit of
reconciliation he affected at the time, agreed. Walls went on national
television to warn that troublemakers among his former forces "will not
be tolerated". It was too late. Disaffected Rhodesian security forces
fled to South Africa and elsewhere, along with many thousands of whites.
Mugabe, who as new president of Zimbabwe was inundated with various
"intelligence" reports, became convinced that Walls was secretly
organising a coup and fired him. Peter Walls went into exile in South
Africa, settling at Plettenburg Bay, a fashionable resort on the Western
Cape coast. He never wrote his memoirs but remained in seclusion with
his second wife until he collapsed and died on July 20 while on his way
to a holiday in the Kruger National Park. He is survived by his wife and
by four children from his first marriage.
Michael Foot R.I.P. ex The Spectator Conservatives often remind themselves that, much as Foot's
campaign was derided in 1983, he returned to parliament more MPs than now sit
on Tory benches. His campaign also contained a set of clear principles � all
too rare a thing in modern politics. His was an era where people became MPs
because of what they believed, rather than to acquire power for its own sake.
The books Foot loved were not simply political tracts but novels and poetry.
It is hard to think of another frontbencher who would or could have produced A
Vindication of Byron. His vast intellectual breadth and brilliant, spontaneous
oratory could not strike a greater contrast to the all-too-homogenous
political class of today. His was a politics of passion and authenticity. For
him, elections were battle of ideas. It is a type of politics which has
steadily drained from the current Westminster scene. And we are the poorer for
it.
Johnnie
Johnson DSO, DFC Patrick Porteous
VC During the initial assault on the
battery, Porteous found himself with the smaller of the two detachments. He was
shot at close range by a German, the bullet passing through his hand and his
arm. Undaunted, Porteous, using the other hand, shot his assailant dead. Next,
Porteous saved the life of a sergeant by disarming his attacker and despatching
the German with his own bayonet. In the meantime, the larger detachment had been
held up, its two officers killed and the troop sergeant seriously wounded.....
Without hesitating, and in the face of
withering fire, Porteous dashed across open ground to take charge of this
section. He rallied them, and then led a bayonet charge which carried the
battery. Porteous was the first to reach the guns, and as he did so was severely
wounded for a second time, being shot through the thigh..... After recovering
from his wounds taken at Dieppe, he returned to duty and landed in Normandy,
near Ouistreham, on June 6 1944 as second-in-command of No 4 Commando.
Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Merritt
VC By then alert to
the situation, the German defenders targeted the bridge with machinegun and
mortar fire. Initial Canadian attempts failed to storm the bridge, leaving it
covered with dead and wounded. Merritt led the next rush forward, waving his
steel helmet with the rallying shout "Come on over. There's nothing to it!"
His audacity took
the enemy by surprise; one group of men followed him over the bridge and others
used the girders to cross. Merritt soon had most of his surviving men on the far
bank, but shortage of mortar ammunition and lack of communications to the
destroyers to call for supporting fire made any further advance impossible.
Meanwhile, the
company landed on the west bank of the Scie had reached its objective and sent a
success signal to the operation command ship. This and one from Lord Lovat's
Number 4 Commando were the only two success signals sent in the entire
operation. Finding all moves
towards his objectives blocked by concrete "pillboxes", Merritt led an attack on
each in turn, personally killing the occupants of one by throwing grenades
through the enemy's firing ports. When the last enemy strongpoint had been
silenced, Merritt had been twice wounded and his battalion reduced to fewer than
300 men.......... Merritt was sent to
prison camp Oflag VIIB at Eichst�tt in Bavaria. Together with 64 others, he
escaped through a 120ft tunnel during the night of June 3-4, 1943. Only a
handful reached safety. Merritt was recaptured and sentenced to 14 days'
solitary confinement. He remarked after being freed: "My war lasted six hours.
David Kimche
Andr�e Peel During her three years with the Resistance � during which she
was known first as Agent X and then as Agent Rose � Andr�e helped save the lives
of more than 100 Allied pilots. Her team used torches to guide Allied planes to
improvised landing strips and smuggled fugitive airmen aboard submarines and
gunboats on remote parts of the coast, often feeling their way in the dark past
German coastal shelters. The work was extremely dangerous. Any family found harbouring
an Allied airman risked being shot and in 1943 Andr�e herself was forced to
leave Brest after a comrade (who had been forced to watch his family being
tortured by the Gestapo) informed on her.
John Profumo Profumo's transgression came when the Tories
had been in power for 11 years. He was then a promising Secretary of State for
War, married to the actress Valerie Hobson, star of the film Kind Hearts and
Coronets and one of Britain's leading actresses of stage and screen in the 1940s
and 1950s.
Major General John Cowtan MC He then slipped out of a side door and moved
south to Monte San Vicino where he joined a resistance group consisting of 14
Yugoslavs and six escapers. In the three months from November 1943, Cowtan and a
comrade lay low. They then made several attempts to cross the German lines but
were handicapped by the weather. Tul Bahadur Pun VC On 23 June 1944 at
Mogaung,
Burma (now Myanmar),
during an attack on the railway bridge, a section of one of the platoons was
wiped out with the exception of Rifleman Tul Bahadur Pun, his section commander
and one other. The section commander immediately led a charge on the enemy
position but was at once badly wounded, as was the third man. Rifleman Pun, with
a Bren gun continued the charge alone in the face of shattering fire and
reaching the position, killed three of the occupants and put five more to
flight, capturing two light machine-guns and much ammunition. He then gave
accurate supporting fire, enabling the rest of his platoon to reach their
objective.
Lieutenant-Colonel Andy Unwin
Knut Haugland Of The Telemark Raid And Kon Tiki
Sir Edward Fennessy
Lt-Col Ian Feild
Mark
Donaldson VC
Philip Etherton
Corporal Budd VC
Death On the day, there were three sections on patrol, a total of 24
men, spread out in a head-high cornfield around the compound. Budd spotted four
Taliban approaching, at a distance of 50 metres. With hand signals, Budd led his
section in a
flanking manoeuvre round to the cornfield's outskirts to try to cut them
off, but they were spotted and the Taliban opened fire on the troops. A further
group of Taliban opened up fire from a wall further back. The British soldiers
took heavy fire, kneeling or lying down trying to take cover. One soldier
received a bullet in the shoulder, and another was shot in the nose. Realising his section were taking heavy fire and were likely
to be killed, Budd got up and rushed straight through the corn in the direction
of the Taliban, now just 20 metres away. Budd opened up on them in fully
automatic mode with his rifle, and contact was immediately lost, but the Taliban
fire lessened and allowed the rest of his section to withdraw back to safety so
the casualties could be treated. After withdrawal, Budd was declared missing in action and most
of A Company was sent back to find him.
Apache
and
Harrier air support was called in to beat the Taliban back. An hour later,
Budd was found beside three dead Taliban. It was clear he had killed the three
Taliban, but had himself been killed in the process. Budd was badly wounded and had no pulse. The
company sergeant major recovered his body on a
quad bike, but he was declared dead on arrival at the platoon house. On 29 November 2007 an
inquest found that Budd's death was probably the result of
friendly fire. His Victoria Cross is displayed at the
Parachute Regiment and Airborne Forces Museum at
Aldershot,
Hampshire,
in England.
Margaret Duchess of Argyll - aka Marge Of Arge
The court case lasted 11 days, and its piquant details included the
theft of a racy diary, in which the Duchess listed the accoutrements of
a number of lovers as though she was running them at Newmarket. The
50,000-word judgment, in which the Duke was granted a decree, was one of
the longest in the history of the Edinburgh court. The Duchess was found to have committed adultery with three men named
in her husband's petition and with a fourth, unidentified figure. A pair
of photographs was produced in court showing the Duchess, naked save for
three strings of pearls, engaged in a sexual act with a man whose face
was not shown and who passed into folklore as 'the Headless Man'........... Springett [ her maid ] fell out with the Duchess after being found unconscious on
the floor of Her Grace's bedroom, with an empty bottle of her whisky
lying close by. The Duchess dispatched solicitor's letters instructing
Springett to desist from calling her a 'Mayfair whore' and a 'silly old
bitch' in front of guests.
Bhanubhakta Gurung VC "On approaching the objective, one of the sections of
the company was forced to the ground by a very heavy
light-machine-gun, grenade and mortar fire, and owing to the
severity of this fire was unable to move in any direction. "While thus pinned down, the section also came under accurate
fire from a sniper in a tree some 75 yards to the south. As this
sniper was inflicting casualties on the section, Rifleman Bhanbhagta
Gurung stood up and, while fully exposed to heavy fire, calmly
killed the enemy sniper with his rifle, thus saving his section from
suffering further casualties."........ One Japanese soldier remained inside, holding up 4 Platoon's
advance with the machine gun. Bhanubhakta crawled in and, prevented
by the cramped space from using his bayonet or kukri, beat the
gunner's brains out with a rock...........His three sons also served in the 2nd Gurkhas. Bhanubhakta
suffered from asthma for many years and for the last four years of
his life was housebound at his youngest son's house at Gorkha, where
he died on Saturday.
Ganju Lama VC
Rifleman Ganju Lama, the No 1 of the PIAT (Projector
Infantry Anti-Tank) - which launched a 3 lb grenade on his initiative -
crawled forward through thick mud, bleeding profusely, and engaged the
tanks single-handedly. In spite of a broken left wrist and two other wounds,
one in his right hand and one in his leg, caused by withering cross-fire
concentrated on him, he succeeded in bringing his gun into action within
30 yards of the enemy tanks. He knocked out first one, and then another,
the third tank being destroyed by an anti-tank gun. Despite his serious wounds, he then moved forwards
and engaged with grenades the tank crews who were now attempting to
escape. Not until he had killed or wounded them all, thus enabling his
company to push forward, did he allow himself to be taken back to the
Regimental Aid Post to have his wounds dressed.
Captain Gaje Ghale VC
Eddy George, Governor of the Bank of England
I. J. Good At Bletchley Park, he was initially in
Hut 8 under the
supervision of
Alan
Turing; he worked with
Donald Michie in
Max Newman's
group on the
Fish
ciphers,
leading to the development of the
Colossus computer. After the war ended, he worked at the
University of Manchester and then at
GCHQ until 1959. He then had a variety of defence, consulting and academic
positions. He was a prolific author of technical papers.
Lise Villameur In the first weeks, she bicycled through the country lanes looking
for possible landing and dropping zones, and building up contacts who
would be prepared to help her. "I was very lonely," she said afterwards.
"I discovered what solitude was. Having false papers, I never received a
letter or a telephone call."
Squadron Leader Jock Cassels DFC
Wing Commander Jack Hoskins DFC
A priority target for the Wellingtons was Rommel's fuel supply. As the Battle
of Alamein got under way at the end of October 1942, the Axis tried to run two
tankers into Tobruk. A daylight attack by another squadron had failed, and
Hoskins took off to reach the convoy at dusk. He successfully intercepted the
two tankers and homed in a strike force, which was able to sink both ships as
they were about to gain the safety of the harbour. This loss of critical fuel
was a major setback for the German Panzers.
Major-General Michael Hicks
Chief Petty Officer Bill Stone
William 'Buster' Swan DCM
Air Commodore Pete Brothers DSO, DFC
Lieutenant-Colonel Eric Wilson, VC
On release from the Italian PoW camp he volunteered to join the Long Range
Desert Group operating round the flanks of Rommel's Afrika Korps in the Western Desert. His knowledge of desert conditions
proved a useful asset but, at the end of the North African campaign, he went to
Burma as second-in-command of a battalion of The King's African Rifles..... He joined the staff of the London Goodenough
Trust for Overseas Students, where his fluency in Kiswahili, Gikuria and
Chinyakusa stood him in good stead. He was the honorary secretary of the
Anglo-Somali Society, 1972-77, and again from 1988 to 1990.
Mark Felt - aka Deep Throat
Major Robert Furman
Jimmy James MC
Major Michael Stilwell
John Morrison
Boris Fyodorov
Leading Seaman Gordon Cleaver BEM Ignoring the order Merriman turned away and
increased to full speed when a large calibre shell smashed into ML 1323's engine
room without exploding. As the crew sheltered in the lightly armoured
wheelhouse, Cleaver entered the engine room to find a large hole in the port
side and opposite an unexploded shell, which he carried on deck and dropped over
the side.
Professor Sir Brian Pippard
John Burrows "All the able generals were collected in the
Middle East, and it was the duds who were shipped out to the Far East, some of
them with no understanding of reality at all. It was cloud-cuckoo land and to
someone like myself who had come from wartime Britain it was unbelievable."
"When I joined the
Army, I was a teacher of modern languages," he said. "I admitted to a working
knowledge of German and was immediately posted to Singapore."
Colonel Don Blakeslee In just four months his aggressive leadership led to the
Group's achieving its 500th �kill�....... By his own admission Blakeslee was not a very good shot, and he flew very
close to his adversary before opening fire. He was credited with 15 and a half
victories, but when there was a multiple claim he always allowed junior pilots
the credit. Many believe that he destroyed at least 30 enemy aircraft.
Malcolm Muir
Jim Webster
Jack Nash
WO2 Gary O'Donnell
Oded Schramm
Group Captain Tony Barwood
Michael Crichton
Flight Lieutenant Charley Fox DFC
Julia Pirie
Amos E Joel
Studs Terkel
Colonel Charles Greenwood MC
Lieutenant-Colonel Cliff Norbury MC
Group Captain Jim Mitchell DFC Following training in Canada and then becoming
an instructor in England, Mitchell joined No 9 Squadron, flying Lancasters. His
first bombing operation, on July 3 1943, was an attack on Cologne; he was next
involved in two more in the devastating "firestorm" raids on Hamburg. Over the
next few months he attacked most of the major industrial targets in the Ruhr as
well as on Berlin, Leipzig and Magdeburg. His first DFC was awarded in April
1944 for displaying "high skill, fortitude and devotion to duty".
After some 20 operations, Mitchell joined the
Pathfinder Force with No 83 Squadron. From early 1944 he marked targets at many
German cities before the squadron attacked pinpoint targets in France in
preparation for the Normandy landings, and then was deputy master bomber on
several of these raids. Awarded a Bar to his DFC, he was assessed as a cool and
courageous captain, who had set a sterling example to all in the squadron. He
had flown 49 operations over enemy-occupied territory at the height of the
strategic bombing campaign when casualties were at their worst.
Alex McKie
Yuri Nosenko
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Has Departed Us During the 1990s, his stalwart
nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and
disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources
cheaply following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from
public view..... Born Dec. 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk,
Solzhenitsyn served as a front-line artillery captain in World War II........ The author's last book, 2001's "Two
Hundred Years Together," addressed the complex emotions of
Russian-Jewish relations. Some criticized the book for alleged
anti-Semitic passages. But the author denied the charge, saying he
"understood the subtlety, sensitivity and kind-heartedness of the Jewish
character."
Robert A Heinlein
Roger Landes MC
Vice-Admiral Sir Tony Troup DSC The next patrol, however, brought mixed results. On
October 11, in the Malacca Strait, Troup attacked a merchant ship which was
being escorted by two sub-chasers, firing five torpedoes at a range of 3,000
yards. Two exploded prematurely and the others missed; then, before he could
renew the attack, he found himself in shallow water.
Ruth Greenglass
Fuchs confessed that he had been passing information to the Soviet Union
since the Manhattan Project. It was clear that he had not worked alone and,
during subsequent investigations by the FBI, suspicion fell on David
Greenglass. Greenglass was called in for interrogation and confessed. He claimed that
the Rosenbergs had also been members of the spy ring and agreed to testify
against them. It was important for the prosecution that Ethel Rosenberg
should be implicated as it was thought that her husband might be persuaded
to spill the beans if he felt he might spare her execution.
Jesse Helms In contrast to his public reputation, in private
Helms as known as a courtly southern gentleman with impeccable
manners, unswervingly loyal to family, friends and employees. Yet he
also had a quick temper which could flare up when things were not
going his way, or when people disagreed with him, a temper which he
sometime employed to good effect.
Squadron Leader Larry Curtis DFC
Throughout that winter No 617 attacked
precision targets, including the V-1 flying bomb sites in the Pas de Calais.
On the night of February 12 1944 Curtis took off on his twelfth sortie with
Martin. The target was the Antheor viaduct on the vital coastal rail link
between Italy and the south of France, and it was at the extreme range of
the Lancasters. On arrival, Cheshire and Martin were to illuminate the
target from low level to allow the rest of the force to drop their bombs.
David Caminer
David Caminer was born David Tresman on June 26 1915, the son
of a Jewish tailor in the East End of London. His father was killed in the
trenches during the First World War, just before
David's third birthday, and his mother subsequently married a man called Caminer. Educated at Sloane School in the Fulham Road, David became a
fiercely radical idealist and passed up his chance to go to university
because, he once explained, the Depression had made him too politically
conscious............ During the Second World War Caminer served
with the Green Howards, losing a leg at the Battle of Mareth in the Tunisian
desert in March 1943.
Lieutenant General William Odom
The balance tilted decisively in Brzezinski's and
Odom's favour after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December
1979. Two documents drafted by Odom proved critical. In September
1980 Brezezinski forwarded Odom's memorandum to Carter recommending
a decisive shift away from a "de facto policy of strategic
retreat in the world to a policy of strategic and regional
competition with Soviet power".......... From 1972 to 1974 Odom was assistant army attach�
at the Moscow embassy. Although constantly trailed by Soviet
military intelligence, or the GRU, he nonetheless managed to smuggle
out a large portion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's archive, including
the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and Second World
War military citations; Solzhenitsyn subsequently paid tribute to
Odom's role in his memoir Invisible Allies (1995)..... Odom's well-known forthrightness did
him little apparent harm. In 1981 he was appointed Assistant Chief of
Staff of the US Army for Intelligence. Four years later he became
Director of the National Security Agency, the multi-billion-dollar
global signals intelligence organisation based at Fort Meade, Maryland,
which dwarfs the CIA in size and budgets.
Group Captain Tony O'Neill
Colin Murdoch
Stanley Southworth MM
Angus Calder
Arthur 'Robbie' Burns DSO
For his inspiring leadership in a critical
situation, Burns was awarded an immediate DSO. Private Burton, a member of
his company, won a Victoria Cross in the same action.
Professor WH Greenleaf
Lieutenant 'Polly' Perkins DSC
Brian
Booth
Wing
Commander Jimmy Dell Its cancellation dealt a massive blow to the British aircraft industry,
and the sense of anti-climax, and in some quarters anger
[ make that thoughts of treason - Editor ], was intensified
when the government ordered the destruction of all the airframes, plans and
the jigs. Dell always thought that the aircraft would be a world-beater, and
considered it a great privilege to fly it.
Michael
Farrin
Michael
Cole He became interested in global warming
theories and believed that many of the assumptions around man-made
CO2 emissions and climate computer modelling were highly
questionable.
Brian
Keenan ........ Instead he seems to have been
inspired by a fanatical commitment to revolutionary Marxism, to which
he had been converted in the 1960s. He was a formidable political
animal – highly intelligent, fluent in at least four languages,
and he possessed organisational and technical skills of a high order.
Keenan joined the
Provisional IRA in the late 1960s at the start of the "Troubles".
By 1971 he had become quartermaster of the so-called Belfast Brigade,
and over the next few years he masterminded a campaign of bombings in
the province. A factor in his promotion was his fluency in Arabic,
which enabled him to attend training camps in the Middle East and to
buy arms, explosives and ammunition from terrorist organisations and
rogue states worldwide. He made contacts with the PLO, with the Stasi
in East Germany and with Colonel Gaddafi's Libya. He arranged the
first arms shipment from Libya in 1972.
Larry
Levine
Air
Chief Marshal Sir John Barraclough Promoted
to wing commander at the age of 24, he commanded the captured Italian
airfield at Mogadishu, Somaliland, where Wellingtons conducted
anti-submarine operations. On his return to Britain in May 1944 he
became chief instructor at a flying-boat training unit and was
mentioned in dispatches.
Lieutenant-Colonel
Douggie Moir
Robert
Vesco
Flight
Lieutenant Nicky Ross DSO
Major
David Liddell MC Liddell's
company attacked at first light. His men gained a foothold in the
village, but the platoons became separated by 100 yards of
bullet-swept ground. The leading platoon had suffered severe
casualties, and when Liddell came up with reinforcements they were
pinned down by heavy machine-gun fire.
Liddell charged
the machine-gun post single-handed, knocked it out with hand grenades
and enabled his men to continue the advance. During the engagement
his batman was killed beside him and he himself was wounded in the
eye. He continued, nevertheless, until he had linked up with the
isolated platoon.
Diana
Barnato Walker The
diminutive socialite granddaughter of a South African diamond
millionaire, before the war Diana Barnato was well known in London
for her high spirits and for late nights spent at the Embassy or 400
Club in London. She was also known for the Bentley which she was
given for her 21st birthday - a gift from her doting father, the
motor-racing champion Woolf “Babe”
Barnato.....................
On
another occasion, “skimming happily along in a Spitfire”,
she suddenly found herself in thick cloud, “but I couldn’t
bale out! My skirt would have ridden up with the parachute straps and
anyone who happened to be below would have seen my knickers!”
Instead, to the astonishment of those on the ground, she managed to
nurse her aircraft down, breaking through the cloud at tree-top
height and banking sharply to avoid a patch of woodland, to make a
perfect landing in heavy rain on the tiny grass airstrip of what
turned out to be the Navigation and Blind Flying Establishment at RAF
Windrush............
One
evening in 1963 in the mess at RAF Middleton St George, the Wing
Commander Flying, John Severgne, idly suggested that Diana might like
to fly one of the RAF’s new supersonic Lightnings. She jumped
at the chance and on August 26 1963, following clearance from the
Ministry of Defence, she took off and reached a speed of Mach 1.65
(1,262 mph), making her the first woman to break the sound barrier.
Philipp
Von Boeselager
Deborah
Palfrey - Suicide Or Murder? Mark
Wyndham MC When
war came he joined up, and was commissioned in the 12th Royal
Lancers............... In March of that year, while on patrol, he was
wounded; and throughout this period he performed reconnaissance
movements that, in the words of a senior officer, showed "the
utmost dash and gallantry", taking his vehicle as close to the
enemy as possible, even though out gunned and suffering from inferior
British armour.
On
June 7 1942, when Wyndham's squadron was providing reconnaissance for
the 22nd Armoured Brigade near the Rigguel ridge, he noticed an enemy
concentration south of the ridge, almost entirely hidden. Spotted
by the Germans, Wyndham found himself under heavy shell-fire for some
45 minutes, during which time he managed to gain information about
the size of the enemy force and the exact location of its
batteries.............
Wg
Cdr Paddy Barthropp DFC Throughout that
summer he was constantly in action, and was credited with destroying
two enemy fighters, probably destroying two others and damaging two
more. On numerous occasions his Spitfire returned damaged by
anti-aircraft fire. In August 1941, after completing 150 operations,
he was awarded a DFC and sent to a fighter training unit as an
instructor.
Bruce
Wyllie His
other sport of the 1930s, shooting, taught him the concepts of
swinging through a target and firing slightly ahead of it to allow
for the speed of the moving lead. Unbeknownst to him at the time,
these were soon to prove invaluable...........
With
the appallingly high casualty rate suffered by Bomber Command, Wyllie
considered the whole of the rest of his life to be an unexpected
bonus, and he enjoyed it to the full.
Sydney
Dowse MC, the Great Escaper Dowse
had been in captivity for just over a year when he arrived in May
1942 at Hermann Goering's "escape-proof" camp, Stalag Luft
III, at Sagan. He made two unsuccessful attempts before further
efforts by the prisoners were put on to a more formal footing by the
formation of an escape committee under the chairmanship of Roger
Bushell, known as "Big X"..............
Although
Dowse spent most of his time underground, he also befriended a German
corporal who worked in the censor's office at the camp headquarters.
Through this contact he obtained numerous authentic documents, which
were passed to the escape committee for copying, and much valuable
military intelligence. He even managed to persuade the corporal to
provide him with a tailored suit, which he subsequently wore for his
escape.
Sergeant
Dougie Wright MM
Bill
Curling Bryan William
Richard Curling was born on November 15 1911 at Bitterne, near
Southampton, the elder son of Captain Bryan Curling, who won a DSO
during the Great War and retired in the rank of brigadier-general. In
later life Bill would recall how as a small boy he rode his father's
polo ponies when they were out in Egypt.................
In younger days
he played squash; later, he stuck to shooting, stalking, fishing and
sailing from his holiday cottage at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight.
He was a member of the Bembridge Sailing Club for more than 50 years.
Charlton
Heston To
his detractors, Heston could be an inflexible, monolithic presence,
weighed down by his own mantle of heroism and pious sense of virtue.
Others took a more charitable view. [ The Grauniad has a very fair
share of supercilious, left wing, homosexual scum - Editor
] Assessing the actor's cultural impact, the critic Pauline
Kael hailed him as "a god-like hero; built for strength, he is
an archetype of what makes Americans win. He represents American
power - and he has the profile of an eagle."........
It
could be argued that Heston gave his last great performances at these
NRA rallies. Brandishing a rifle on the stage, the actor would strike
a pose reminiscent of the one he held while parting the Red Sea as
Moses, and then challenge critics to pry the gun "from my cold,
dead hands".
Charlton
Heston II
Pedro
Zaragoza
Major-General
Sir Desmond Langley
Pearl
Cornioley - SOE
Pearl
Cornioley II She
was taken on, and embarked on seven weeks' training in armed, and
unarmed, combat and sabotage - "Having been in the Girl Guides
proved very helpful," she recalled. "We learned to use
explosives and did a lot of firearms training. I was quite a good
shot."........
In
the event of capture - as with all the SOE agents operating in France
- her instructions were to remain silent under interrogation for at
least 48 hours, in order that her comrades should have the
opportunity to escape.
Air
Commodore Kit North-Lewis DSO DFC
Captain
Robert Franks DSO Drifting
upstream on the tide on a moonless night, he saw several large,
camouflaged craft. He whispered "Action Stations" and
closed to about 80 yards range, surprising and destroying an enemy
convoy. He returned with what he thought were the first Japanese
prisoners on this front.
On March 7
Franks again moved upstream, this time to establish himself
permanently in the Mayu river. His force endured continuous artillery
fire ("new and very unpleasant to us sailors"), and during
the day hid from aircraft in the shelter of chaungs [jungle covered
inlets]. At night, however, it was able to dominate the river and,
after several fierce night-time battles, managed to halt the Japanese
river traffic.
Neil
Aspinall, 'the fifth Beatle', dies aged 66 For some 20 years following the break-up of the group in
1970, Aspinall applied his astute business acumen to fighting
lawsuits on their behalf and unravelling the tangled skein of their
financial affairs. His flair for figures helped to transform them
into the wealthiest entertainers in the world, with a estimated
combined fortune of £2 billion.
Lazare
Ponticelli - The Last Of The First It
was as important to him as it was to them to underscore the horror
and futility of it. More than anything, he was appalled that he had
been made to fire on people he didn't know and to whom he, too, was a
stranger. These were fathers of children. He had no quarrel with
them. C'est complètement idiot la guerre. His Italian Alpine
regiment had once stopped firing for three weeks on the Austrians,
whose language many of them spoke; they had swapped loaves of bread
for tobacco and taken pictures of each other. To the end of his life,
Mr Ponticelli showed no interest in labelling anyone his enemy. He
said he did not understand why on earth he, or they, had been
fighting. Tim
Denny DFC At
the Bridstowe estate in Tasmania, a lavender plantation founded by
his father in the 1920s, Denny propagated new more productive
strains, developed improved husbandry techniques, designed and built
the world's first lavender-harvesting machine and designed steam
distillery equipment which improved both the quality and yield of
lavender oil and the productivity of the stills...............
His proudest
claim, however, was to have designed the "Yak Pack", a
portable still that could be carried up a mountain by a yak for
essential oil production in remote regions of Bhutan.
Frederick
Seitz
John
Prott MM On
July 19 1944 Prott was driving a tank serving as an artillery
observation post for 3rd Royal Tank Regiment at the village of Bras,
on a ridge south of Caen, when his commander was shot in the face by
a sniper and the tank caught fire. Although still under small
arms attack, Prott tried to douse the flames before helping down the
officer and two other wounded. He then climbed back up to rescue
another crew member, only to be hurled to the ground when the turret
exploded............
When
billeted in a country house before the invasion he and a comrade
found a comfortable sleeping place beside a large fireplace. But its
warmth attracted so many others that the two tossed a bulging sandbag
on to the fire, saying "There, boys, that'll give you heat",
and then watched the room being rapidly vacated as two dozen thunder
flashes went off.
Lord
Pym MC He was educated at Eton and Magdelene College,
Cambridge. In 1942 he was commissioned into the 9th Lancers, joining
his regiment in North Africa just before El Alamein, in which he took
part as a troop leader. He was appointed adjutant just before the
fall of Tunis in March 1943, and landed in Italy that September; he
served as adjutant until the end of the war and did not miss a single
day’s action. He was twice mentioned in dispatches, and in 1945
was awarded an MC.
Squadron
Leader Charles Patterson DSO DFC He
was a fine horseman, and hunted with more than 40 packs in England
and Ireland......... A cultured, articulate and patriotic man
who was fiercely loyal to his country and to his
friends,..........
Paul
Raymond
Brigadier
John Prendergast DSO MC
Anthony
Blond Charismatic,
daring and outrageous, Blond collected talents as diverse as Harold
Robbins and Jean Genet, Spike Milligan and Graham Greene. He was the
first to spot the potential of Jennifer Paterson (of the Two Fat
Ladies), and was an early director of Private Eye, of whose bank
account he was a guarantor.
Of
the 70 or so writers to whom Blond gave their first chance, he became
most closely associated with Simon Raven [ well worth a look - Ed.
] , whose books he published throughout his literary
career............
As
well as publishing, Blond also became involved in the founding of
Piccadilly Radio and stood unsuccessfully as Labour candidate for
Chester at the 1964 general election. A member of the National
Council for Civil Liberties, he opposed censorship of any sort.
Lieutenant-General
Dan Shomron
Sir
David Orr MC
Squadron
Leader 'Hawkeye' Lee DFC On
June 10 he attacked a formation of Heinkels, but exhausted his
ammunition without any apparent effect. As he turned away, his
Hurricane blew up and he baled out, hitting the tailplane of his
aircraft. He was injured in the hand and leg, and 10 days later was
put on a boat for England from St Malo. He was mentioned in
dispatches.
Lieutenant-Colonel
Ken Scott MC The
approaches were heavily wired and mined, and guarded by about 50 men
equipped with searchlights and machine guns. The destruction of the
viaduct, however, became a priority with the military planners, since
it would cut the railway supply line through Greece to Rommel's army
in North Africa for several months.
By
moonlight the four men carried the charges to the bottom of the
ladder. While their comrades kept guard, Scott and McIntyre climbed
to the top platform and hauled up the explosives. They could hear the
Germans patrolling above their heads for the whole of the hour and a
half that it took to fix and connect the charges to the main girders.
Major
Frank Courtney MC He
earned his first MC as a forward transport officer in an attack on
the Vichy French at Mouaddmiye, Syria, on June 18 1941. As the
Fusiliers came under heavy fire, Courtney gathered the vehicles
together, appointed relief drivers and by personal example inspired
the continuation of the advance. When the remains of the column were
subjected to further small arms and tank fire later that morning, he
aided its temporary commander in restoring a confused and difficult
situation.
He
did much to restore the self-esteem of the expatriate community by
rescuing the UK Citizens' Association from decline, setting the
Bombay Ex-Servicemen's League on a sound footing and serving as a
trustee of the Breach Candy hospital. He was appointed OBE in
1980. Frank Courtney's wife predeceased him. He kept a home in
Britain, but Bombay remained his chief residence. He rented a flat
for 27 rupees (£3.20) a month, and retained a cook-bearer to
minister to his needs.
Jack
Lyons
Badri
Patarkatsishvili - Jew And Thief On The Run In June 2001
Patarkatsishvili was charged in his absence with attempting to
organise the escape of Berezovsky's associate Nikolai Glushkov from
prison. In October 2002 he was charged with fraud in connection with
a subsidiary of Avtovaz.
At first he was
welcomed in Georgia. He was courted by the country's president Eduard
Shevardnadze, who repeatedly rejected Russian calls for his
extradition, and by the then opposition leader Mikheil [ sic ]
Saakashvili......
Patarkatsishvili's
relations with Saakashvili deteriorated, by his account due to the
coverage given by Imedi to opposition parties, though allies of
Saakashvili suggested that the real reason was that Patarkatsishvili
found himself blocked in his efforts to gain total control of
Georgia's economic and business life.
Ian
Michie Educated
at Marlborough, where he was captain of house and a school prefect,
Ian Michie was commissioned into the King's Royal Rifle Corps (60th
Rifles) after passing out equal second from the officer cadet
training unit at Eaton Hall...... Field sports - particularly
stalking, shooting and fishing - played a large and significant part
in his life, accompanied by a love of golf and skiing. His
semi-autobiographical book on these subjects, Passions Shared, was
well received by his many friends.
Major-General
Ronnie Buckland He spent nearly
14 years abroad, serving in most of the trouble spots: Palestine,
Tripolitania, Malaya, Egypt, Cyprus and British Guiana. He ended his
career with five years at Salisbury as Chief of Staff Army Strategic
Command and Major-General in charge of Administration, HQ UK Land
Forces. Joshua
Lederberg - Jew And Nobel Prize Man When Lederberg
began his researches after the Second World War, bacteria were
thought to reproduce by cell division, producing clones identical to
the parent organisms. But the discovery by Oswald Avery that
deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, was the material that encoded the
genetic information for life, inspired him to test that
hypothesis..........
Anthony
Sumption DSC Sumption had an
extremely good brain, and as a lawyer he used it to address the
complexities of the taxation system, developing various strategies -
then perfectly legal - which earned many of his clients in the City
large fortunes. In the process he, too, prospered.
Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi Indian guru to the Beatles who built a business empire
based on transcendental meditation
George
Habash
Charles
Elwell But
in March 1942, having successfully disembarked two SOE agents in
Holland, Elwell and his Dutch companion were unable to launch their
dinghy through the surf and he was taken prisoner.
An
attempt to escape resulted in his being sent to
Colditz...........
Squadron
Leader 'Jimmy' James James
was one of the few to escape execution after the Great Escape, and
joined two others at the notorious death camp at Sachsenhausen, from
where he made another daring escape by tunnel, only to be recaptured
10 days later. He had already made a number of unsuccessful
escape attempts by the time he arrived at Stalag Luft III, near
Sagan, in the spring of 1943. Plans were being made to dig three
tunnels, and he was soon recruited to the organisation and appointed
to the security team.
Group
Captain Dudley Honor DFC
Bobby
Fischer, Chess Champion And Jew
Issy
Smith VC
Rear-Admiral
Joe Bartosik
Sir
Edmund Hillary
George
MacDonald Fraser John
Groves The
regiment sailed for France in June 1944, but Groves's ship was sunk
by an acoustic mine off the Normandy beaches; there was heavy loss of
life. Groves was one of the volunteers who returned to the sinking
ship to bring ashore the vehicles from the forward holds...... Groves
fought with the regiment throughout the subsequent campaign in
Belgium, Holland and Germany and was mentioned in dispatches. Later
he was promoted to the rank of captain and spent the summer of 1946
as a War Office observer officer in Berlin. Lt-Cdr
'Fuzz' Fyson DSC From
early 1944 to May 1945 Fyson was based on Corsica and in Italy
commanding the secret and elite No 2 Combined Operations Pilotage
Party (COPP). He reconnoitred the coast of Elba before its liberation
by Free French forces and later moved to Bari, where he led covert
operations in the Aegean and Adriatic. Then, in March and April 1945,
he took part in Operation Roast, the assault by 2 Commando Brigade on
the Spit, a narrow stretch of low-lying land about 600 yards wide
between the sea and the shallow, brackish waters of Lake Comacchio,
which was strongly defended by the
Germans..................
Professor
John Strugnell In
the course of an interview in November 1990 - during which he drank
beer but did not, according to his interrogator, seem to be drunk -
Strugnell was quoted as describing Judaism as "a horrible
religion. It's a Christian heresy, and we deal with our heretics in
different ways". Flight
Lieutenant Mick Shand The
RAF was desperately short of fighter pilots, and Shand was rushed
through training. After just 20 hours' flying [ 40 hours are the
minimum for a basic licence in these decadent times - Editor ] on
the Spitfire, during which time he never fired its guns, he was
posted to No 54 Squadron.
Benazir
Bhutto In
Pakistan she was often far less popular than her foreign press made
out. To her opponents she was more English than Pakistani, more
Western than Eastern. Her Urdu, although fluent, was ungrammatical,
while her Sindhi, her family's mother tongue, was almost
non-existent.
Lieutenant
Colonel Herbert
Jones VC Command
of 2 Para passed to Major Chris Keeble, and Jones was buried at Ajax
Bay on May 30, near where he fell. After the war his body was exhumed
and buried at the Blue Beach War Cemetery in Port San Carlos on
October 25
Simon
Raven Instead,
he survived to produce 25 novels, including Alms For Oblivion
(1959-76), a 10-volume saga of English upper-class life, numerous
screenplays, eight volumes of essays and memoirs, including Shadows
On The Grass (1981) - "the filthiest book on cricket ever
written," according to EW Swanton - and The First Born Of Egypt
sequence (1984-92), which contains requests such as "Darling
mummy, please may I be circumcised?" and "Please, sir, may
I bugger you, sir?" John
Hereford
Colonel
David Owen DSO
Patricia
Clarke
Captain Roger Villa On
May 23 1943 Active and the frigate Ness sank the Italian submarine
Leonardo Da Vinci north-east of the Azores after it unwisely
signalled its intention to head for Bordeaux.....
The Italian vessel was sunk with no survivors....
He
was navigator of the destroyer Bleasdale at the Dieppe raid, and then
commanded two landing craft which ferried ashore American troops west
of Algiers during Operation Torch.........
André
Bettencourt
Captain
John Gower Having
located it, he towed it to safety despite coming under air attack. In
April he took part in Operation Tungsten, the attack on the German
battleship Tirpitz, which was hiding in the fjords.
Ian
Smith 'Sir'
Roy Welensky [ a Jew from Poland unlike Slovo, a Jew from
Lithuania who subverted South Africa. Editor ] once remarked that
"dealing with Smith is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Make
no mistake: Smith is a ruddy ruthless man."
Ian
Smith - Man whose folly unleashed Mugabe Smith
feared that Britain would eventually transfer Rhodesia to black
majority rule and abandon the 230,000 white settlers.
Leo
Marks n
his memoir Between Silk and Cyanide (1998) Marks drew a vivid and
often angry portrait of an organisation capable of both brilliance
and lethal carelessness. It was also one in which Marks, as a
quick-witted Jew, often felt an outsider.
Colonel
Peter Ormrod MC
Major-General
Harry Grimshaw DSO He
was the last British soldier to leave Port Said after handing over to
the UN Force Commander. He was awarded a CBE for his part in the
operation.
Roy
Wallace
Barbara
Dainton
The
Right Reverend Graham Chadwick
Vice-Admiral
Sir Arthur Hezlet DSO DSC
Sir
Oliver Chesterton MC
Captain
Denis Jermain DSC
Lord
Michael Fitzalan Howard MC
Rosenberg's
Soviet spy overseer dies Born
March 9, 1914, in Moscow to a railroad signalman's family, Feklisov
was trained as a radio technician and was recruited into the American
department of the KGB's predecessor, the NKVD, according to his
official biography posted on the Foreign Intelligence Service's Web
site.....
Years
later, he published an autobiography "The Man Behind the
Rosenbergs" in which he described his work guiding the
intelligence-gathering work of the couple. The Rosenbergs were
executed in 1953 after being convicted of supplying the Soviet Union
with top-secret information on U.S. efforts to develop the atomic
bomb....
He
was later dispatched to London, where he made contact with Klaus
Fuchs, the German-born scientist who worked at the U.S. atom bomb
project as well as at Britain's Harwell nuclear research
laboratory....... In 1950, Fuchs was sentenced to 14 years for
disclosing nuclear secrets.
Brigadier
General Paul Tibbets The
detonation occurred at an altitude of 1,900ft with a power of 13 to
16 kilotons (estimates vary). Tibbets considered it to be a normal
bombing operation until he turned to see the effect, which he
described as "unbelievable". It was estimated that 70,000
died in the blast, but many more died over the following days from
radiation.
Tibbets
was often in demand to comment on his wartime experiences. He had no
regrets, regarding the dropping of the bomb as necessary, and he
would say: "Why be bashful? That's what it took to the end the
war."
Victor
Grayevsky For
many years after coming to Israel Grayevsky also worked as a double
agent, posing as a Soviet spy but in fact serving the Israelis by
feeding disinformation to Soviet intelligence officers. His Soviet
handlers in Israel were KGB officers working under diplomatic cover
or posing as clergy from the so-called Russian Orthodox Red Church in
Israel.
Michael
Spurway
Air
Vice-Marshal Peter Howard
Arthur
Kornberg
Christopher
Seton-Watson MC The
citation for the Bar to his MC pays tribute to the part he played in
beating off two counter-attacks near Perugia, and states that at
Castiglione, near Arezzo, when a 75mm shell landed beside him in a
slit trench that he was using as an OP and failed to explode, he
calmly continued to send fire orders to his guns.......
As
a talent scout for the security services, however, he sometimes
became irascible when his recommendations were not followed; on one
occasion he threatened to "send them his Burgesses and Macleans"
instead of the prodigies he usually put forward.
Lim
Goh Tong
RB
Kitaj
Sammy
Duddy Paul
Raven
Squadron
Leader Harry Scott Scott
had already survived two tours on bomber operations when, in October
1942, he joined the newly-formed No 109 Squadron equipped with the
fast and high-flying Mosquito. Oboe was a ground-controlled,
blind-bombing system developed by the Telecommunications Research
Establishment and based on the German Knickebein beam bombing
system......
General
Sir Richard Trant
John
Kent Her
creator, John Kent, who has died aged 65, was a New Zealander, the
son of a lawyer. Arriving in England, he found the ways of old Europe
cunning beyond his imagination..... The culture shock gave him the
clarity of vision to cut through the cant and the double
standards..... She [ Varoomshka ] was a concept to enrage feminists
of the day, which she duly did.
Sefanaia
Sukanaivalu VC
Deborah
Kerr She
made serenity dramatic; and though her poise might be ruffled at
critical moments in scenes of passion (most famously exemplified by
her encounter on the beach with Burt Lancaster in From Here to
Eternity in 1953), her well-bred airs and social graces made her a
model of British womanhood in Hollywood.
Andrée
de Jongh Dédée
de Jongh made more than 30 double crossings and escorted 116 evaders,
including more than 80 aircrew. But on the night of January 15 1943
she was sheltering at Urrugne with three RAF evaders when she was
betrayed.....
The
escape line survived, and by the time the Allies invaded France in
June 1944 more than 500 men had passed down the line to
safety.
The
Earl of Harrowby
Bob
Denard He
came to prominence during the early conflicts in the Congo, when he
led a raid on Stanleyville (now Kisangani) to rescue white civilians
besieged by rebel forces. The ruthless efficiency with which his
group of mercenaries carved through the rebel army earned them the
soubriquet "Les Affreux" (the fearful
ones)....
Brigadier
Mike Harvey MC
Cynthia
Pitman For
some 70 years in season, she hunted for three days a week, rain or
shine, and always rode out side-saddle........
David
Muffett He
spent 16 years in the colonial service in northern Nigeria, where he
claimed to have been one of only two Britons whose name passed into
the native Hausa language: "Aka yi masa mafed" (literally
"One did to him Muffett"), meaning "Justice caught up
with him"......
In
1960 he apprehended the Tigwe of Vwuip, a northern Nigerian tribal
chief who had eaten the local tax collector. The Tigwe had apparently
been so impressed by the man's ability to acquire money on demand
that he had — understandably — decided to try to
assimilate his powers. It was not so much this particular
misdemeanour that bothered Muffett; what really worried him was the
fact that a UN delegation was due to visit the area, and "I
wasn't about to have one of them eaten. I considered that it would be
a highly retrogressive step."
Captain
Kenneth Lockwood
Sir
Alan Campbell Every
now and then Campbell caught himself behaving uncannily like Sir
Samson Courtney, the British ambassador to the Empire of Azania in
Evelyn Waugh's novel Black Mischief, indulging in little absurdities
of opinion and pomposities of manner. Campbell found Black Mischief —
which was unmentionable in Ethiopia at the time — to be a very
shrewdly observed satire....
He
joined the Army in 1940, serving briefly in the ranks of the Suffolk
Regiment before receiving a commission in the Devonshire Regiment. He
ended the war as a staff officer in SOE.
José
Luis de Vilallonga
Graham
Clarke The
journey was intended to demonstrate that the craft — an SRN6 of
the British Hovercraft Corporation — could successfully travel
2,500 miles from Manaus, in Brazil, to Port of Spain,
Trinidad......
Professor
Durward Cruickshank His
careful work on the analysis of the thermal motion of atoms in
crystal structures is known to every student of crystallography, and
his development of much of the theoretical basis for the refinement
of molecular structures in the 1950s and 1960s was crucial to the
advancement of the subject......
Tony
Ryan
Squadron
Leader Terry O'Brien DFC O'Brien's
native Australian scepticism and disdain for the pretensions of rank
was accompanied by an acute intelligence and a deep concern for his
men; and he could be very critical of independent operations and of
some of their leaders. Such operations, he maintained, were not
always harmonised with the wider strategy or tactics of Allied
Command and were very wasteful of life.
The
Reverend Rex Humbard Although
Elvis Presley was among the programme's admirers - in 1977 Humbard
officiated at the singer's funeral - not everyone shared his
enthusiasm. When an arch-fundamentalist rival complained that Humbard
"sings hillbilly music in church", he recalled his own
father's advice: "If you want to smell like a polecat, fight
one."
Professor
Wolfgang Panofsky Despite
his own involvement with the Manhattan Project which developed the
first atomic bomb,........ became in later life a fierce advocate of
arms control. Last year he declared that: "The risk-to-benefits
ratio of nuclear weapons has grown to an unacceptably large value
today… and in my view threatens the survival of
civilisation."
Lois
Maxwell Although
she played the part for 23 years, she was on screen for less for an
hour and spoke fewer than 200 words in all 14 films, her lines
running an emotional gamut from "James, you're late" to
"When are we going to have that dinner?".....
Never
paid more than £100 a day, her first appearance in Dr No took
only two days to shoot, and those in her 13 subsequent Bond films
were just as modest in scale. For her first five films, Lois Maxwell
wore her own clothes.
Major
Sir Hamish Forbes, Bt MC
Lieutenant
Commander Harry
Wardle
John
Gardiner When
Audi insisted on manufacturing the V16-cylinder engine crankshaft for
these cars, it failed Gardiner's rigorous inspection; and when an
Audi committee quibbled endlessly over technical details Gardiner
told them: "Listen, all you've got to do is sign the cheques and
tell us how big you want the swastikas painted."
Sir
Edward Tomkins
Ian
Gilmour
Albert
Jacka VC
Lady
Jeanne Campbell
Major-General
Sir John Anderson John
Evelyn Anderson, the son of a New Zealander who sailed as a deckhand
with Captain Scott on one of his Antarctic expeditions, was born at
Shrewsbury on June 28 1916 and educated at King's School, Rochester.
He attended RMA Woolwich and later became the last senior officer in
the RCS to have been trained to drive and operate horse-drawn cable
wagons......
Count
Heinrich von Einsiedel Deutsches Kreuz in Gold
Major-General
Sir Jeremy Moore MC
Lieutenant-Commander
'Fairy' Filmer
Group
Captain 'Benny' Goodman DFC The long-range
heavy gun battery at St Martin de Varreville, behind what was to be
Utah Beach on the Cherbourg peninsula, posed a major threat.....
Goodman was flying one of four Mosquitoes detailed to mark the
target.... The other Mosquitoes dropped before a force of 64
Lancasters commenced their attack. When American troops overran the
battery on June 6 [ D Day ], they discovered that it had been
so badly damaged that it had been abandoned. A few days after the
attack against the gun battery, Goodman marked major marshalling
yards at Saumur.... It was Goodman's 78th and final bombing operation
of the war;
Major-General
Hew Butler
Lord
Bethell
Sir
Tasker Watkins, VC He
was promoted from lieutenant to major on the field.... Interviewed
subsequently, all he would say about the action was that the men with
him were Welsh, and "I am proud of that".
Lord
Michael Pratt
Leonard
Williams DFC
The
Duke of Buccleuch KT, AB Laid
end to end, the walls and fences that bounded his 280,000 acres would
have stretched from Drumlanrig, his castle in Dumfriesshire, to San
Francisco. The management of such a demesne was, as the Duke
maintained, "every bit as much a business as running a chocolate
factory or a chain of shops".
Buccleuch
had served as an ordinary seaman in destroyers during the Second
World War, had been an MP for 13 years and had championed the
increasingly neglected countryside while representing an Edinburgh
constituency....
Rear-Admiral
Robin Mayo
Group
Captain Willie 'Tirpitz' Tait DSO, DFC The
weather was clear and the German fighters tasked to protect the
battleship failed to appear. Tait attacked first and his Tallboy hit
the ship; in the first four minutes, 18 more were released, achieving
another direct hit and several near misses. There was a violent
internal explosion and the huge battleship capsized and rested bottom
up with great loss of life.
George MacDonald Fraser [
1925 - 2008 ]
The result was Flashman (1969), which saw the
craven Flashy turned into a soldier, quaking with fear but still
drinking and chasing women in the middle of the retreat from Kabul
in the first Afghanistan war. The book was original and very funny
and it also, most unusually for a comic novel, gave readers a
telling picture of life in England and the empire between 1839 and
1842: there were four closely-packed pages of notes at the back of
the novel which proved the historical accuracy of what seemed like
mere exuberant farce. It is hard now, with Flashman recognised as
an international comic classic, to believe that Fraser had
difficulty getting the book published. Flashman was turned down a
dozen times before Herbert Jenkins, the small independent house best
known for publishing PG Wodehouse, brought it out. Fraser followed it the next year with Royal
Flash. This was a double literary conceit, with Flashman, a
character from one Victorian novel, getting involved in the plot of
another, Anthony Hope's 1894 classic
The Prisoner of
Zenda. The idea
was that Hope had used Flashman's adventures to invent the tale of
Rudolf Rassendyll, the Englishman who was the double of the King of
Ruritania. Flashy gives the reader the true story, involving
Bismarck and the Schleswig-Holstein affair. The book also featured
Lola Montez, the fabulous beauty of the age, and her lover Ludwig,
the mad King of Bavaria. Ten pages of notes again told the casual
reader that he was getting much true historical gen among the comic
cuts. Bismarck and Schleswig-Holstein aside,
Fraser's real interests were the British empire, the American civil
war, and the wild west. The 12 books of the Flashman series feature
many of the 19th century's major engagements: the slave trade in
Flash for Freedom (1971), the Charge of the Light Brigade in
Flashman at the Charge (1973), The Indian Mutiny in Flashman in the
Great Game (1975), Custer's last stand in Flashman and the Redskins
(1982), the Opium Wars in Flashman and the Dragon (1985), and the
raid by the abolitionist John Brown on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in
Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (1994). In a late book of short stories, Flashman and
the Tiger (1999), Flashman, up against Bismarck again, averts a
European war in 'The Road to Charing Cross', is involved in a
celebrated royal scandal concerning Edward VII in 'The Subtleties of
Baccarat', and, in the title story, 'Flashman and the Tiger', he is
found at the battle of Rorke's Drift before encountering Sherlock
Holmes and Dr Watson. Other Flashman books were Flashman's Lady
(1977), Flashman and the Mountain of Light (1990) and the very last
one, Flashman on the March (2005), about the Abyssinia Campaign of
1868. In every novel the notes confirm that while
Flash's sexual high jinks and great feats of cowardice are fictional
they are played before a real historical background. Sometimes the
real events are very hard to believe. Two women in particular - the
"female Caligula", the black Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar in
Flashman's Lady, and Jeendan, the nymphonmaniac Maharini who dressed
as a dancing girl and ruled the Sikhs in their war against British
India in 1845-46 - seem the work of a fevered imagination, but they
turn out to be quite real historical figures. Fraser had no qualifications as a historian.
He was born in Carlisle, the son of a doctor. He went to Carlisle
grammar school and Glasgow Academy. He joined the army in 1943 and
served with the Border regiment in Burma, part of the "forgotten"
14th Army. Oddly for a man who spent so much time writing about
historical battles in his fiction, in his own wartime memoir,
Quartered Safe Out Here (1993), with its hard-bitten opening
sentence, "The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry-river bed in
the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila," he told of the war as seen
by a rifleman in an infantry platoon and ignored the big picture.
The book was considered one of the great personal memoirs of the
Japanese war. Fraser was given a commission at the end of
the war and served as a lieutenant with the Gordon Highlanders in
the Middle East until 1947. After the army he worked as a sports
reporter on his home-town newspaper, went to Canada for a time, and
then joined the Glasgow Herald. In 1971 he published, as well as two
full length Flashman novels, a straight historical study of the
Scottish border reivers, The Steel Bonnets. This was considered an
important historical work. He returned to the subject in 1993 with
The Candlemass Road, a short novel which at times seems like one of
Daphne Du Maurier's historical romances, except that the love
interest stops dead, perhaps realistically so. He wrote four other non-Flashman novels. Mr
American (1980) is a rather old-fashioned adventure about an
American mystery man who settles in England in 1910, becomes
friendly with Edward VII and then turns out to be one of the Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid gang. The Pyrates (1983) is a wild
farce owing much to the stereotypes of old movies. Black Ajax (1977)
is a fictionalised account of the real life of Tom Molineaux, a
freed slave who became a bare-knuckle boxing champion in the late
18th and early 19th century. His very last book, The Reavers (2007),
is set in Elizabethan England. Fraser also published three books of short
stories, The General Danced at Dawn (1970), McAusland in the Rough
(1974), and The Sheikh and the Dustbin (1988). A busy man of tremendous energy, Fraser
claimed to have written 20 or 30 film scripts. Most of them were
never made, but even so, he said, the money was very good. The
scripts that did reach the screen were The Three Musketeers (1974),
The Four Musketeers (1975), Royal Flash (1975), The Prince and the
Pauper (1977), the James Bond film Octopussy (1983), Red Sonia
(1985), Casanova (1987) and The Return of the Musketeers (1989). Fraser perhaps reveals his literary raison
d'être in 1988 with The Hollywood History of the World. In this
unusual book, filled with pictures, he claimed that intellectual
critics were wrong to condemn Hollywood for getting things wrong in
the movies. He admitted that modern vernacular does sometimes seem
unintentionally comic in the mouths of historical figures, and facts
are often twisted to make a story, but still, he said, this is no
worse than clocks chiming in Shakespeare's ancient Rome. He praised
film costume and set design for giving contemporary audiences an
accurate picture of the look of things in the past. "They have given
a picture of the ages more vivid and memorable than anything in
Tacitus or Gibbon or Macaulay," he claimed. "It matters little that
George Sanders had a knack of wearing Biblical armour as though it
were made of well-cut tweed." It was not a popular view, and the
book is the only one of Fraser's that is out of print. Fraser lived on the Isle of Man, not, he
said, as a tax exile, but as an exile from the modern world. He said
the island was like England used to be. He became something of a
right-wing figure, hating political correctness (the Flashman books
are full of the word "nigger"), and claiming to be very surprised at
the way the liberal left had cheered the Flashman novels as attacks
on the British Empire. They were not meant to be attacks, he said;
he liked the British Empire, it had been a marvellous force for good
in the world. He is survived by his wife Kathleen
Hetherington whom he married in 1949, their two sons and one
daughter. ·
George MacDonald Fraser, writer, born April 2 1925, died January
2 2008
Lieutenant-Colonel
Michael Weippert
In
Flanders Fields
Older
Obits and Older
Obits L to Z Errors
& omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real
or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.
QUOTE
Freeman Dyson is now retired, having been for most of his life a professor
of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was born in
England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force in World
War II. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1945 with a B.A. degree in
mathematics. He went on to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947
and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. His most useful contribution
to science was the unification of the three versions of quantum
electrodynamics invented by Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga. Cornell
University made him a professor without bothering about his lack of Ph.D. He
subsequently worked on nuclear reactors, solid state physics,
ferromagnetism, astrophysics and biology, looking for problems where elegant
mathematics could be usefully applied. He has written a number of books
about science for the general public.
UNQUOTE
Professor Dyson
was an Englishman, this biography notwithstanding. He became an American
citizen after Her Majesty's Government
hassled him. He did some first class work. The
Wikipedia's write
up is better. So is the
NY Times' essay.
The Institute for Advanced Study
gives his contact details but it is too late. The good professor was, rather
like Paul Dirac,
another important Englishman, one who did not
get publicity. Albeit Dirac had a Swiss father.
The
wonderful people running the Congo way back had an army, which was all right
until it was actually needed - then it ran away.
Mad Mike did what
it took, when it took. But then his men were, whisper it,
White. He could say:- Been there, done that. He
lived; a better man that the average accountant. Their club kicked him out.
It shows that they are worthless wimps. You can find
A brief biography of Mike Hoare, listing some of his involvements around the world
covering the ground.
Paul Caswell
Powe Farnes,
DFM,
AE (16 July 1918 – 28 January 2020) was a
Royal Air Force fighter pilot and
Second World War
flying
ace who flew during the
Battle of Britain as one of "The
Few". He scored 8 kills (comprising 7 and 2 shared destroyed, 2 'probables'
and 11 damaged).[1][2]
He was there on the day and he made a difference.
QUOTE
Sir
Roger Scruton,
who has died aged 75, was a philosopher and academic
variously identified as “one of the nearest things Britain
has to a public intellectual”, Britain’s favourite “token
reactionary” (his own description), and even “the thinking
man’s skinhead”.
UNQUOTE
This is sad news. He was a decent man with deeply informed views.
The Wikipedia's
biography is interesting; it reads as honest. That is not always true. Sir
Roger, at his best
wrote clearly and well. Teaching in an underground university in
Czechoslovakia
when it was enslaved by the USSR meant facing up to
danger. He was not murdered, merely expelled. It could have been death.
His little book,
On Hunting is charming but, of course Amazon has some hostile reviews as
well.
Was very much there on
D Day, getting instant promotion as commanders
died. He made it to Antwerp, if not further. His granddaughter explains. She
is proud of him.
He did not like the reality of the USSR and said so,
in spite of the pain, the torture, the lunatic asylums, the
Concentration Camps of the
GULAG. So the KGB kicked him
out but
Maggie took
him in. The
Guardian reads as an honest admirer. Vladimir loathed the
USSR, understandably so he set up
Resistance International, which seems to have been effective
albeit one or two scoundrels were part of it. The
Times of Israel accuses him of being a friend of that
Shitty
Little Country. Further that he was fitted up regarding the paedophile pictures.
H Hour was 00.16 on 6 June 1944. Their role was to take
Pegasus Bridge. Holding it protected the
Eastern Flank of the D Day beaches. They took it, they held it. Gliders
were not that safe because landing zones had obstructions but arriving close
meant being effective. It was not like Arnhem, a
Bridge Too Far, a DZ Too Far.
Was heavily involved in
Ireland. This meant covert operations against the
IRA. Dying was a useful tactical move against
infiltrators running the prosecutor's office and
Malicious Prosecutions over there. It means they can't do anything to
him. It worked for 'Sir' Edward Heath and
Jimmy Savile, paedophiles both so why not for
an honest man? The
Irish Times article,
How, and why, did Scappaticci survive the IRA’s wrath? is better than
the
Guardian's effort and, in all probability the
Telegraph's. NB
Michael Oatley was important too; he acted as a go between.
Captain Jary, lately of the
Somerset Light Infantry talked to the
Imperial
War Museum about operations in North West Europe. He said interesting
things about morale generally. Belsen failed to amuse. Men who met him, men
who
Tweet were impressed.
He got about,
mainly in the Mediterranean area. So did
4 PARA. See also the Telegraph's offering at
Major Richard Hargreaves, Para officer who
led an uphill assault against fortified enemy positions in Italy.
Ross Perot was interesting and made the world a better place after doing
four years in the US Navy. The
Guardian is not an admirer.
A Jew from Germany was a first rate electrical engineer who joined the
Royal Naval Scientific Service in 1944, beginning his career at the
Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment (ASWE) & invented the first
trackball called
roller ball in 1946,[2]
patented in 1947.[1]
He did Command and Control Systems.
She got to Belsen as well. What
fun? No!
Major-General Sir Colin McVean Gubbins
KCMG,
DSO,
MC (2 July 1896 – 11 February 1976) was the prime mover of the
Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the
Second World War.[1]
Lieutenant-General Sir
John Bagot Glubb,
KCB,
CMG,
DSO,
OBE,
MC,
KStJ,
KPM (16 April 1897 – 17 March 1986), known as Glubb Pasha, was a
British soldier, scholar and author, who led and trained
Transjordan's
Arab
Legion between 1939 and 1956 as its commanding general. During the
First World War, he served in France.
A Frenchman who had an interesting war, escaping Mauthausen and
Buchenwald; it was memorable but not fun.
Edward Simpson was a mathematician specialising in statistics. He led
the team that broke
the
Japanese Naval cipher JN 25
without knowing the language.
Was a physicist with a
Nobel Prize for his work on
Heterojunctions
in
crystalline
semiconductors. The results, the pay offs are enormous.
QUOTE
Zhores I. Alferov, a Russian physicist who won a Nobel Prize for research
that underpinned an array of inventions integral to modern life, from solar
cells to DVD players to cellphones, died Friday night in St. Petersburg. He
was 88.
UNQUOTE
He was half Russian, half Jew and all communist.
QUOTE
Tributes have been paid to Dick Churchill, the last surviving member
of the real-life World War II Great Escape team, who has died aged 99.
UNQUOTE
They saved England. Did they wonder why they bothered?
Adolf Hitler was creating a
European Union by force.
Heath was doing it by
Treason. Now
May is trying to keep us in
it by treachery.
He was one of the last of
The Few who saved
England in 1940, thus exposing it to betrayal by
May & others of her ilk.
Now there is only one left. Fred Sutherland, a Canadian was there
as a gunner on that day in 1943. 53 men out of 133 did not get back. This
obit is better than the
Telegraph's
He jumped on D Day & at
Arnhem then copped it on a bomber raid on the Berlin run.
QUOTE
Byam served in the
Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and was one of only 68 survivors of the
254 crew of
HMS Jervis Bay which was sunk in November 1940 in the North
Atlantic. Byam lost the sight in his right eye in the incident, having swum
through oil to be rescued.[1]
UNQUOTE
You can't say he was a Left Wing enemy of
England like the rest of the BBC.
QUOTE
Lord Carrington, the last Tory Foreign Secretary to quit until Boris
Johnson resigned last night, died at the age on 99 yesterday, it was
revealed today.
UNQUOTE
He served King and Country for real, unlike the
Moral Cretins we have now.
Her face fitted but she served.
Was married to Harold Wilson, a rather foul prime
minister. She seems to have been rather
better than one assumed, interested in poetry and in favour of a quiet life. She
didn't get that.
Professor Lewis, ex
Royal Armoured Corps and
Intelligence Corps then the
Foreign
Office and
School of Oriental and African Studies. He was the(?) leading
intellectual of Islam. He gets a decent
write up from Mark Steyn in
'We Don't Know Who We Are'
& a rather less friendly one from the
Wikipedia. He is
right about us as well. We do not know where we came from or where we are going to.
We have not worked out that we are being manipulated by the
Puppet Masters, by Jews. Mark does not
mention that Lewis was also a Jew. Look at
Wikiquote, think
for yourself, decide about his views for yourself.
War time, armour. Made it from Normandy
to the Elbe. Did well after.
He doubled up as bomb aimer with the
master pilot, which meant spending time over the target, dodging the ack-ack.
He bombed Berlin at 11.00 on 30
January 1943 & disrupted a
speech by Feldmarschall
Hermann Göring,
the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe. The sound of the bombs were
broadcast all over Germany, a useful propaganda coup. He did a good hit on
the Gestapo HQ in Aarhus, Demark
He kept getting
exposed but he kept on with his clubs, his whores & rich clientele. With
those sort of prices it is easy to see why. He got done for VAT fraud but
got out of prison very quickly. It's not what you know, it's who you know.
The
Telegraph does even hint at blackmail but....... The Wiki, like all of
the rest keeps quiet about him being a Jew but the
Saint John's Wood Synagogue does not see him as problem; to them he was a
success.
Padre, but a not very good one. face fitted. Pandered to Jews.
She
was a delicate beauty from the wrong side of the tracks. Her affair with
John Profumo, l'affaire
Profumo made us all cynical about the Establishment that was having fun while we were not.
Mark Steyn tells us about her and Jack, about
The Girl in the Swimming Pool Christine Keeler, 1942-2017. It is a kindly
piece, one more about a decent man and his life long apology than about her sad
life. Compare him with shameless rogues like
Weinstein & Clinton, that never even thought
of doing the right thing.
PS Profumo was the last man living to have voted
against Neville Chamberlain in the 1940
Norway Debate that led
to Winston Churchill
becoming His Majesty's Prime Minister.
PPS
The Telegraph gave her a decent send off too,
Freed from her demons, Sixties icon Christine Keeler is laid to rest. She
held the True Faith.
Bronwen Astor, Dowager Viscountess Astor was the chatelaine of Cliveden at
the time of the
Christine Keeler Affair; she knew all of the big players. Balmain said that she was
the great beauty. a compliment from a man who really knew. She saw Christine off but
not by long. Her old man was at it with
Mandy Rice-Davies,
known as Randy Mandy by cynics. This really did not help when the brown stuff
got into the cooling system. Bronwen was also a daughter of
Holy Mother Church.
He helped set up
Operation Stopwatch, which was betrayed by George Blake,
Was the man who did not get a grip of
Paedophile Perverts.
This really not helpful when the brown stuff got into the cooling system. Of
course when Jews do the same only more so the Main Stream
Media eagerly hide the truth but see Mikva Abuse
for more and nastier details, thousands of them.
Kazimierz Piechowski,
who has died aged 98, escaped from Auschwitz dressed as an SS officer in a staff
car stolen from the concentration camp's commandant, in one of the most
audacious exploits of the Second World War. It really was not nice place
to be but a good one to leave.
Jenkins
deserted his post during the Korean War, a bad mistake. The North Koreans were
far nastier to him than his own would ever have been.
The IRA tried to murder him
as vengeance for
Operation Flavius carried out by men of
22 SAS;
killing two men and a woman of
PIRA. Sir Peter gave the final authorisation. It was publicised later as
Death On The Rock.
Reno was appointed by
Clinton because she was a woman. His previous two choices were both
criminals, women with children, using
Illegal Immigrants as servants. The
Telegraph made excuses for her. She brought us the
Waco Massacre and the corrupt investigation
by the FBI. More excuses come from
Vox - a Feminist pioneer while the
Guardian is evasive.
Mike Dauncey was at
Arnhem, on 17 September 1944 as a glider pilot then as infantry. There are
not many of them left now. He was on the run for months afterwards.
Montgomery blocked his VC nomination.
Rob looks like a
jovial soul. He was, he had fun, living for the moment & to the Devil with the
consequences. He makes one think better of a big country. The voters warmed
to him and his high jinks; it was just the prigs, preachers and bores who
are spoil sports.
Spoke Malay & some Japanese, Judoka,
Kendoka, fencing champion. Stood down from Arnhem, fought in Java, Palestine
& Korea. Commanded 2 PARA. Join the Army and see the world.
QUOTE
Brigadier Peter 'Scrubber' Stewart-Richardson
Soldier and adventurer
who built clinics in Afghanistan and was roughed up by the Taliban
Brigadier Peter "Scrubber" Stewart-Richardson, who has
died aged 89, was a decorated Guards officer, a commander of
a parachute company and an intrepid aid worker for the
charitable organisation that he founded.
UNQUOTE
Scrubber commanded
10 PARA; he
was known, not loved.
From boy soldier, through the
Second World War to the Tower of London
he did well.
He flew as an observer, nearly
getting to attack the Tirpitz.
He did his real soldiering with a Sten gun, in
Korea where cold meant very cold. Germany and Ireland came later. The
Baader-Meinhof lot wanted him dead.
Was in Borneo during the
Confrontation. Ireland and the Falklands came
later. He did rather well there it seems.
The Last of The Few? What does he think about
saving England, only to see it betrayed by The
Enemy Within? His squadron destroyed 123 enemy aircraft.
Welshman in the London Irish, when they wore a rather
strange hat. Did well.
With the Commandoes. On the successful Lofoten raid.
He survived Dieppe and Boulogne.
QUOTE
Robert Conquest, historian - obituary
Historian who played a
leading role in stiffening western resolve in the Cold War by
chronicling the horrors of Soviet communism
UNQUOTE
An honest man who told the truth while the
BBC
lied.
QUOTE
Squadron Leader Les Munro, who has died aged 96, was the last
surviving pilot to have taken part on the Dambusters raid, which
attacked the Ruhr Dams in May 1943.
UNQUOTE
Do we deserve men like him? Do we deserve politicians like the traitor
Cameron?
QUOTE
Kyril Zinovieff, who has died aged 104, was a first-generation
Russian �migr� who served in the British Army, spent his working life as
a British civil servant, and became an acclaimed translator of works by
Russian writers; as a child he caught sight of a laughing Rasputin and
remembered Tsarist officers being shot outside his bedroom window in
1917 during the Russian Revolution............
UNQUOTE
An interesting life.
Jumped into France on D Day.
Had a lively time of it.
Races stock cars and praised the
heroism of the
English football hooligan.
QUOTE
The Dowager Marchioness of Reading, who has died aged 96, was a
society beauty of the 1930s and 1940s and a woman of independent spirit.
UNQUOTE
What a sound lass.
Happily, this one is not posthumous. He is a lance corporal of
1 PARA
who saw action in Helmand.
Was all right, a major in the Royal Yeomanry.
Jumped with
9 PARA on to the Merville Battery on D Day.
Ran Singapore rather well.
Was a New Zealander who knocked out several V1s.
Professor Terence Miller was there
on D Day and at Arnhem with
the
Parachute Regiment. Ian Smith didn't like him because of his attitude to
blacks in Rhodesia. The Marxists didn't either.
She jumped into France to help les Maquisards,
moved weapons, explosives, information, whatever.
Was a good time girl, a friend of Christine Keeler
at the time of the
Profumo affair, who survived unscathed, married a Jew and became a
business woman.
His father got a VC so it must be in the blood.
She was with SOE out East helping very
profitable black market operations. Seeing peasants crucified for stealing
grain failed to amuse.
Was a Bletchley man, then the boss of
GCHQ. Did he know what was going on? Believe it. Did
he babble? Presumably not.
Sir Thomas �Tommy� Macpherson, who has died aged 94, was awarded
three Military Crosses, three Croix de Guerre (two Palms and Star), and
several Papal and Italian medals during the Second World War; he
subsequently had a successful career in business. He was also a first
class athlete with a good brain, whence languages & and interesting time. It
was not all fun though.
Abandoned by the
American artillery in Korea, attacked by Allied aircraft, withdrawing was
the option but not fun. An officer would have gotten much better than
an MM. It is one of the worst things about the
British Army.
QUOTE
Pierre Ryckmans was a writer who came under
attack when he exposed the brutal reality of China's
Cultural
Revolution to the West
UNQUOTE
Socialists
hate the truth. When one of their false gods is exposed they move on to
another. Mao came after Joe Stalin. Then it was Pol Pot. Now? God knows.
She was part of Society. Helping the founders of Private Eye was
one thing she did.
He flew in the
Battle of Britain
and Australia against Japs. He did well.
Tanky was with 2 SAS in Italy blowing up
trains, escaping, causing havoc. As a policeman in Soho he took the war to
the enemy, which was one reason why they put him in a lunatic asylum. We
could do with more like him.
Born in Dublin, educated in South Africa,
lived in Germany, fluent in German. Heard little
Adolf speak. Made Dunkirk, Greece, captured in
Libya, escaped often, led partisans in Italy. He did things.
Went to war with sword, bow and bagpipes. He got
maybe the last operational kill with an arrow. He was a first class archer.
Bob was with the Home Guard, the secret part of it. They
were tasked to stay behind after the Wehrmacht had invaded. The job was
sabotage. It was quite a big outfit. At the time ALL records were destroyed to
prevent them being compromised.
Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov
designed the
AK-47, AKM,
and AK-74
rifles. They made millions of them. They worked under military conditions
i.e. mud. This is different to a more recent British offering, the
SA80, which didn't work
under any condition.
"I'm proud of my invention, but I'm sad that it is used by
terrorists... I would prefer to have invented a machine that people
could use and that would help farmers with their work� for example a
lawn mower."
"Blame the Nazi Germans for making me become a gun designer... I
always wanted to construct agriculture machinery."
"I created a weapon to defend the borders of my motherland. It's not
my fault that it's being used where it shouldn't be. The politicians are
more to blame for this."
Was an actor in
The
Professionals. He was also in 10 PARA but
failed the Basic Parachute Course by breaking a leg. He appeared in
The Bullshitters, a spoof.
Havildar Gurung VC, 2nd Gurkha Rifles.
Rai VC, Naik 5th Gurkha Rifles
Captain Ghale VC, 5th Gurkha Rifles
Subedar Major Lama VC MM, 7th Gurkha Rifles
Ray Dolby was the man in hi fi sound. Reducing the
background hiss on audio cassettes was one of his best known achievements.
He had a solid track record in electronics and 50 patents. More and better
details at Ray Dolby ex
Wiki.
A maquisard who made it through Buchenwald, Indo-China &
Algeria.
QUOTE
Ed W. "Too Tall" Freeman (November 20, 1927 � August 20, 2008) was a
United States Army helicopter pilot who received the U.S. military's highest
decoration, the
Medal of Honor, for his actions in the
Battle of Ia Drang during the
Vietnam
War. During the battle, he flew through gunfire numerous times, bringing
supplies to a trapped American battalion and flying dozens of wounded soldiers
to safety. Freeman was a wing-man for Major
Bruce Crandall who also received the Medal of Honor for the same missions.
UNQUOTE
He rated a VC, as well as a Medal of Honour.
Snopes says that
the story is true.
Lady Mosley knew everyone. admired naughty little Adolf,
went to prison for her pains........ it goes on. Not every one is
a
Marxist front man. She had
Moral Courage even if it was misdirected at times.
QUOTE
For more than a decade
Margaret Thatcher enjoyed almost unchallenged political mastery, winning
three successive general elections. The policies she pursued with ferocious
energy and unyielding will resulted in a transformation of Britain's
economic performance.
UNQUOTE
The Telegraph messed this obit up by
breaking it into little pieces. Sad but true. The idea that we have lower
taxes come from the Telegraph. It is tosh.
A critical view which is not merely party political.
We are sad to learn of the death of Major Ian Dawson on 14th February 2013. Ian was
commissioned into the Royal Scots and spent some time with the SAS before
serving in 10 PARA as OC 3 Company and 44 Brigade as FAC. His Funeral will be at
12.00 on Friday 1st March at Lighthorne Church CV35 0AR, near junction 12 on the
M40 for Stratford upon Avon, afterwards at the Antelope Pub nearby in Lighthorne.
QUOTE
Colonel Peter Goss, who has died aged 88, was a highly experienced
Intelligence officer whose career began in the Second World War and ran the
course of postcolonial conflicts, the Cold War and national and
international terrorism.
UNQUOTE
His face fitted. He had lots of fun.
QUOTE
In the early hours of June 6 1944, Pool, a platoon commander serving with
the 7th Battalion the Parachute Regiment, was dropped near Le Port, a small
village close to what is now Pegasus Bridge. His battalion had been ordered
to hold the western approach to the bridge, which crossed the Caen Canal at
B�nouville. Success would aid the bridge's capture by the glider-borne �coup
de main� company of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry .
UNQUOTE
7 PARA did things.
QUOTE
Sadly, World War II Polish pilot, Tony Rogers has passed away. Tony had
an incredible life and flew Lancasters, Spitfires and Wellingtons during the
War. In later life he became a keen supporter of the RAF Benevolent Fund.
Tony
Rogers, who has sadly passed away
Not many have lives like his. Tony was taken prisoner by Soviet forces after
the invasion of Poland and was imprisoned in The GULAG in a hard labour camp. In 1942, he was freed in an agreement with the Allies. Making his way to the
UK, he went on to serve with the RAF. In service, he flew a range of aircraft and in 1944 he flew dangerous and
daring supply missions to resistance forces in Warsaw......... It's a sad loss to the RAF family and to the nation. Tony told his story in
this short video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq60eXYJRa0&feature=player_embedded
UNQUOTE
They were there when it mattered, then we were betrayed by the likes of
Beckett, Blair,
Brown, Bush,
Cameron, Clegg,
Clinton, Harman,
Heath,
Mandelson, Straw et cetera. Not all of them are Jews.
PS The
Daily Mail gives a more picturesque account which does not ignore his
Virtuti Militari.
QUOTE
Vidal Sassoon, who has died aged 84, was at the cutting
edge � literally and metaphorically � of hairdressing; his sharp, geometric,
low-maintenance 1960s hairstyles revolutionised his craft, sounding the death
knell for the stiff, set hairdos of the 1950s. An astute businessman, Sassoon
made a fortune from his salons and products, and became a household name.
UNQUOTE
The Wikipedia write up at
Vidal Sassoon tells us that Sassoon went to
Palestine to rob the locals. Human rights are universal, according to
Jews, until their self interest gets in the way. Sassoon was just another
fast talking, murderous thug.
QUOTE
Jimmy Storie , who has died aged 92, was the last surviving
member of �The Originals�, the handful of men who first joined �L� Detachment,
the unit that under the leadership of David Stirling developed into the
Special Air Service Regiment.
Have pistol, will travel: Storie (right) and a fellow 'Original' in the desert in 1941
The force's mission was to operate many miles behind
enemy lines, attack airfields and convoys, blow up planes, destroy fuel
dumps and derail trains. Based at Kabrit, near the Nile, they lacked
even the most basic supplies and Storie took part in an unofficial raid
on another camp in which tents, stores and rations were appropriated
(together with a piano and easy chairs from an officers� cinema). There were, however, failures of equipment and on one
occasion two men jumped to their deaths during parachute training.
Storie said that he did not sleep much that night. In November 1941, Storie took part in a raid on two
German airfields at Gazala and Tmimi, Libya. The men parachuted into a
sandstorm. As Storie said afterwards, one man who broke his back had to
be left with a bottle of water and a revolver. There was no possibility
of saving him. Barely a third of the original strength returned to base;
the rest were killed or captured. In attacks thereafter, L Detachment
drove to its targets in Jeeps. Storie took part in numerous raids with
David Stirling and Paddy Mayne, officers whose exploits became almost
legendary. In one period of two weeks, 100 enemy aircraft were
destroyed. In one raid, they dodged sentries and crept on to an
airfield, placing bombs with delayed-action fuses on the fighter
aircraft lined up on each side. Then they got into the hangars, which
were full of Junkers, and set more charges. The door of the guardroom
was bashed open and grenades thrown in.
UNQUOTE
He was there when it mattered.
QUOTE
John Williams joined the Parachute Regiment as one of the first "boy" bandsmen
in 1949, aged 15 years. By 1961, after transferring to Regimental duty, he was a
W02 and had spent a considerable amount of his service in the Middle and Near
East. It was for his conduct during the Borneo campaign in 1964/65 that he won
his Distinguished Conduct Medal.
UNQUOTE
John Williams was my first RSM. I knew then that he was going to be the best.
The Army confirmed it by making him a lieutenant colonel. His own, rather good
account of that battle is at
Personal Account of the Battle of Plaman Mapu by John 'Patch'
Williams
QUOTE
George joined the Royal Scots in 1943 while living in his home town of
Edinburgh. He volunteered for the airborne soon after and upon completion of
training was posted to the
9th Parachute Battalion of the 6th Airborne division. He was one of the few
who actually took part in the attack on the
Merville Battery on
D Day as part of Lt Alan (twinkle toes)
Jefferson's assault group. He stayed with the battalion until 1948, taking part
in The battle of the Bulge and The Rhine crossing and operations in Palestine.
On returning to the UK he was posted to the P.C.A.U at Upper Heyford where he
met a young parachute packer, Hilary Sloane, they married on Xmas eve 1949. In
Feb 1950 he left the army and tried civvy life but re-enlisted in 1951, the
recruiter thought he was a new recruit so he was given a new army number by
mistake. Once more he joined the Royal Scots for six weeks, insisting on going
back to the Paras he was sent back to depot, doing the entire P course again
with other returning veterans. He was once more posted to P.C.A.U at Abingdon,
it was here in 1953 he took part in the filming of The Red Beret, doing the
jumping scenes from the balloon and aircraft. After another stint at depot he
was posted to 3 Para, serving in the middle east in Jordan, Egypt and Cyprus. He
missed the last combat drop during the Suez crisis due to the birth of a new
son. He stayed with 3 Para and HQ until 1966. He then served as an M.O.D. police
sergeant until retirement in 1985. He now lives back in his native Scotland with
Hilary and is a member of Fife branch P.R.A. George and Hilary had 8 children, 5
boys and 3 girls, sadly one girl died in infancy. All five sons joined the army,
the eldest with The Duke of Wellingtons Regiment and the others all joining The
Parachute Regiment. The two girls followed mum into the R.A.F.
UNQUOTE
He was involved.
QUOTE
Tex Banwell joined the British Army in 1931, serving with the Coldstream Guards
with whom he saw action against the Pathans and Kashmiris in the mountains on
the North-West Frontier. His career during the Second World War progressed to
most every style of special forces unit in existence, beginning in 1942 when he
joined the Long Range Desert Group, a unit which was not intended to commit
sabotage like the SAS that it evolved into, but to spy on enemy troop formations
extremely deep into enemy territory. Dressed like Arabs, the Group operated from
the most inhospitable desert regions, where even the natives did not go. In 1942
Banwell was captured at Tobruk, but soon escaped in a German half-track.
Sometime later he joined the Commandos and was again captured in an operation on
Crete, but once again he succeeded in escaping, this time with a fishing boat
which he sailed to North Africa. He joined the 10th Battalion when the 4th Para
Brigade began the process of assembling in the Middle East, and was posted to
No.4 Platoon of A Company..........
UNQUOTE
Tex got about, he really did.
PS He rates a
Wikipedia obit,
Grauniad obit,
New York Times obit,
Herald obit plus a mention in
Holland at war against Hitler: Anglo-Dutch relations, 1940-1945 by
Michael Foot, pp. 117-118
QUOTE
As co-inventor of Unix
and the programming language C, he had a key role in shaping today's
computing environment
The American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, who has died aged 70
after a long illness, was one of the co-inventors of the Unix
operating system and the C
programming language. Unix and C provided the infrastructure
software and tools that created much of today's
computing environment � from the
internet to smartphones � and so have played a central part in
shaping the modern world.
UNQUOTE
An important man who made a difference but he is
getting far less notice than Steve Jobs who has just flaked out.
Was a good economist, a decent man and an Austrian. He believed that it was people that
mattered. He was not a fan of Capitalist Swine.
QUOTE
Leigh Fermor was the architect of one of the
most daring feats of the Second World War, the kidnapping of the commander of
the German garrison on Crete, and also the author of some of the finest works
in the canon of English travel writing........
UNQUOTE
Brains and brawn make a splendid combination. Knowing all of the
right people helps too.
QUOTE
Martin Birnstingl, who died on January 21 aged 86, was a
leading vascular surgeon and a passionate campaigner for human rights who
employed his medical expertise on many occasions to challenge the official
line.
UNQUOTE
Some Jews tell
some of the truth some of the time.
QUOTE
Traverso was a young lieutenant in the Savoy Cavalry which, in
June 1942, was shielding the southern flank of the German summer offensive.
The fighting intensified as, approaching the River Don approximately 125 miles
north of Stalingrad, the 600 men of the Savoy Cavalry arrived at Isbuschenskij.
There, on the evening of August 23, an Italian patrol encountered a Soviet
rearguard of 2,000 men supported by mortars and machine-guns. The regiment's monocled commanding officer, Count Alessandro
Bettoni, winner of two Olympic golds in equestrianism, ordered his men to take
defensive positions before settling down to dine off the regimental silver.
The following morning, after breakfast, Bettoni gave the order
to attack across a plain thick with sunflowers. Officers, wearing red neck
ties, slipped on white gloves for the occasion. They wielded captured Cossack
swords, which were heavier, and thus more destructive, than Italian sabres. Such was the thirst to take part in what was � even then �
recognised as an unusual event, that Traverso's commander rode off to join the
four cavalry squadrons, each of 150 men, which formed the main thrust of the
attack.........
UNQUOTE
The Poles did their charge against Wehrmacht tanks but that
would have been 1939. This came later - and worked.
The Regiment was formed in 1692 so it had plenty of practice.
QUOTE
Commander
of the Selous Scouts who waged a ruthless war against insurgents in RhodesiaLieutenant-Colonel Ron Reid-Daly, who has died aged 81, was the colourful
and outspoken founder and commander of the Selous Scouts regiment, whose
unorthodox tactics during Rhodesia's bush war against nationalist insurgents
were as effective as they were controversial.
UNQUOTE
A very good man in his
way but brutal.
QUOTE
Herivel was one of a number of bright young
mathematicians recruited from Cambridge by Gordon Welchman when he set up Hut
6 to break German army and air force Enigma ciphers in January 1940, and he
arrived at Bletchley on January 29 1940. Aged only 21, he had been one of
Welchman's students at Sidney Sussex College.
UNQUOTE
Brains are the reason why we are not still swinging round in trees - in some
cases.
QUOTE
A libertarian, he entered into Margaret Thatcher's
circle and to an extent the public consciousness in 1984 when helping
rebel miners to thwart the year-long strike called by Arthur Scargill
and the NUM. A larger-than-life figure, he attracted enemies as easily
as he did friends. The occasionally preposterous sense of mystery he
cultivated about himself belied a man who was erudite, sensitive,
generous and had a devoted circle of friends...........
UNQUOTE
A libertarian who rode to hounds and shot so he
can't have been all bad. In fact he was better notwithstanding being a Jew. He really
lived. There is no mention of his pornographic film starring Maggie and Scargill.
For that you need to read Private Eye.
QUOTE
Gerry Rafferty, the singer and songwriter
who died on January 4 aged 63, had a smash hit in 1978 with Baker Street, a
world-weary classic based on his experiences busking in the London Underground
as a struggling young musician......
UNQUOTE
Pop music is a dangerous business. Count the number of performers
who have come unstuck and know. John Lennon [ gun shot wounds ] was just one.
QUOTE
Havildar Lachhiman Gurung, who died on December 12 aged 92,
won the Victoria Cross while serving with the Gurkha Rifles in Burma in 1945;
in recent years he had been a prominent figure in the campaign led by the
actress Joanna Lumley to allow former Gurkhas to settle in Britain..........
UNQUOTE
His VC was hard earned.
QUOTE
Lionel Ernest Queripel
VC
(Winterborne
Monkton [ very near Maiden Castle ], Dorset
July 13, 1920 -
Arnhem, the
Netherlands September 19, 1944) was an
English
recipient of the
Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the
face of the enemy that can be awarded to
British and
Commonwealth forces.
UNQUOTE
Arnhem was the graveyard of too many Englishmen.
Got there on D Day piloting a glider. He did well in taking Pegasus Bridge.
QUOTE
Millin began his apparently suicidal
serenade immediately upon jumping from the ramp of the landing craft into the
icy water. As the Cameron tartan of his kilt floated to the surface he struck
up with Hieland Laddie. He continued even as the man behind him was hit,
dropped into the sea and sank.
UNQUOTE
He was a fine upstanding figure of a man.
Bill on D Day. Those are the pipes, not a Bren Gun
QUOTE
On the night of May 15/16 1940, Lyster's
Hampden bomber of 83 Squadron was one of 99 aircraft that took off to strike
industrial targets in the Ruhr following the German advance into the Low
Countries � the first attack of the conflict on the factories feeding the
German war machine. Within a few days, the Hampdens were called
on to assist the beleaguered British Expeditionary Force in France and Lyster
bombed elements of the German advance including the railway system used to
bring up reinforcements. Following the Dunkirk evacuation, the bomber force
commenced a campaign against German industry, ports and oil installations.
UNQUOTE
A
toughie with important work to his credit.
QUOTE
Claude Denis Boucherville de Baissac, known as Claude de Baissac
or by his codename David (born 28 February 1907,
Curepipe,
Mauritius
- died 22 December 1974) was a
Mauritius-born
agent in the
Special Operations Executive (SOE). He organised the important
French Resistance network SCIENTIST, in south-west France from August 1942
to March 1943 and in
Britanny from February 1944 onwards. His elder sister
Lise was also an SOE agent.
UNQUOTE
Interesting times.
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SOEbaissacC.htm
is a rehash with a bit more detail.
QUOTE
Lieutenant-General Peter Walls, who has
died aged 83, was the last commander of Ian Smith's Rhodesian armed forces;
his otherwise distinguished military career ended in humiliation when he
became involved in the political turmoil that surrounded Robert Mugabe's
accession to power in Zimbabwe in 1980.
UNQUOTE
Should you take the
Daily Quislinggraph at face value? I am dubious. It gave us down right malicious
commentary on Sir Ian Smith. As to buying it: Never again.
QUOTE
Michael Foot, who died on Wednesday, aged 96, was a wonderful
man. A major politician and an accomplished writer, he stood firmly in the
great British tradition of literary radicals. There was something defiantly unmodern and unspun about him, but this was the point of Mr Foot: he was a
leader who saw politics as a battle of ideas. The idea of spin was utterly
alien to him. From his early days in journalism and the New Statesman, to
Tribune magazine, which he edited after the war, to his last days, he
maintained his intellectual integrity. This was what guided the radical Labour
manifesto of 1983. It was, electorally, spectacularly unsuccessful. But it
was, nonetheless, a work of immense honesty.
UNQUOTE
A generous tribute from The Spectator who did not agree with Mr
Foot's politics but knew decency when they saw it.
Paul Foot, his nephew was
a Private Eye man and also honest.
QUOTE
The highest scoring RAF fighter pilot to
survive the war, Johnnie Johnson shot down 38 enemy aircraft in the skies over
Western Europe between June 1941 and September 1944. This tally is remarkable on
two counts. Johnson began his operational career after the end of the Battle of
Britain, which provided such a rich harvest of combat victories for many of his
peers as the Luftwaffe's air fleets attacked virtually day after day. Kills were
much harder to obtain on the fighter sweeps over enemy territory which succeeded
the battle, operations for which the Spitfire was much less suited than it had
been to the role of air defence in the summer of 1940. In addition, all
Johnson's victories, with the exception of a quarter share in a Messerschmitt
110, were against single-seat fighters - easily the most formidable opponents.
UNQUOTE
A first class man. He did well after going out.
QUOTE
COLONEL PAT PORTEOUS, who has died aged
82, won the Victoria Cross on August 19 1942 when serving with No 4 Commando in
the Dieppe raid.......... No 4 Commando, in which Porteous was serving, was the
only unit to capture its objective. The Canadians, in the centre of the assault,
had never been in action before, and to their dismay found that their tanks were
unable to negotiate the stony beach; they were cut to pieces by fire from
carefully sited strongpoints that had been tunnelled out of the cliff..... No 4
Commando, commanded by the intrepid Lord Lovat, numbered 252 soldiers. It landed
three and a half miles west of the main attack and advanced in two
sections.........
UNQUOTE
D Day and Dieppe made for a lively war.
QUOTE
The Dieppe Raid in 1942, in which
Lieutenant-Colonel "Cec" Merritt won the Victoria Cross for gallantry and
inspiring leadership, was subsequently judged a military disaster and needless
waste of lives, especially Canadian lives. Even so, it was a terrific fight and
those who survived looked back on August 19 as a day of awesome courage and
sacrifice........
UNQUOTE
First class men were wasted.
QUOTE
As deputy head until 1980 of the Israeli external
security service, the Mossad, Kimche was deeply involved in Operation Wrath of
God � the plot to assassinate the terrorists who had killed 11 members of the
Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Kimche ensured that, rather than
eliminating the terrorists with a straightforward sniper's bullet, Mossad used
more sophisticated methods (booby-trapped mattresses or telephones) that both
burnished the agency's own reputation and struck fear into potential future
targets.
UNQUOTE
Cunning, clever, devious, dangerous. In other words a
Jew.
QUOTE
Brest was an
important naval base, and information about shipping movements was vital to the
Allied war effort. By establishing contacts in the dockyard, Andr�e was able to
pass on information about naval installations, as well as about troop movements
and the results of Allied aerial attacks. These were mainly directed at the
harbour area, but many bombs missed their target and fell on the town. No one
blamed the Allies. She recalled one man whose house had been destroyed leaping
with joy when he found that his precious radio, on which he listened to the BBC,
had survived intact. On another occasion she came across a group of teenage boys
singing "What joy, Tommy, now that we are united at last" to a well known tune,
as British bombs rained all around.
UNQUOTE
Bravery is what it took
and what she had.
QUOTE
Profumo's story is of a man
who made one terrible mistake but sought his own redemption in a way which has
no precedent in public life either before or since. No one in public life ever
did more to atone for his sins; no one behaved with more silent dignity as his
name was repeatedly dragged through the mud; and few ended their lives as loved
and revered by those who knew him.
UNQUOTE
How many politicians today would apologise, far less
be sincere about it? Not a lot. Most are robbing us and flaunting their ill
gotten pay offs.
QUOTE
In May 1942, Cowtan was serving with 232 Field Company RE (232 FR) in North
Africa. On May 31, he was taken prisoner near Gazala during a major Afrika Corps
offensive. He was sent to a prison camp near Bologna and, after the Italian
Armistice in September 1943, avoided being transferred to Germany by hiding in
the roof of one of the camp buildings for 12 days.
UNQUOTE
It was lively but not fun.
QUOTE
Pun was 21 years old, and a
Rifleman in
the 3rd Battalion,
6th Gurkha Rifles, in the
Indian Army during World War II when the following deed took place for which
he was awarded the .
UNQUOTE
A brave man. He was used by
Joanna Lumley, a fool
or rogue to whip up support for allowing Gurkhas to settle in England after a
mere four years service. Some did and were badly cheated.
QUOTE
In January 1964, barely a month after
Kenyan independence, there was a threat of mutiny in the army barracks
outside the town of Nakuru. Unwin, then a major and the CO of the
Military Training School, took his most trusted soldiers to the armoury,
where he instructed them to take arms and act against any fellow
soldiers who might mutiny.
UNQUOTE
He liked Africa and stayed on
afterwards. He knew Idi Amin.
QUOTE
Adventure stories rarely come more epic than that of Knut Haugland, the
Norwegian resistance fighter who died on Christmas Day at the age of 92. His
exploits were already the stuff of legend even before he joined Thor Heyerdahl's
crew aboard his balsa wood raft, Kon-Tiki. Together they not only conquered the
vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean using only the most primitive of technologies
� but in doing so, they helped rejuvenate the crushed spirit of human endeavour
in the bleak aftermath of the Second World War. A heavily decorated commando who
escaped three times from the clutches of the Nazis, his bravery and endurance
gave rise to one of the most enduring legends of the Second World War � one
retold in spectacular style in a Hollywood movie.
UNQUOTE
Some men are
just so much better.
QUOTE
Sir Edward Fennessy, who has died aged 97, was a
radar pioneer whose outstanding work during the Second World War was followed by
a successful business career as managing director of Decca Radar, and later as
deputy chairman of the Post Office.
UNQUOTE
Perhaps it is unkind to say that the radar of those days was not very good but
it was the first of its kind and has gotten much better since. Navigation in
those days was underwhelming but that was not quite his thing.
QUOTE
In 1953 Feild, an officer in the Duke of Cornwall's
Light Infantry (DCLI), was seconded to the Kenya Police Special Branch and
posted to HQ east Africa Command. He and Frank Kitson (later General Sir Frank
Kitson) were involved in setting up an intelligence network for operations
against Mau Mau. Spending long hours on patrol by day and night, Feild and his
comrades built up a first-rate organisation. They recruited �pseudo-gangs� of
reformed terrorists who were essential �camouflage�, but there was always the
danger that they would turn on their new masters.
UNQUOTE
They used
pseudo gangs later in Rhodesia and very effective they were. Top Secret by Ron
Reid Daley is the book on that one and the Selous Scouts.
QUOTE
Mark
Gregor Strang Donaldson
VC (born 2 April 1979) is the first recipient of the
Victoria Cross for Australia, awarded for gallantry, the highest award in
the
Australian honours system. He is the first
Australian recipient of a
Victoria Cross since
Keith
Payne in 1969.
Trooper Donaldson was a member of the
Australian Special Air Service regiment when he exposed himself to enemy
fire to protect injured troops and then rescued an interpreter under heavy enemy
fire in
Oruzgan province during
Operation Slipper, the Australian contribution to the
War in Afghanistan. He was awarded the medal by
Governor-General of Australia,
Quentin Bryce, in a ceremony in
Canberra on
16 January 2009.
UNQUOTE
Happily this one is not an obit. He lived to tell
the tale. He also showed that colonials give medals to men while the British
Army saves most of them for officers.
Of 10 PARA. RIP
QUOTE
In the first incident, on 27 July, Corporal Budd's section was
on a patrol when they identified and engaged two enemy gunmen on the roof of a
building in the centre of Sangin. Without regard for his own safety, Corporal
Budd led an assault where the enemy fire was heaviest. His gallant action
allowed a wounded soldier to be evacuated to safety where he subsequently
received life-saving treatment.
On 20 August 2006, A Company, 3 PARA was located in the
southern Afghanistan town of Sangin. Cpl Budd and his platoon were ordered to
hold a small, isolated coalition outpost - dubbed a platoon house - to protect
engineers blowing holes in a compound 500 metres away. The site was subject to
almost daily Taliban onslaught for months.
UNQUOTE
The Telegraph didn't bother to write him up but then
he was not an officer.
QUOTE
Margaret Duchess of Argyll, who has died aged 80, was one of the most photographed and publicised beauties of the 20th century and a
seemingly indomitable social figure.
But between 1959 and 1963 she was involved in a sensational and
sordid divorce case, when her second husband, the 11th Duke of Argyll,
Chief of the Clan Campbell and Hereditary Master of the Royal Household
in Scotland, sued her for divorce on grounds of adultery.
UNQUOTE
Sensational, lurid, disgraceful but it was
not in my newspaper. At all events I knew nothing at the time. On the other hand
the Profumo case was all over the headlines and nearly broke Harold MacMillan's
government. Now it seems that Marge was a total ratbag and far worthier case for
publicity.
PS She looks rather savage in the mug shot.
QUOTE
Havildar [ Sergeant ] Bhanubhakta Gurung, who has died aged 86,
was awarded a VC when serving as a rifleman in the 3rd Battalion of the
2nd Gurkha Rifles in Burma on March 5 1945........
UNQUOTE
Their loyalty is something utterly alien to politicians in England.
QUOTE
Ganju Lama, who has died aged 75, was
awarded a Victoria Cross in Burma for his action on June 12 1944 when B
Company, 7th Gurkha Rifles, were checking a Japanese attack, supported by
tanks, in the Imphal and Kohima area...........
UNQUOTE
He was from Bhutan rather than Nepal but a brave man among the brave none the
less.
QUOTE
On May 24 a large force of
Japanese were attempting to make an advance into the Chin Hills, where the
2nd/5th Gurkhas were part of the defence force. The Japanese occupied a vital
tactical point, the key to the position, on Basha East Hill, the approach to
which was a long bare knife-edge ridge which in some places was as little as
15ft wide............ On May 25, Gaje Ghale was given the task of taking the
position........ A Japanese grenade wounded Gaje Ghale in the chest, arm and
leg. Though covered with blood, he ignored his injuries and continued to throw
grenades with his other arm. After prolonged hand-to-hand fighting the position
was captured. The Gurkhas succeeded in holding it in the face of heavy fire from
the Japanese trying to retake it..... Gaje Ghale later received the VC from
Field Marshal Lord Wavell in Delhi at a parade beneath the walls of the Red Fort
in the presence of a crowd of 5,000. He was later decorated with the Star of
Nepal in Kathmandu by the Prime Minister of Nepal.
UNQUOTE
Do we
deserve the loyalty of such men while Parliament is full of swine?
QUOTE
George was a supreme technocrat, and was only the second person ever (after
Lord O'Brien of Lothbury) to have come to the governorship through the ranks
of the Bank of England itself, rather than from elsewhere in the City. His
style was in marked contrast to that of the patrician Robin Leigh-Pemberton
(Lord Kingsdown) who preceded him: if Leigh-Pemberton looked every inch the
lord-lieutenant he was, George � hunched, stocky, chain-smoking � simply
looked like a hard-working bank manager.......... George nevertheless
commanded worldwide respect as "Steady Eddie" (and sometimes "Hard Eddie"),
the banker's banker, a man who knew every nut and bolt of the financial
system and was never deflected from his essential role in combating
inflation in the British economy.
UNQUOTE
He sounded sensible and
nice on the wireless. He worked through some rather nasty times.
QUOTE
Irving John "I.J." Good (9 December
1916 - 5 April 2009) was a
British
statistician who worked as a
cryptographer at
Bletchley Park. He was born as
Isidore Jacob Gudak to a Jewish family
in London. In his publications he was called I. J. Good. He studied
mathematics at
Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1938. He did research work under
G. H.
Hardy and
Besicovitch, before moving to Bletchley Park in 1941 on completing his
doctorate.
UNQUOTE
When a
Jew is good he can be very good. When he is bad he can be very good at being
bad.
PS He is mentioned at
Alan Turing
Scrapbook - the Origins of Artificial Intelligence
QUOTE
On the night of September 24 1942, Lise de Baissac (as she then was) and
Andre Borrel - code-named Odile and Denise - were dropped over the Loire
valley. De Baissac's mission was to form a new circuit, called "Artist",
based at Poitiers, where she could provide a secure centre for agents in
need of help and information...... With typical sang froid,
she chose to live next to the Gestapo headquarters. It was in a busy
street, she explained afterwards, and on the way to the station;
visitors, even at night, were unlikely to attract attention.
UNQUOTE
She was never
caught which means luck and skill. Being bilingual always meant being in line
for Secret Squirrel.
QUOTE
Squadron
Leader Jock Cassels, who has died aged 86, completed 119 operations as a bomber
pilot over Occupied Europe, including 27 against Berlin � on his 13th visit to
the "Big City", his Mosquito was so badly damaged that he was forced to head for
Sweden, where he crash-landed.
UNQUOTE
A tour was 30 operations and
a lot of men didn't make it. Almost 4 tours is humungous.
QUOTE
Wing Commander Jack Hoskins, who has died aged 92, played a pivotal role
seeking out and destroying Axis convoys to North Africa which were loaded with
essential supplies for Rommel's forces engaged against the British Eighth Army �
air attacks which proved crucial in the Allied victory in the African campaign.
In later years he was a member of the nuclear planning staff at NATO............
UNQUOTE
A lively war
but a lucky one. He lived to tell the tale.
Commander in Northern Ireland who led his men with dignity and authority
during Bloody Sunday
QUOTE
Chief Petty Officer Bill Stone, who died on January 10 aged 108, was the last
man to have served in the Royal Navy during both world wars.......... Shortly afterwards Stone witnessed the scuttling of the German High Seas
Fleet at Scapa Flow. The 10th of a farm labourer's 14 children,..... two years later, he walked to Kingsbridge to join
the navy. But his father, who had four brothers and three sons at sea, refused
to sign his papers. While other farm labourers joined the Army, never to return,
young Bill drove a water cart and, later, a steam roller before getting his
chance when he was called up two weeks before his 18th birthday.
UNQUOTE
He was a jovial soul and remembered the happy things.
An officer would have been in for a DSO if not a VC. That is the British
Army for you.
QUOTE
Air Commodore Pete Brothers, who has died aged 91,
flew throughout the Battle of Britain and was one of the RAF's most
distinguished fighter pilots, credited with destroying at least 16 enemy
aircraft......... As the Battle of Britain opened in July 1940, the squadron was
operating Hurricanes from Biggin Hill and was soon involved in furious fighting.
Flying three, sometimes four, times a day, Brothers shot down seven fighters and
a bomber over Kent before the end of August. On one occasion he returned home
after a particularly difficult day to learn from his wife that a bomb splinter
had come through an open window and shattered the mirror as she was applying her
make-up. Years later he observed: "It was then that I decided the war had become
personal."
UNQUOTE
A rather good man I think.
QUOTE
Eric
Wilson won the first Victoria Cross to be awarded in the campaigns in Africa
during the Second World War. His story is one of persistent yet seemingly
nonchalant gallantry as, by his lights, he was simply doing what he was trained
to do. He stuck to his precious guns to the bitter end and so certain was the
brigade staff that he had been killed in the enemy's final attack he was awarded
a posthumous VC. But he survived to fight in two more campaigns......
UNQUOTE
Determination helps
when things get nasty. The climate was no help to anyone. He must have liked the
heat.
QUOTE
Mark Felt, the former FBI deputy director who died on December 18 aged 95, was
Deep Throat, the source for newspaper stories linking President Richard Nixon to
a burglary in 1972 at the Democratic Party's offices in Washington DC's
Watergate complex.
UNQUOTE
The outrage and hate from the media
contrasts with their total commitment to covering up for Obama, the illegal president.
QUOTE
Major Robert Furman, who has died
aged 93, oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and played a vital part in the
American struggle for nuclear supremacy when, in 1943, he was ordered to
discover how far the Germans had advanced in developing the atomic bomb. He
began by interviewing scientists on campuses across the United States and was
appointed the personal handler of Niels Bohr, the Nobel prize winner who had
worked on the understanding of atomic structure and had recently escaped from
occupied Denmark. Furman was particularly impressed by the ability of Bohr and
his associates to play chess without using a board.
UNQUOTE
A
useful man.
QUOTE
Jimmy
James, who has died aged 88, won the Military Cross in 1943 during the battle
for the island of Leros and subsequently became deputy under-secretary of state
at the Home Office. In November 1943, following a German attack on
the Aegean island of Leros,..... On November 15
James, the intelligence officer, was part of the reconnaissance group which was
following up a company attack on Rachi Ridge, near Leros town, when they were
held up by snipers firing from houses lining the road. James ran forward under fire and found a
secure position from which the group could observe the attack. Then, with a
private from the Intelligence Section, he cleared the houses and disposed of the
snipers. For his gallantry, he was awarded an MC [ and the private? - Editor ].
UNQUOTE
Officers get medals and men get nothing; snobbery in action.
Commando officer who was badly wounded while leading a daring assault on a
German stronghold.
Robert Mark used him to lean on bent coppers in the Met.
Mark was the last chief in London to give serious reason to believe that he was
not corrupt himself.
QUOTE
Boris
Fyodorov, who died on Thursday aged 50 following a stroke, founded one of
Russia's leading investment banks and served, briefly, during the Yeltsin era as
finance minister and deputy prime minister. Fyodorov came to symbolise
Western-style economic reform, but was unusual in speaking out against
corruption and demanding the introduction of Western-style corporate governance.
At a time when the commanding heights of the Russian economy were being sold at
a knock-down price to Yeltsin cronies, his reforming zeal made him powerful
enemies and proved his undoing.
UNQUOTE
An honest politician in Yeltsin's
time was a rare beast. He would have been the only one.
QUOTE
Leading Seaman Gordon Cleaver, who has died
aged 75, was the hero of the Pearl River Incident in 1953 when, with half his
shipmates killed, he took command of his patrol boat to bring her into British
waters off Hong Kong. On Sept 9, 1953, Cleaver, who had just been
made up to a leading hand in Harbour Defence Motor Launch 1323, was watching
traffic at the mouth of the river on the Hong Kong boundary with China. Her
captain, the South-African born Lieutenant GCX Merriman, had just inspected a
junk when he saw a warship, flying the Communist Chinese flag, coming downriver............
UNQUOTE
An officer would have been considered for a VC. The
seaman got a paltry medal and the Royal Navy is a bunch of snobs.
QUOTE
Professor Sir Brian Pippard, who died on September 21 aged
88, was Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge..... As a physicist Pippard made numerous contributions to
research in low temperature physics and semiconductors. These included his proof
of the existence of the Fermi surface in metals � an abstract boundary derived
in part from the nature of the crystalline lattice, which is useful for
predicting the thermal, electrical, magnetic and optical properties of metals,
semi-metals, and semiconductors.......... his father became Professor of Engineering........ One of his projects included the design of an aerial for
equipment to follow the trajectory of mortar shells, equipment which was first
used by troops in the 6th Airborne Division in the Rhine Crossing, though
subsequent rapid troop movements prevented its full deployment.
UNQUOTE
If you really understand what he did you are probably in the business too. His
father was a capable man. Brains are in the blood.
QUOTE
John Burrows, who died on August 28 aged 96,
was a Japanese military expert at Bletchley Park, the wartime code-breaking
organisation, and went on to become Chief Inspector of Schools during the 1970s. Before being sent to Bletchley, Burrows had
been a sergeant on the intelligence staff at Singapore and was witness to the
shambles of the British defence of Malaya during the Japanese invasion, which
coincided with the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941.......
UNQUOTE
They keep fairly quiet about Singapore. It was a major blow to our prestige and
gave Japs ideas above their station which are causing problems to this day.
QUOTE
Colonel Don Blakeslee , who has died aged 89, served in the Royal Canadian
Air Force and the RAF before transferring to the USAAF, where he was considered
one of the finest combat fighter leaders of the Second World War......... A forceful,
no-nonsense man, Blakeslee left his pilots in no doubt of what he expected of
them when he addressed them for the first time: �We are here to fight,� he
began. �To those who don�t believe me, I would suggest transferring to another
Group. I�m going to fly the arse off each one of you. Those who keep up with me,
good; those who don�t, I don�t want them.�
UNQUOTE
Effective in the air and private on the ground. A good man.
Test pilot for de Havilland and Rolls-Royce who notched up time in 84
different aircraft and had two narrow escapes. He had lots of fun though.
Huntsman with the Belvoir for 27 years who was the leading exponent of
hunting pure-bred Old English hounds.
Refugee who became a pioneer of the modern hedge fund and a prominent
philanthropist. He was a Jew who made a lot of money and spent a lot on
charities. He was born Jack Nachtgeist in Germany. Such often like to hide their
origins.
Bomb disposal officer whose technical expertise saved many lives in Iraq and
won him the George Medal.
Mathematician who made a significant contribution to the study of probabilty
[ sic ]
and fractals.
RAF doctor who improved the ejection seat and became an international expert
on aircraft escape systems.
Was a novelist and film maker with a good background. His books were
prone to have reading lists at the back. One such was
State Of Fear which gives first class sources
regarding the Global Warming boondoggle.
Canadian Spitfire pilot who destroyed or damaged 22 locomotives, 153
vehicles, at least four aircraft and Rommel's car. He did 224 sorties including
3 on D Day.
MI5 agent who for two decades worked at the heart
of the British Communist Party. They paid her pension until she died.
Electronics engineer who worked on early digital computers and
made mobile phones connect on the move. He an MIT man and worked at Bell
Laboratories. 70 patents mean rather special.
Writer and broadcaster whose interviews with ordinary people created a chronicle
of American life. Also a Jew with brains.
QUOTE
Colonel Charles Greenwood, in May 1944 Greenwood, then a captain, was serving with 22
Field Regiment Royal Artillery (22 FR). On the night of May 11, he was forward
observation officer with the leading company of 1/6 Battalion East Surrey
Regiment in their attack on an important tactical feature at Monte Cassino. He was able to get his party on to the objective but they
then found themselves in a highly precarious situation. For the next 36 hours,
while under constant sniping, shelling and attack from mortars, Greenwood, by
quick calls for fire, saved the infantry in what was an almost untenable
position. When their last officer was wounded he took charge and continued to
consolidate the defences. He was awarded an immediate MC in the field...........
His uncle serving with the King's
Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, had won a VC in France the previous year.
UNQUOTE
Having a VC in the family implies that it is the blood.
QUOTE
On March 24 1945, 6 Airborne Division landed east of the Rhine; Norbury, then a
major, was serving as DAQMG. Both the other A/Q staff officers were killed and
he had the task of setting up Rear Divisional HQ while under heavy fire from
artillery, mortars and small arms as well as organising the supply of the
fighting units......... In 1942 his unit became the 9th Battalion the Parachute
Regiment [ 9 PARA is no more - Editor ] and the following year he was
posted to HQ 6th Airborne Division, first as Staff Captain Q and then as DAQMG.
He then took part in operations in Normandy (he was mentioned in dispatches),
the Battle of the Ardennes, the Rhine Crossing and the advance to the Baltic.
UNQUOTE
Derek didn't say that the Rhine Crossing that lively and he was there.
QUOTE
Group Captain Jim Mitchell, who died
on July 30 aged 92, earned a DFC and Bar as a bomber pilot
during the Second World War, then faced a different kind of
danger when he flew on a rescue mission to the High Arctic
in 1950............
UNQUOTE
He was not just anyone. There are old pilots and bold pilots but not many
who are both; they are competent as well as lucky.
RAF navigator who hunted the Tirpitz while serving with
the Dam Busters...........
There are not many of them left. There weren't that many who
got back either.
QUOTE
Yuri Nosenko, who died on August 23 aged 80, was a
KGB intelligence officer who defected to the West at the height of the
Cold War; after initial doubts about his authenticity, the CIA came to
consider him one of its most valuable, if troublesome, defectors........... Nosenko offered to provide the Americans with
information, saying that he hoped to defect some time in the future, and
that he wished to acquire medication for his asthmatic daughter, Oksana;
but his principal objective was to replace funds which he had
misappropriated from the local rezidentura which he had then
blown in a local nightclub.
UNQUOTE
Drinking and fornicating can lead to problems. Was the whole Secret Squirrel
thing a waste of time and money? The product I saw was fairly pathetic.
QUOTE
MOSCOW - Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books
chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labour camps, has
died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89...........
Through unflinching accounts of the
years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novels and
non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system
that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned
him years of bitter exile, but international renown.......... His non-fiction "Gulag Archipelago"
trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the
Soviet state under Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the
Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe. But his account of that secret system
of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person
- Solzhenitsyn himself - survived, physically and spiritually, in a
penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice........
Yeltsin's successor Putin at first
had a rocky relationship with Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the Russian
president in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on Russia's
oligarchs. Putin was also a veteran of the Soviet-era KGB, the agency
that, more than any other, represented the Soviet legacy of repression.
But the two men, so different,
gradually developed a rapport. By steps, Putin adopted Solzhenitsyn's
criticisms of the West, perhaps out of a recognition that Russia really
is a different civilization, perhaps because the author offered
justification for the Kremlin's determination to muzzle critics, to
reassert control over Russia's natural resources and to concentrate
political power.
UNQUOTE
He proved the power of the truth over evil. He also serves with the guns, unlike
draft dodging war criminals such as Blair, Brown and Bush. The writer brushes
lightly over Two Hundred Years Together [ with Jews that is. They
constituted six of the seven oligarchs who robbed Russia of 85% of its assets.
] The truth is everywhere in chains ]
Robert Heinlein was also a writer, just like Solzhenitsyn. They
would have agreed about liberty if nothing else. Their heritage lives on.
QUOTE
Landes, who was French by birth, was dropped south-west of Orl�ans in October 1942 with instructions to make contact with Claude de Baissac, head of SOE's Bordeaux-based "Scientist" circuit. When de
Baissac was flown to Britain in July 1943, Landes took control of the network just as a Gestapo crackdown led to
arrests, including that of the wife of a local resistance
leader, Mme Grandclement. Fearing for his wife's life, and suspicious of communist influence within the Maquis, the
Right-wing Andr� Grandclement agreed to help the Germans, forcing Landes to escape through Spain.
UNQUOTE
Being on your own must have been rather trying.
QUOTE
Vice-Admiral Sir Tony Troup,.....
became the youngest-ever submarine captain when he took command, at 21 years
10 months, of the training submarine H32 in June 1943. Just a few months later he was given command of
Strongbow, based at Trincomalee, Ceylon. Operations had been largely
restricted to patrols, air-sea rescue and the landing and recovery of
agents; but Troup sank the 800-ton coaster Toso Maru off Phuket with
a single torpedo on his first eastern patrol. He then sank or drove ashore
nine junks, a tug and two lighters with gunfire and by boarding and placing
demolition charges.
UNQUOTE
He did have an interesting time of it.
QUOTE
During the Second World War Ruth's husband, David Greenglass, had worked as
a machinist on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos,
New Mexico. He was said by prosecutors at the trial to have been persuaded by his
sister, Ethel Rosenberg, and her husband Julius, to give them top-secret
data relating to atomic weapons, which Julius then transmitted to Moscow.
Both couples were avowed Communists.............
UNQUOTE
Most of the traitors were Jews. They
have a penchant for treachery but the Daily Telegraph does
not say so. It was owned by a Zionist thief.
QUOTE
Jesse Helms, the Republican senator for North
Carolina who died on Friday aged 86, was one of America's most
outspoken custodians of traditional conservative values; his robust
attitudes on race, Aids, Communism and federal funding of art he
considered obscene made him a household name. When he was first elected as a southern senator
in 1972 Helms's eccentricities were tolerated, even found amusing.
For his first 20 years he railed against the "muck of decadence,
civil rights campaigners, hippies, taxes, "striped-pants
bureaucrats" in the State Department and the like, but had few real
achievements to his credit..........
UNQUOTE
A
rather sad obit. He was not that effective; a pity.
QUOTE
He flew more than 70 bombing operations during the Second World War
and had the very unusual distinction for a wireless operator of earning two
DFCs. He had already completed two bomber tours
when he arrived on No 617 Squadron in July 1943 as one of the replacements
for the men lost on the Dam Busters raid. He joined the crew of the
Australian Mickey Martin (later Air Marshal Sir Mick Martin), who was
described by his CO, Leonard Cheshire, VC, as "the greatest bomber pilot of
the war". Curtis flew on the squadron's first
bombing operation after the Dams raid, a low-level attack by eight
Lancasters on the Dortmund-Ems Canal. The new CO was shot down and several
aircraft were badly damaged. Low cloud thwarted those who got through, and
Martin and his crew made 13 attempted attacks before releasing their bomb;
the canal, however, remained intact.
UNQUOTE
He did have a lively war.
QUOTE
David Caminer, who died on June 19 aged
92, was an early designer of computer software and one of the brains behind
the world's first office computer. In the late 1940s Caminer was working in
the systems research office of the J Lyons bakery and catering firm when the
board commissioned its engineers to design and build the world's first
working computer for business use. Completed in 1951 and named LEO (for
Lyons Electronic Office), it was this machine that Caminer used to introduce
software systems and concepts that transformed the way companies worldwide
manage data...........
UNQUOTE
Lyons were an enterprising outfit.
QUOTE
Lieutenant-General William Odom, who has died aged
75, was one of the pre-eminent Sovietologists and Russian speakers
in the American armed forces during the Cold War.......... Odom was the staunchest supporter of Brzezinski in
urging Carter to be more robust in his dealings with the Eastern
Bloc. He duly became known in some quarters as "Brzezinski's
Brzezinski".
UNQUOTE
An important man in his day. It sounds as though he got it right. The
truth may well be more complicated.
Bomber pilot who switched to fighters for the Battle of
Britain and flew night fighter sorties against the Japanese.
Pharmacist who patented 46 inventions, including a
plastic disposable hypodermic syringe and a tranquilliser gun.
Wartime NCO whose outstanding courage under enemy fire in
the Libyan desert earned him the Military Medal. The worst thing about
the British Army is the snobbery that gives better medals to officers
than men.
Historian who challenged the popular conception of
British national unity during the Second World War.
QUOTE
On the afternoon of October 8 1944, 1st
Battalion the Duke of Wellington's Regiment was ordered to attack Monte
Cece, north-east of Florence. This feature, about 2,000ft high with sheer
slopes, was strongly held by the Germans and stood in the path of the main
Allied axis of advance. C Company led the advance with A Company, commanded
by Burns, then a captain, in support. With heavy rain and the mud knee-deep
in places, conditions over the precipitous terrain were close to
impossible.........
UNQUOTE
Italy was not a fun place to be then. Beaches were places for landing
under fire as Denis Thatcher knew all too well.
Critic of collectivism in British government. He was at
least sympathetic toward libertarian ideas. When some one claims that he knows
how to run your life better than you do it is time to ask why.
Motor torpedo boat captain awarded two DSCs who used an
operation in Norway to harvest Christmas trees.
Soldier, explorer and naturalist who fell foul of the Foreign Legion in
the Sahara and studied owls in Iceland. He
proved that various deserts had once been fertile.
QUOTE
Wing Commander Jimmy Dell, who has died aged 83, was one of Britain's
foremost test pilots; he used his outstanding skills as an RAF fighter pilot
to test the Lightning, as well as the highly advanced TSR 2 bomber which was
cancelled by the Labour government in 1965.
Leading huntsman who rode with the
Quorn and was considered a distinctive and iconic exemplar of the
Shires tradition.
QUOTE
Michael
Cole , who has died aged 79, was one of the first scientists to make
his mark as an entrepreneur in the years after the Second World War;
during his career he survived near-bankruptcy to establish one of the
fastest-growing manufacturing businesses in Britain. There was then a
huge demand for research into the properties of metals for use in
weapons, space exploration and nuclear fuels, but the best research
results could be obtained only by working on single crystals, which
were unavailable commercially....
UNQUOTE
He was a Jew with brains. Such can do a lot
of good. They also do a lot of evil.
QUOTE
Brian Keenan, who died on
Wednesday aged 66, was a linchpin of the IRA and one of the most
ruthless and formidable members of its leadership;..........
UNQUOTE
Brains
and drive make a lot of difference for better or worse.
QUOTE
Larry Levine, who died on
May 8, his 80th birthday, provided the technical expertise behind
Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" recordings in the 1960s; as
Spector's principal recording engineer from 1962 to 1966, he
contributed to classics such as the Righteous Brothers' You've
Lost That Lovin' Feeling, the Ronettes' Be
My Baby, the Crystals' Da
Doo Ron Ron and Ike and Tina Turner's River
Deep, Mountain High. Spector and Levine made
their records at Gold Star's Studio A in Los Angeles. The studio was
low-ceilinged, small (22ft by 32ft) and often had to accommodate as
many as 20 musicians at a time, thus giving the producer the ideal
acoustic environment for the sound he wished to achieve.
Spector
is still living in the shadow of a murder charge, facing a retrial
over the shooting of a 40-year-old nightclub hostess in
2003.
UNQUOTE
Larry was the man who made some nice very pieces
sound just the way they did. Phil Spector was not merely abrasive he
was trigger happy too.
QUOTE
On
the outbreak of war he converted to flying boats, and in 1940 he
operated with No 240 Squadron from the Shetland Islands. Flying over
the northern North Sea he flew in support of the ill-fated British
Expeditionary Force to Norway and on searches for German ships
seeking to break out from the Baltic........
UNQUOTE
Promotion came fast in those
days. So did death. He didn't do really exciting things. So it was
promotion instead.
QUOTE
Lieutenant-Colonel
Douggie Moir, who died on May 6 aged 89, was taken prisoner in 1940
and made a series of escape attempts from German PoW camps, including
Colditz............ Later, when he was being moved by cattle-truck to
Warburg, he and a brother officer squeezed through a hatch window and
jumped clear of the moving train.
They were at large for
several days, but were then given away by a local and returned to
Warburg. Moir was soon assisting in the planning for another escape
attempt, which involved some 60 officers scaling the perimeter wire
with makeshift ladders while fellow prisoners fused the lights and
created distractions to confuse the guards.
UNQUOTE
A lively
man and a practical man.
QUOTE
Robert Vesco, whose death
in Cuba at the age of 71 has been confirmed by Cuban burial records,
was a swashbuckling Wall Street financier and con man whose escapades
included looting millions of dollars from a Swiss mutual fund, drug
trafficking, money laundering, making an illegal contribution to
Richard Nixon's 1972 presidential re-election campaign, attempting to
set up his own mini-state in the Caribbean and plotting to bribe US
officials to allow Libya to buy American military planes.
UNQUOTE
An
interesting life but a bit too exciting for me.
QUOTE
Flight
Lieutenant Ross, who has died aged 90, was one of Bomber
Command's most experienced heavy bomber pilots; he completed three
tours of operations over enemy-occupied northern Europe, flew on
Leonard Cheshire's No 617 Squadron and attacked numerous targets with
Barnes Wallis's 12,000-lb Tallboy "earthquake"
bomb.............
An avid gardener, he also enjoyed tinkering with
old Jaguars and he had a passion for Scotch. A kind, generous and
extremely modest man, he once described his time in the RAF as "the
best six years of my life".
UNQUOTE
Some were lucky. A
lot were not.
QUOTE
On December 23
1943 Liddell was in command of a company detached as reinforcements
to 5th Battalion the Essex Regiment which was ordered to capture the
village of Villa Grande, near Termoli on the Adriatic coast of Italy.
Patrols had reported that the position was held in strength by the
formidable German 1st Parachute Division.
UNQUOTE
He had a lively war and a brother who
got a VC.
QUOTE
Diana Barnato
Walker, who died on April 28 aged 90 , occupied an almost legendary
position in the world of aviation: as well as being one of a handful
of “Atagirls”, women who served during the war as ATA
(Air Transport Auxiliary) pilots delivering newly-built and
battle-ready aircraft to airfields all over southern England, in 1963
she became the first woman in the world to break the sound barrier.
UNQUOTE
She really did live. Being a Master of Fox Hounds is
rather special in this foul year of Our Lord. She was the
granddaughter of a very successful Jewish crook until he came
unstuck.
QUOTE
Philipp Von
Boeselager, who died on Thursday aged 90, was the last surviving
conspirator in two failed attempts to assassinate Hitler during the
Second World War, including the July 20 plot for which most of his
co-conspirators were executed. Boeselager was one of eight
Wehrmacht officers who planned to shoot Hitler and the head of the
SS, Heinrich Himmler, on a visit to the eastern front in March 1943,
but the plot was called off in Himmler's absence.........
Claus
Schenk von Stauffenberg and other officers involved in the plot were
rounded up and shot the same day, while others, including thousands
of their relatives, were tortured and executed; but Boeselager, who
had obtained the explosives, escaped detection.
UNQUOTE
A pity
that he didn't succeed. We have plenty of politicians equally worthy
of deposing. They know it too. That is why their security is so
heavy.
QUOTE
Deborah
Palfrey, who has died aged 52, was known as "the DC madam";
for more than a decade she ran a call-girl ring in Washington DC
which was alleged to attract clients from the heart of the American
establishment. The girls she employed at "Pamela Martin &
Associates" were required to be university-educated,
well-mannered and capable of holding an intelligent conversation
about current affairs.............. Deborah Palfrey was found
hanged at her mother's house at Tarpon Springs, Florida, on
Thursday.
UNQUOTE
Suicide is a way out and rather a
pity. Releasing her list of clients should have been the master
stroke but the establishment closed ranks. They didn't hesitate when
it came to dropping Eliot in it even though he is a Jew. Murder is a
political tool and a very effective one. Dead men tell no tales as
Vince Foster will not tell you ever since he got sorted out by the
CIA/FBI/Mossad. See Eliot
Spitzer Was Screwed for the context.
QUOTE
Mark Wyndham, who
died on April 15 aged 86, won a Military Cross in the desert and
later worked in industry for his cousin, the novelist Henry Yorke,
before becoming a notably successful chairman of the Children's
Society and a founder of the 999 Club, a charity at
Deptford............
UNQUOTE
A lot of men had interesting
times then and showed that they not just anybody.
QUOTE
Wing
Commander Paddy Barthropp, who died on April 16 aged 87, was one of
the RAF's most ebullient and colourful characters; he fought in the
Battle of Britain, escaped twice from prisoner-of-war camps and later
became a test pilot and a winning jockey in Hong Kong............
UNQUOTE
Another good one gone.
QUOTE
Bruce "Titch"
Wyllie, who has died aged 85, was a rear-gunner ("tail-end
Charlie") in Lancasters with 57 Squadron of Bomber Command,
whose very first operation was the famous Dresden Raid. It was not
until half a century had passed that Wyllie could be prevailed upon
to speak of his wartime past. When finally he did, he recalled a
number of harrowing, terrifying but ultimately hugely rewarding
experiences........
UNQUOTE
Some were lucky.
A lot weren't.
QUOTE
Sydney
Dowse, who died on Thursday aged 89, was one of the principal
constructors of the tunnel used in the Great Escape; he was among
those who got away, and was at large for 14 days before being
recaptured and sent to the "death camp" at Sachsenhausen,
where he dug another tunnel to gain a few more days of freedom.
UNQUOTE
A first class man. A pity that we don't have
men like him running England rather than the traitors and communists
that have wormed their way in.
QUOTE
Sergeant Dougie
Wright, who has died aged 88, earned a Military Medal and a legendary
reputation as a fighting soldier with Lord Jellicoe's 1st Special
Boat Squadron in the Greek islands. In April 1944 he
distinguished himself in a close-quarter attack on an enemy post on
Ios, which resulted in no SBS losses but five enemy casualties. He
was also involved in two dramatic attacks on a radio station on
Amorgos. In the first he found himself under the command of Anders
Lassen, a Dane (later to win a posthumous VC) who hated Germans and
usually killed them; but on this occasion Lassen did a deal with a
captured wireless operator by which he took the man's dog as well as
the station's code books, while Wright took the German's Greek
mistress.
UNQUOTE
The worst thing about the British Army
is the snobbery that gives VCs to officers and lesser medals to the
men who do the fighting. What a useful man to have on your side.
QUOTE
Bill Curling, who died
on April 1 aged 96, was "Hotspur", the racing correspondent
of The Daily Telegraph, from 1946 to 1965 and wrote half a dozen
books about racing; before the Second World War, during which he
served in destroyers, he was from 1936 to 1939 the racing
correspondent of the Yorkshire Post.
UNQUOTE
Eton, destroyers, racing and shooting; a good life.
QUOTE
Charlton Heston, the
Oscar-winning actor known for his larger-than-life movie roles, has
died at the age of 84. In a career spanning 60 years, Heston lavished
the world with a seemingly inexhaustible roster of resolute screen
heroes, from Michelangelo to Moses, El Cid to Judah
Ben-Hur..............
UNQUOTE
Charlton served for real; he flew
from England as a gunner during the war years but the Graun doesn't
see fit to mention that. They don't like honest men.
A rather better obit albeit
with a left wing sneer or two thrown in.
QUOTE
Pedro
Zaragoza,......... is credited with turning Benidorm into a
destination for mass-tourism..................... In 1953 - on the
principle that "you couldn't stop it" - Zaragoza authorised
the wearing of bikinis at Benidorm. No one in the country had
attempted this, and there was uproar. As members of the Civil Guard
scuffled with scantily-clad girls on Benidorm's beaches, the local
archbishop threatened to excommunicate Zaragoza, who decided to
appeal directly to Franco.
UNQUOTE
Pushing for the bikini was
the master stoke. Today they even go topless in Marbella.
Career soldier who
later became Governor of Bermuda and hosted Anglo-American summits
for two British prime ministers. Did he ever hear a shot fired in
anger? He definitely had a lot of fun.
QUOTE
Pearl Cornioley
outfoxed the Nazis by - among other tricks - concealing secret
messages in the hem of her skirt and helping airmen escape to safety,
according to records unsealed at Britain's National Archives on
Monday...........
The records shed light on a woman who
quickly adapted to life as an agent but never forgot about her family
in Britain, requesting in handwritten notes that officials in London
send her mother and sisters timely birthday and Christmas presents.
She escaped France ahead of the Nazi invasion and returned to
Britain via Spain. Upon returning to Britain, she worked briefly at
the Air Ministry in London but used her French to gain a slot as a
Special Operations Executive agent - one of about 40 women to serve.
The Air Ministry became part of the Ministry of Defence in the 1960s
while the Special Operations Executive evolved into the Secret
Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. [ Written
by an ignoramus - Editor ]..........
She
parachuted into France initially posing as a cosmetics saleswoman to
deliver coded messages to members of the French Resistance. Following
the capture of her leader, she assumed control of the cell in the
north Indre department of the Loire River valley, about 55 miles (90
kilometres) south east of the Normandy beaches.
She
interrupted the Paris-Bordeaux railway line more than 800 times and
attacked convoys in June 1944, the same month of the D-Day invasion.
All told, she led 3,000 French Resistance fighters in a host of guerrilla warfare missions.
UNQUOTE
She did well.
QUOTE
Pearl Cornioley, who
died on February 23 aged 93, was a wartime agent in France with the
Special Operations Executive (SOE)...... Pearl Witherington
joined the WAAF, but became increasingly frustrated by her
pen-pushing post at the Air Ministry, and presented herself at the
SOE headquarters in Baker Street, London, demanding a job.
UNQUOTE
Women do things too from time
to time.
Commodore
Kit North-Lewis, who has died aged 90, led his squadrons of
rocket-firing Typhoon fighters in the fierce fighting during the
Normandy campaign and the advance through Holland to Germany.........
On August 7 a major German counter-attack, spearheaded by five Panzer
divisions, was identified moving against just two US infantry
divisions. The Panzers had already captured three important villages
and were threatening to cut off the US Third Army near Mortain as it
began moving into Brittany. A shuttle service of Typhoons was
established, and by the end of the day they had flown more than 300
sorties, three of them led by Lewis.
UNQUOTE
He did well.
QUOTE
Captain Robert
Franks, who has died aged 95, was an officer in destroyers and also
fought a vicious, little-known river war in Burma.......
UNQUOTE
He really did do things.
QUOTE
Neil
Aspinall, who has died aged 66, was the Beatles' original road
manager and went on to run the group's business empire for 40 years;
he became their chief confidant and, although not the only contender
for the title of the fifth Beatle, perhaps deserved the accolade more
than most.
UNQUOTE
Epstein robbed
them blind I thought but I am glad that someone played straight with
them.
QUOTE
The last French
foot-soldier of the first world war chose to go uncelebrated.
The
approach of the death of Lazare Ponticelli therefore caused something
of a panic in France. This derdesders,
“the last of the last”, was for a while the only man in
the country who remembered the first world war because he had fought
in it. The suburb of Kremlin-Bicetre, where he lived, had like most
other communities in France a memorial to the war dead. But, more
important, it had Mr Ponticelli, who up to his 111th year appeared
every November 11th in his flat cap and brown coat, lean and
bright-eyed, gamely managing the few steps required to lay his small
bunch of carnations there. The most astonished and serious observers
were always children, to whom—if they wanted—he would
tell his stories...........
UNQUOTE
He was a man of the
Légion étrangère.
The Telegraph didn't bother to write him up. A parochial lot.
QUOTE
Tim Denny, who died on
February 24 aged 87, was a wartime air observer who rescued a gunner
from a burning bomber and was awarded the DFC and Bar; he later
forged an international reputation as the leading expert on lavender
and the distillation of essential oils.
UNQUOTE
Flyer,
engineer, innovative farmer; he was versatile. A man should be
versatile.
QUOTE
Eminent physicist who
stood accused in later life of selling out to commerce.
UNQUOTE
A
first class man. When accusations are made it is always worth asking
who is feeding us the dirt and why. A lot of men in the science
racket are place men with nothing original about their work.
QUOTE
Gunner John Prott, who
died on February 22 aged 88, was awarded two Military Medals for
unusual courage and unfailing presence of mind during the fighting in
north-west Europe............
UNQUOTE
Private soldiers don't get the
recognition in the British Army that they deserve and they would in
New Zealand or Oz. They deserve better officers too. Then there is
the matter of politicians and treason.
QUOTE
The Lord Pym, who died
yesterday aged 86, was a classic casualty of the shift in
Conservative Party attitudes from paternalism to laissez-faire
liberalism. In a Commons career spanning more than a quarter of
a century, Francis Pym served with distinction under four prime
ministers, making his name in the Whips’ office. But it was
under the fourth of those leaders, Margaret Thatcher, whom he served
as Defence Secretary, Leader of the House and Foreign Secretary, that
he made his greatest impact;..........
UNQUOTE
One of the better Tories, I think.
Too many of them are men on the make.
QUOTE
Squadron
Leader Charles Patterson, who has died aged 88, took part in many
daylight low-level bombing raids, including three of the most
audacious of the war, exploits which earned him a DSO and a
DFC........ his air officer commanding, Air Vice Marshal Basil
Embry, selected him to fly a Mosquito specially modified to carry a
cine camera in the nose of the aircraft. It was his task to follow
the bomber force and to arrive over the target five minutes later to
film their results as he dropped his own bombs. Flying at very
low level in broad daylight was always hazardous, but Patterson ran
the additional risk of being shot down by the German flak batteries
that had been alerted by the 20 or 30 bombers just ahead of him.
UNQUOTE
A
first class man who never married; a waste.
QUOTE
"The King of Porn",
as Raymond was dubbed, was an avuncular figure who claimed that he
was an honest entertainer. But some argued that his prurient
productions and publications whetted the public's appetite for darker
material, and that Britain's moral decline began in 1958, when
Raymond circumvented the laws prohibiting striptease by opening a
private club, the Revuebar, his flagship and life-long base. The club
could be joined on the door, and within two years it had more than
45,000 members. Its neon sign - the first in Britain to offer
STRIPTEASE - became a Soho landmark.
UNQUOTE
He cheered people
up and gave Puritans something to moan about.
QUOTE
Brigadier
John Prendergast, who has died aged 97, won a DSO and two MCs in an
adventurous military career which spanned more than 30 years. In May
1937 Prendergast was serving with the Tochi Scouts in North
Waziristan. They were leading an advance on the village of Gariom
with the objective of blowing up two of the towers as a punishment
for harbouring the wily Fakir of Ipi when they came under heavy fire
from rebel tribesmen............
UNQUOTE
His service reads
like a roll call of forgotten regiments. Interesting times and better
too in some ways.
QUOTE
Anthony Blond, who has
died aged 79, was a gentleman [ believe that
if you want - Editor ] publisher from an age
when business was conducted in dusty garrets and promising authors
were given small retainers to allow them to find their muse.
UNQUOTE
An interesting man but it was well to keep your back
to the wall round him.
Architect of the raid on
Entebbe in 1976 and later Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence
Forces
Lieutenant-General Dan Shomron, who died on Tuesday aged
70, was a leading figure in the Israeli Defence Forces of which he
eventually became Chief of Staff; as the commander in charge of
Israel's paratroopers and infantry, he planned and led the daring
military operation at Entebbe, Uganda, to rescue 105 hijacked
hostages in 1976. On June 27 1976 Air France Flight 139 from Tel Aviv
to Paris, carrying 248 passengers and a crew of 12, was hijacked by
two armed gunmen from the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine and two Germans from an organisation called the
"Revolutionary Cells".
UNQUOTE
Competent - Who Dares
Wins. Surprise is a useful weapon
QUOTE
David Orr, who died
on February 2 aged 85, was chairman of Unilever, Inchcape, the
British Council and the Globe Theatre Trust; as a young engineer
officer in Burma during the Second World War he was awarded a
Military Cross and Bar.....
In mid-April they reached the
village of Kanhla, south of Yamethin, where a bridge over a deep
chaung, or gully, had been demolished and was covered by enemy fire.
The chaung made an effective anti-tank obstacle and the advance was
halted. Lt Orr went forward in a bridge-laying tank and supervised
the installation of a scissors assault bridge across the 30ft gap
under heavy rifle and mortar fire; it was laid straight and evenly,
although it was impossible for anyone to direct the operation from
outside, enabling the fighting tanks to cross quickly.
UNQUOTE
A
man of parts; he did things before, after and during.
QUOTE
Squadron
Leader "Hawkeye" Lee, who has died aged 92, was a Hurricane
pilot sent to France on the day the Germans invaded France in May
1940; during the month that followed, as his squadron fought against
much superior odds, he shot down five enemy aircraft before being
forced to bale out of his own. Lee's squadron, No 501 (County of
Gloucester), was on standby to reinforce Norway when it was rushed to
an airfield near Rheims on May 10, the day the Germans started their
Blitzkrieg. In the first three days Lee accounted for three enemy
bombers as the German army advance continued. The squadron flew three
or four patrols a day but was forced to retreat to Le Mans, where it
gave cover as the British and French forces were evacuated from
Dunkirk. During this period Lee shot down two more bombers as they
attacked the "little ships".
UNQUOTE
Would men try as hard today with a corrupt
government behind them?
QUOTE
Lieutenant-Colonel
Ken Scott, who has died aged 89, was awarded the first of his two MCs
for his part in an SOE operation to sabotage the Asopos viaduct in
Greece in 1943...........
UNQUOTE
The SOE did well sometimes.
QUOTE
Major Frank
Courtney, who has died aged 91, won an MC and Bar during the Second
World War, then stayed on in India after independence to become a
symbol of the Raj at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club. Courtney refused to
learn Hindi, continued to correct Parsees' English and never said
Mumbai for Bombay. But he joined the club only in 1953, when it
became the last in the country to admit Indians, and he expected no
deference - though he once struck a fellow member who had insulted
his wife.
UNQUOTE
He was there when it
mattered, unlike the shysters and con men who constitute Her
Majesty's Government.
Jack Lyons, who has died aged 92,
would have been remembered chiefly as a great patron of the arts were
it not for his involvement in the Guinness scandal [ Rather
like Adolf's involvement in the Second World War - Editor ]. This resulted in his being convicted of theft and
false accounting, reproached by the trial judge for "dishonesty
on a major scale" and stripped of his knighthood by the Queen.
UNQUOTE
Lyons was a Jew and a thief; one of the Guinness Four.
Three and a half of whom were Jews. All four were thieves.
QUOTE
Badri
Patarkatsishvili, the Georgian [ sic ] billionaire who was found dead
at his Surrey mansion on Tuesday night aged 52, a month after running
unsuccessfully for the Georgian presidency, was one of the
"oligarchs" who made a fortune from the privatisation of
state-owned industries during the Yeltsin era and eventually found a
haven in Britain,..........
UNQUOTE
A man with 120
body guards who thought he wanted more has upset people who
matter. The Telegraph draws a light hand over his guilt. He
colluded with Berezovky, another Jewish crook.
QUOTE
Ian Michie, who has died
aged 79, was an investment banker and field sportsman, and the
brother of James, the classical poet, and of Donald, the
distinguished scientist in the field of artificial intelligence and a
code breaker at Bletchley Park, both of whom predeceased him last
year....
UNQUOTE
Brains and brawn
make a good combination.
QUOTE
Major-General
Ronnie Buckland, who has died aged 87, had a varied career which took
him to many of the world's trouble spots. As an officer of the
Household Division, Buckland had a most unusual career in that he
never served at the MoD, HQ London District or at his regimental HQ;
his time in the Army was largely spent as an officer at the "sharp
end" or with field formations....... Having accompanied his
battalion to Normandy in July 1944, he was seriously wounded in its
first operation and was out of action for six months.
UNQUOTE
Join the Army and see the world; meet
interesting people and kill them.
QUOTE
Joshua
Lederberg, who died on February 2 aged 82, shared the 1958 Nobel
prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Edward Tatum and George Beadle)
for establishing that bacteria engage in sex, a discovery that laid
the foundations for modern genetics and biotechnology.
UNQUOTE
Brains are the reason why we are
not swinging in trees.
QUOTE
Anthony Sumption,
who died on January 8 aged 88, served in submarines during the Second
World War before embarking on a successful career as a lawyer and in
the City.
UNQUOTE
Doing
things in submarines would have been interesting. Beating the tax
system is still perfectly legal although more difficult. The details
are different of course.
Indian
guru to the Beatles who built a business empire based on
transcendental meditation. It sounds as though he might even have
believed his own tosh.
QUOTE
George Habash, the
Palestinian guerrilla leader who died in Jordan on January 26 aged 80,
earned an entry in the grim annals of Middle Eastern politics as one
of those responsible for introducing the world to international
terrorism. As chief of the Marxist-leaning Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the second largest group within the
PLO after Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, Habash "pioneered"
the use of airliner hijackings to call attention to the cause of his
people.
UNQUOTE
The
Telegraph makes him sound like a rebel without a cause. He was up
against the world's most dangerous murderers and political
manipulators, the Zionist Jews who stole Palestine and showed us that
Adolf could be outdone.
QUOTE
Charles
Elwell, who died on January 11 aged 88, was the MI5 officer
responsible in 1961 for breaking the Portland spy ring, run by the
KGB officer Konon Molody (Gordon Lonsdale), which passed naval
secrets to the Russians. A year later Elwell had similar success
with John Vassall, the KGB spy at the Admiralty who was blackmailed
into passing secrets after taking part in a homosexual orgy in
Moscow..........
UNQUOTE
He lived in interesting times.
QUOTE
Squadron
Leader "Jimmy" James, who died on January 18 aged 92, was
an inveterate escaper during his five years in captivity during the
Second World War. James: the refusal to accept incarceration, he
said, it was 'our contribution to the war effort'
UNQUOTE
A great escaper and on the Great
Escape.
Group
Captain Dudley Honor, who has died aged 94, flew during the Battle of
France and as a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain before going
to the Middle East; shot down in the latter stages of the German
invasion of Crete, he spent six days in the mountains before reaching
the coast where he was picked up by an RAF flying
boat.....
UNQUOTE
Nine
kills is respectable. He pranged a few as well so he was lucky.
QUOTE
Chess
legend Bobby Fischer has died. Despite having a Jewish mother,
Fischer was famous for his vitriolic antisemitism..........
In
sporadic interviews on Philippine radio during the past five years,
Fischer has used almost every question to launch into another
diatribe about the global Jewish conspiracy directed against him and
the need for an extermination of all Jews. The f——-g Jews
want to destroy everything I’ve worked for all my life,”
Fischer said during a January 1999 interview with Baguio City’s
Bombo Radyo. “There was no Holocaust. The Jews are liars. It’s
time we took off the kid gloves with these parasites.”..........
Fischer
has developed a straightforward narrative of a Jewish world
conspiracy, [ So have a lot of other people - It is just a matter of
looking at the evidence - Editor ]
UNQUOTE
He
had the brain. Jews often do. The evil goes with it all too often.
QUOTE
Smith
was born in Alexandria,
the son of French citizens Moses and Eva Shmeilowitz, who were of
Polish origin. His
father was employed by the French Consulate-General as a clerk. Aged
11, Smith embarked as a stowaway aboard a vessel proceeding to
London. Undaunted by this unfamiliar environment, Smith attended
Berner Street School, Commercial Street, and worked as a deliverer in
the East
End, then an impoverished ghetto
where Yiddish was
the predominant spoken language.
Persecution
and extreme deprivation had compelled millions of Eastern European
Jews to migrate to Western Europe, the Americas,
and elsewhere. By the time of Issy Smith's arrival, Jewish
immigration to Britain had peaked and was further curtailed by the
enactment of the Aliens
Act in 1905.
UNQUOTE
Why were they being hassled? Depend on
a Jew not to tell the truth about why he is hated. To be fair, this
one served well.
QUOTE
..........was
the only Pole to reach Flag rank in the Royal Navy, earning a
reputation in the process as a latter-day Captain Bligh........... As
second gunnery officer in the 35-knot destroyer Blyskawica, he was
credited with shooting down two Luftwaffe aircraft during the
Norwegian campaign. In May and June 1940 he took part in Operation
Dynamo, the successful evacuation of the beaches at Dunkirk. Later
Blyskawica, one of the few ships that could keep up with the liner,
escorted the Queen Mary.
UNQUOTE
An interesting life. There
was not much to go back to in Poland after the war. Poles are prone
to be a pain even when they are not in positions of
authority.
Philip
Agee
Former
CIA operative who exposed more than 2,000 western agents around the
world. Given the CIA' s track
record of evil which includes decades of torturing people and major
narcotic trading it is difficult to argue that his treason was
misdirected.
QUOTE
Sir
Edmund Hillary, who died late yesterday aged 88, made his name as the
first conqueror (with Norgay Tenzing) of Everest; just as impressive,
though, was the use he made of his renown over the remainder of his
life. On the one hand there were feats of exploration - to the
Antarctic and South Pole from 1956 to 1958; in other parts of the
Everest region in the early 1960s (including a search for the
Abominable Snowman, or yeti). In 1968 he drove jet boats up the
violent rapids of Nepalese rivers; in 1977 he took them up the
Ganges................
UNQUOTE
He cheered us up at time when it
mattered. A decent man as well.
QUOTE
George MacDonald Fraser, who died on Wednesday aged 82, revived
in a long-running series of novels the career of one of fiction’s
most infamous characters, Flashman. the fag-roasting bully of Tom
Brown' Schooldays, Thomas Hughes’s 1857 tribute to Dr Arnold’s
Rugby, was last seen being expelled for drunkenness. Age had not
improved him. Fraser’s appropriation in 1969, Flashman,
joyously confirmed him as a thoroughgoing rotter and cad of the first
water.................
UNQUOTE
Our best writer has left us; a
pity. He made the middle brow writing industry look like the
pretentious third raters that they are. He will be missed.
QUOTE
John
Groves, who died on Boxing Day aged 85, was a journalist-turned-civil
servant and headed the Government Information Service in the early
Thatcher years, having earlier served as director-general of the
Central Office of Information.....he decided to serve in the Army and
joined the Queen's Royal Regiment. In 1943 he was commissioned in the
newly-formed Reconnaissance Regiment (formerly the 5th Gloucesters).
UNQUOTE
He sounds
like a good man.
QUOTE
Lieutenant-Commander
'Fuzz' Fyson,...was involved in covert operations during the Second
World War; after leaving the Navy he became a successful craftsman in
wood.
UNQUOTE
He did things. Training
twenty apprentices after was worthwhile; an investment in the future.
QUOTE
Professor
John Strugnell, who has died aged 77, was a prominent Biblical
scholar, and was editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls project
until he was sacked for making what were construed as anti-Semitic
remarks to an Israeli newspaper......
UNQUOTE
The Jews had a problem with him;
they couldn't abuse his ignorance as they do with us. He knew too
much but a claim of anti-Semitism did the trick. It just means hatred
of Jews. They never bother to tell us how they cause it.
QUOTE
Flight
Lieutenant Mick Shand, who died on Thursday aged 92, was a fighter
pilot interned at Stalag Luft III at Sagan and survived "the
Great Escape" - the last to emerge from the tunnel before it was
discovered, he was recaptured after four days on the run. Shand and
his fellow New Zealander Squadron Leader Len Trent, VC, planned to
"hard arse" it on foot to Czechoslovakia in the hope of
getting to Switzerland. They had no great expectation of reaching
England, and felt it would be impossible to make it across the frozen
countryside undetected - but they felt they "had to do
something"........
UNQUOTE
Men fought for something and
then found themselves betrayed by corrupt politicians like Blair and
Bush.
QUOTE
Benazir
Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan who was assassinated in
a suicide bombing in Rawalpindi yesterday aged 54, restored democracy
to her country in 1988 after 11 years of military dictatorship. Her
glamorous good looks and fluent English led to a sustained love
affair with Western politicians and journalists, many of whom had
known her at either Harvard or Oxford. For those with the standard
Western prejudices against the Islamic world, she had the added
assets of a pronounceable name and a tolerant religious outlook.
UNQUOTE
Corrupt, vicious, couldn't speak her own
language properly. No wonder the main stream media told us that she
was wonderful. Pakistanis aren't fool enough to believe them. The
world is better without her.
QUOTE
Colonel
attended Eton College. He joined the British Army on leaving school
and was commissioned into the Devonshire and Dorset Regiment. By 1982
had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel, During the Falklands War
he was in command of 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment when the
deed described below took place for which he was awarded the VC.
UNQUOTE
He commanded in the first land battle of the
Falklands War so the result mattered. 2 PARA won against much greater
forces albeit Chris Keeble took 2 PARA onto victory rather than
Colonel Jones.
QUOTE
Promiscuous
chronicler of upper-class life
The death of Simon Raven, at the
age of 73 after suffering a stroke, is proof that the devil looks
after his own. He ought, by rights, to have died of shame at 30, or
of drink at 50.
UNQUOTE
He was a first rate writer
but never a gentleman. Any sneers from the Grauniad's supercilious
poofters should be treated with contempt.
Wing
Commander 'Dal' Russel DSO DFC
QUOTE
Wing
Commander "Dal" Russel, who has died aged 89, was a highly
decorated wartime Canadian fighter pilot whose log book recorded
kills in the Battle of Britain and the Normandy invasion; he later
led attacks on enemy rail and road transport as the Allies entered
Germany and Holland.... Russel arrived in England in June 1940 with
No 1 (RCAF) Squadron, the first Canadian unit to see action. Flying
Hurricanes, it was declared operational in mid-August, and within 10
days Russel shared in the destruction of a Dornier bomber over
Gravesend. ...
His squadrons destroyed more than 700 transport
targets and tank concentrations; and on October 4 one of his pilots
shot down a Messerschmitt 262 fighter, the first jet to be downed by
a fighter..... In retirement he enjoyed salmon fishing but, although
invited to hunt by friends, he never liked shooting after the
war.
UNQUOTE
He did well. Going off shooting after having done
the real thing is understandable.
QUOTE
John
Hereford, who has died aged 82, was a German brought up in the Jewish
faith; during the Second World War he completed a full tour in
bombers over Germany as a wireless operator disrupting the
Luftwaffe's night fighter operations by jamming their control
frequencies.
UNQUOTE
There weren't many Jews who served far
less got up the sharp end. He was one of the few and did a tour of
thirty operations. Nor many made it. He was big in the hotel trade
after.
Professor
John Hudson GM
QUOTE
Professor
Hudson, who died on December 6 aged 97, held a Chair in Horticultural
Science at the University of Bristol and was director of Long Ashton
Research Station; during his wartime career he was one of Britain's
foremost experts in bomb disposal and won two George Medals. On the
night of January 17/18 1943 the Germans dropped on London the first
bombs containing a new type of anti-handling fuse, designed to go off
when the device was moved.
UNQUOTE
A man should be versatile.
Being lucky helps too. It is that or dead so fast you don't even
notice.
James
Lamond MP
QUOTE
Although
an unrepentant Stalinist, Lamond saw no contradiction in accepting
the Lord Lieutenancy of Aberdeen. Until the collapse of the Soviet
Union he had been active in many Communist front organisations and
vice-president of one of the most notorious, the World Peace Council.
Nothing deterred him from taking a favourable view of the Soviet
Union, and he justified its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 as a
natural response to American "imperialism" in that
country..... Lamond - and he was far from being the only Labour MP to
take this view - once declared that the Communist Morning Star was
essential "for sensible discussion inside the British Labour
movement".
UNQUOTE
It takes all sorts to make a world. He
did the right things for his constituents though.
Brigadier
Rupert Harding-Newman
QUOTE
Brigadier
Harding-Newman was probably the last survivor of a handful of
Englishmen whose professions had taken them to the Middle East
between the First and Second World Wars and whose experience of
desert travel and exploration led to the formation of the Long Range
Desert Group (LRDG).... In the spring of 1931 Harding-Newman drove an
Austin Seven overland back to England to attend a course at Bovington
and, the following year, accompanied Major (later Brigadier) Ralph
Bagnold on a long trip to northern Chad. He was the group's mechanic
and sometimes did the cooking as well. Using sun compasses, they
learned how to navigate vast expanses of often featureless desert and
mastered the art of driving vehicles over huge sand dunes without
overturning or getting stuck. Bagnold's aim was to create small,
independent units of extraordinary mobility and endurance which would
pose an apparent threat to the enemy out of all proportion to the
reality. After the outbreak of the Second World War when, supported
by General Wavell, Bagnold formed the LRDG, Harding-Newman was
serving with the military mission to the Egyptian Army and was not
permitted to join him.
UNQUOTE
Another good man gone.
Evel
Knievel
QUOTE
Evel Knievel, the
American motorcycle stunt rider who has died aged 69, combined a
considerable talent for self-promotion with a hazardous capacity for
bravery; among the several world records he held was that for the
most bones broken by one person (433), and he is said to have spent
the equivalent of three years in hospital.............. In September
1974, he attempted to jump the mile-wide canyon of the Snake River,
Idaho, on a rocket-powered motorcycle. Once airborne, he seemed to
lack the necessary momentum to reach his target, but the matter was
settled when his emergency parachute opened prematurely and he
floated 600 feet back down to earth.........
Thereafter
Knievel worked briefly as an insurance salesman. He sold 271 policies
in a single week, but left his employers when they did not
immediately offer him a seat on the board. Then he embarked on a
successful career as a safe cracker, working mainly in Oregon. He
also had spells as a bank robber, swindler and pickpocket. After
several narrow escapes from the law, he decided to go straight and
settled at Moses Lake, Washington, where he worked as a car dealer.
Prospective customers could obtain a discount of $100 if they
defeated him at arm wrestling........... Then, in 1977, Knievel was
convicted of assaulting his former agent, Sheldon Saltman. Knievel
had objected to Saltman's book Evel Knievel on Tour, which portrayed
the stunt man as an alcoholic addicted to painkillers; moreover, it
alleged that Knievel did not love his mother. Knievel severely
chastised Saltman with a baseball bat and was ordered to pay him £6.8
million in damages. He was also sentenced to six months in
prison.
UNQUOTE
An interesting life. Courage has its uses but
I wouldn't want a son to follow him.
QUOTE
In 1944, as a
major and 2nd-in-command of the regiment during the long slog up
Italy, he had the task of reconnoitering under shell and mortar fire
forward areas which were often heavily mined. Because of the mines,
the casualty rate amongst 2i/cs was very high, but Owen took no
notice of the danger and always volunteered for the most dangerous
operations.
UNQUOTE
At least with explosives it tends to be
quick.
Sir
Peter Laurence MC
QUOTE
Sir Peter
Laurence was a diplomat in Berlin in 1968 when his nephew spotted a
two-page picture story in a children's comic recounting how he won
the MC in Italy during the Second World War. The boy, who was home
from Marlborough, told his parents - who then informed Laurence of
this unusual piece of publicity in The Victor. In the first frame
Lieutenant Laurence of the 11th Battalion, King's Royal Rifle Corps,
was shown wondering whether the enemy was occupying an isolated
house, known as "The Apostle", near Ponte in December 1943.
Then, in broad daylight, he and a Corporal Angus crept up close, to
find themselves under fire from a hole in the wall. "You spray
the windows while I pop a visiting card through the hole,"
Laurence was shown saying, before he threw in a grenade and Angus
fired his Tommy gun up at the first-floor window.
UNQUOTE
It is
nice to know that the Foreign Office is not all pinko poofters. They
tried to get rid of the Falklands for us. It must have been the oil
and fish that the Argies wanted.
QUOTE
Life in Cairo was not
all partying, however, and it was not long before Patricia Russell
was seriously engaged in the war, working in the Cairo military
interrogation centre. This was to be the start of her intelligence
work, about which she would never speak, that took her from Egypt to
Italy.
UNQUOTE
She got about in a big way and was probably very
useful.
QUOTE
Captain
Roger Villa , who has died aged 85, claimed three enemy submarines
as anti-submarine control officer of the destroyer Active. She was
patrolling the Straits of Gibraltar in April 1943 when a surfaced
submarine appeared out of a rain squall. Active opened fire, and the
U-boat dived.... the "kill" was not
confirmed until after the war.
UNQUOTE
He
got about.
QUOTE
André
Bettencourt, who died on November 19 aged 88, served as a cabinet
minister in French governments of the 1960s and 1970s and won medals
for bravery for his service in the Resistance;.....
In his youth Bettencourt had been a member
of La Cagoule, a violent Fascist group bankrolled by Eugène
Schueller, founder of the cosmetics giant L'Oréal.....
After the German invasion, they swore
allegiance to Hitler, sent men to support the German forces fighting
in Russia...........
UNQUOTE
Misguided
and sincere is perhaps the best you can say. Being a friend of
François Mitterrand is
something to hide. Before you sneer too much be grateful that we
never had to decide which side to join.
QUOTE
Captain John Gower,
who has died aged 95, had a distinguished war in destroyers....
On D-Day
Gower was bombarding targets on Sword beach when he saw a torpedo
bouncing on the surface at the end of its run; it went on to hit the
Norwegian destroyer Svenner, which became the first Allied ship to be
sunk on the morning of June 6.
UNQUOTE
Join
the Navy and see the world.
QUOTE
Ian Smith,.. was the Prime
Minister of Rhodesia and an ardent advocate of white rule; in 1965 he
unilaterally declared independence from Britain, and over the next 15
turbulent years fought an increasingly bitter war against African
nationalist guerrillas, a war that cost between 30,000 and 40,000,
mainly black, lives - but it was a struggle he eventually lost,
paving the way for the country's independence as Zimbabwe.
UNQUOTE
The
Telegraph writes for the right but it is a propaganda machine none
the less. Read the hate and compare it with their coverage of Mugabe,
the black racist thief who is destroying the country.
QUOTE
The
stooping old man with a shock of white hair lived in a modest house
where the front gate always stood open and virtually anyone who
walked up the drive would be invited in for tea...... Smith
earned his place in history by leading the first revolt against
Britain by white settlers since America’s declaration of
independence in 1776...... He was convinced that only a handful
of western-educated and Communist-sponsored Africans genuinely wanted
independence. The great majority of blacks were, he decided, happy
under benevolent white rule. [ They KNOW they
were better off with Sir Ian but the BBC won't be telling you that -
Editor ]
UNQUOTE
Believe
that if you want. It was written by another Blair. Rhodesia was
subverted by followers of Antonio
Gramsci, the chief theoretician of the communist party. One was
Roy Welensky,
a Jew from Poland. More were Jews from Lithuania like Joe
Slovo. Getting Mugabe into power was the pay off for them. The
Telegraph was owned by a thieving Jew. He is gone but they haven't
cleaned up their act. I will not be paying money to read their left
wing propaganda again.
QUOTE
LEO MARKS, who has died
aged 80, was the chief cryptographer of Special Operations Executive
during the Second World War; later he wrote the script for Peeping
Tom, the film which destroyed the career of its director Michael
Powell...... While still in his early twenties he revolutionised the
construction and security of SOE's cyphers. And by his re-invention
of the "one-time pad" he eventually influenced code systems
used by secret services the world over....
UNQUOTE
Brilliance
shines out. His most famous code poem is rather special:-
The
Life That I Have
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours
The love that I
have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A
sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a
pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will
be yours and yours and yours.
QUOTE
Colonel Ormrod
won an MC at the Battle of the Imjin River.
UNQUOTE
A Master of
Otter Hounds which is a rare distinction in this foul Year of Our
Lord.
QUOTE
Major-General
Grimshaw won a DSO in Burma and saw repeated front-line service in a
career which ranged from the North West Frontier of India in 1932 to
the EOKA operation in Cyprus in 1956...... the brigade was flown to
Dimapur on the northern front and held the Japanese at Kohima. During
the siege, Grimshaw took command of 1st Battalion 1 Punjab Regiment
(1/1PR) and they played a notable part in the fighting and in the
pursuit of the Japanese 33rd Division in monsoon weather through the
wild country to the Chindwin river.....
UNQUOTE
There aren't many North West Frontier men
left. He might even have been the last.
QUOTE
Roy Wallace, who has died
aged 80, developed stereophonic sound recording for the Decca company
and designed the famous “Decca tree” microphone array
which became the standard way across the industry of recording
orchestral and operatic sound.
UNQUOTE
Engineers don't normally
get remembered but stereo was a good first.
QUOTE
Barbara Dainton, who has
died aged 96, was the last but one British survivor of the Titanic
disaster; as Barbara West, and at just 10 months old,........ but her
father, Arthur West, aged 36, drowned along with some 1,520 other
passengers and crew when the "unsinkable" White Star liner
RMS Titanic, bound for New York on her maiden voyage, struck an
iceberg shortly before midnight on April 14 1912.
UNQUOTE
Some
talk. Some don't. She didn't.
Bishop
deported from South Africa for opposing apartheid who continued his
ministry in Wales and Liverpool. This little piece does not tell us
what he thought of the damage that he did by getting rid of halfway
decent government.
QUOTE
Hezlet
then took temporary command of Unique, the sole survivor of three
submarines sent to patrol the shallow waters off Tunisia which
attacked a convoy bound for North Africa. He sank the 11,400-ton
troopship Esperia, but was counter-attacked and, not knowing that
Unique was leaking fuel from an external tank which gave away his
position, he was bombed repeatedly by an Italian flying
boat.......
UNQUOTE
A good submariner makes a lot of
difference.
QUOTE
After
demobilisation Oliver returned to Chesterton & Co and became
senior partner — a post he held for 35 years, during which the
firm consolidated its position in the upper strata of the London
property scene, expanding beyond its traditional residential
portfolio into the commercial sector and the City.
UNQUOTE
A
good war to miss. London had to be better.
QUOTE
It was while
commanding a motor torpedo boat.... that Jermain devised a technique
for sinking surface ships using depth charges....... Two months later
his MTB was the only survivor of a flotilla which ran into a convoy
off the Scheldt. Jermain's torpedo-firing mechanism failed but,
selecting the largest target, he made a depth-charge attack while his
gunners fired upwards at anyone who put his head over the merchant
ship's gunwales........ his carefully placed depth charges exploded
amidships, sinking the 6,000-ton vessel.
UNQUOTE
He had plenty
of excitement.
QUOTE
In
August 1944 both young men were tank officers at Caumont, aiding the
breakout from Caen in Normandy...... Looking back on a campaign that
covered 1,500 miles and cost 956 killed and 545 missing, Adair wrote:
"Special mention must be made of the two brigade majors –
the Fitzalan Howard brothers."
UNQUOTE
He had a lively war
and uncles who didn't get back from the previous one.
QUOTE
MOSCOW
(AP) Alexander Feklisov, the Soviet-era spy chief who oversaw the
espionage work of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and helped mediate the
1962 Cuban missile crisis, has died, a Russian official said
Friday....
UNQUOTE
He was definitely one of
theirs and trusted too. His spies were not lucky though.
QUOTE
Brigadier-General Paul Tibbets,
who died on Thursday aged 92, commanded the USAAF bomber Enola Gay,
which dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 1945....... The
bomb to be used was codenamed "Little Boy".....
UNQUOTE
I had one friend with a one way ticket to
Japan who was ever grateful.
QUOTE
The 26,000-word speech, delivered on
February 25 1956, denounced Stalin's regime of terror. Grayevsky had
been able to obtain a copy [ of Khrushchev's
speech ] with the help of his lover, Lucia
Baranowski, wife of Poland's deputy prime minister....... Lucia
allowed Grayevsky to remove the booklet for a couple of hours, and he
took it to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, where it was photocopied.
UNQUOTE
Treachery is a very Jewish
thing. So is cunning. He was a fornicator too. Albeit he did one job
as a freebie.
QUOTE
Dashing officer in both the RAF and the
Colonial Service with a wide range of business interests.
UNQUOTE
QUOTE
Air Vice-Marshal Peter
Howard,....... was one of a small group of RAF doctors specialising
in aviation medicine with the task of testing and analysing human
tolerance of flight......On March 13 1962 Howard fired himself from
the rear seat of a modified Meteor jet fighter. The aircraft was
flying at 250ft, at 290mph. The rocket pack strapped to the seat
generated 3,600lbs of thrust over less than a fifth of a second,
giving a peak force of 16G (16 times the pull of gravity), propelling
the seat from the aircraft at a velocity of 80ft per
second.
UNQUOTE
Ejecting is not a lot of fun. The alternative
is worse.
QUOTE
Arthur Kornberg, who died on Friday aged
89, was the first person to synthesise DNA in a test tube, in 1967;
eight years earlier, he had, with Severo Ochoa, won the Nobel prize
for medicine for his insights into the mechanism of DNA.
UNQUOTE
His
son got a Nobel too and a real one at that. Not bad for the son of a
Jewish(?) tailor.
QUOTE
Christopher
Seton-Watson, who has died aged 89, was an authority on Italian
politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries; he also won an MC and
Bar in the Second World War.......
UNQUOTE
He got
about and had brains too.
QUOTE
Lim was one of a number of hard-driving
Malay-Chinese entrepreneurs who made colossal fortunes as their
country developed and prospered..... he had the idea of developing a
mountain resort closer to the capital, Kuala
Lumpur.
UNQUOTE
Enterprise and hard work can pay off.
QUOTE
RB Kitaj, who died on Sunday aged 74, was an
American painter domiciled for 40 years in England.........he raised
the stature of English painting to one of international
significance.... Kitaj's affection for England was sorely tested in
1994, when there was a major Tate Gallery retrospective of his work.
The verdict of the critics in the British press was savage, and Kitaj
was deeply distressed.
UNQUOTE
Any one who takes modern art
seriously should be treated with suspicion. Art dealers are
different. They are trading on the gullible.
QUOTE
Sammy Duddy, who died on October 17 aged 62,
had a rather unusual curriculum vitae for a member of the Loyalist
paramilitary Ulster Defence Association in having been a drag artiste
who went by the stage name of Samantha.
UNQUOTE
It seems that
he didn't murder Pat Finucane or get involved in the Kincora Job.
Adams would say the same no doubt.
Bass guitarist with post-punk band
Killing Joke who found a place in the group after the Apocalypse
failed to materialise. He flaked out at 46 so maybe the name paid
off.
QUOTE
Squadron
Leader Harry Scott, who has died aged 89, started his RAF career as a
teenage aircraft apprentice and, after training as an air observer,
became one of a small group of specialist navigators who pioneered
the use of the blind-bombing aid "Oboe" with the Pathfinder
Force.
UNQUOTE
Being the navigator is not so glamorous
but it is just as important.
QUOTE
General Sir
Richard Trant, who has died aged 79, played an important role in the
direction of the Falklands campaign as Land Deputy to the Commander
of the South Atlantic Task Force.
UNQUOTE
And that was about
it. Did he ever hear a shot fired in anger? It doesn't say.
QUOTE
Varoomshka was a comic
strip Candide for the 1970s, a wide-eyed, lissom innocent abroad, who
defined the second coming of Harold Wilson and the dog-eared
hypocrisies of the Heath and Callaghan years...........
UNQUOTE
She sounds like fun.
Was a corporal from Fiji
who let himself be shot by the Japanese because his men would never
fall back while he was alive. He really did give his life.
QUOTE
Deborah Kerr,.... was the
unfadingly [ sic ] ladylike and prototypical English rose whose
red-haired, angular beauty and self-possessed femininity
distinguished more than 50 films in four decades of cinema.
UNQUOTE
We all get
older and maybe wiser.
QUOTE
Countess Andrée
de Jongh, who has died in Brussels aged 90, founded and organised the
Comet Escape Line, the route from Belgium through France to Spain
used by hundreds of Allied airmen to escape from Nazi-occupied
Europe......
UNQUOTE
She was a genuine heroine. The Gestapo were
nearly as nasty as Mossad.
Moderniser who helped to
make Coutts a model for success in private banking. He was with 5
PARA in Java.
QUOTE
Bob Denard, the French
mercenary who has died aged 78, was one of the soldiers of fortune to
profit from the upheavals of Africa of the 1960s.
UNQUOTE
Interesting times if you were in the right
places.
QUOTE
In April
1951,.... Harvey, then a captain... attached to 1st Battalion the
Gloucestershire Regiment (1st Glosters), was in command of D Company,
which was defending high ground above the Imjin.
UNQUOTE
Not
many men of the Glosters are left. Now there is one less.
QUOTE
Cynthia Pitman, who has
died aged 94, was a lifelong hunt follower who was still riding to
hounds in her mid-eighties, always at the head of the field and
undaunted by weather or terrain; in her hunting colours and black top
hat, she cut a slight but unique figure as the oldest woman in
Britain regularly to ride in pursuit of the fox.
UNQUOTE
She did
what she wanted. Lucky her.
QUOTE
David Muffett, who has
died aged 88, applied the skills he had honed when dealing with
cannibals in colonial Africa to battling education ministers and
teaching unions in his role as chairman of Hereford and Worcester
County Council education committee.
UNQUOTE
Our empire was not
the worst in the world as the Americans are busy proving this day.
Was on the Escape
Committee at Colditz pretty much for the duration.
QUOTE
Sir Alan Campbell,
who died on Sunday aged 88, was ambassador to the Court of Emperor
Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and later to Italy.
UNQUOTE
It sounds like
fun.
QUOTE
José
Luis de Vilallonga, who has died aged 87, was a Spanish nobleman,
playboy, wastrel, author, fortune-hunter and bit-part actor who
appeared briefly with Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's; late
in life he achieved notoriety when he confessed to having cruelly
mistreated his first wife, an English aristocrat...... Having fought
for Franco during the Spanish civil war, Vilallonga was himself
obliged to go into exile after writing a series of anti-Franco novels
in the 1950s..... he was sentenced in absentia to imprisonment for
sedition — and every three months thereafter was retried and
had his sentence increased. By the time he returned to Spain his
sentence was said to have amounted to more than 300 years..... In his
vainglorious and — in the opinion of some — highly
unreliable memoirs, he described himself as "a hardened
alcoholic who, without ever taking precautions of any kind, has slept
with more whores than a porcupine has quills".
UNQUOTE
A
better man to know about than know; the sort who make the Trots see
red.
QUOTE
Graham Clarke,... fought
in the Korean War as a Fleet Air Arm pilot and in 1968 co-piloted a
hovercraft on the dangerous Negro and Orinoco rivers in South
America; the need to negotiate treacherous rapids made it one of the
most difficult journeys ever undertaken by a hovercraft.
UNQUOTE
He did get about.
QUOTE
Durward
Cruickshank , who has died aged 83, was an eminent mathematical
crystallographer and Professor of Chemistry at the University of
Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) from 1967 to
1984.
UNQUOTE
The kind of man who
underpins our civilization and gets no thanks for his pains.
QUOTE
Tony Ryan, the Irish
entrepreneur who died on Wednesday aged 71, founded the "no-frills"
airline Ryanair and was thus instrumental in breaking up the cosy
cartel of national flag-carriers which had dominated European
aviation from the 1950s.
UNQUOTE
We owe him a lot. It was
Maggie Thatcher who gave him the go ahead when the Irish government
wanted to stop him.
QUOTE
Squadron
Leader Terry O'Brien, who has died aged 91, was a brave and outspoken
pilot who served with the Chindits and later flew many clandestine
sorties in south-east Asia, experiences which he later recounted in a
widely-acclaimed trilogy of memoirs. O'Brien had completed a tour of
operations flying bombers in England and survived the Japanese
advance on Singapore and Java when he volunteered to join the 4/9th
Gurkha Rifles assigned to General Orde Wingate's Long Range
Penetration Group, better known as the Chindits......
UNQUOTE
A good man, not
a yes man.
QUOTE
The Reverend
Rex Humbard,........ was a one-time itinerant preacher who became one
of the best-known television evangelists in America;.....
UNQUOTE
Billy Graham eat your heart out. Elvis has
to be the ultimate customer.
QUOTE
Professor
Wolfgang Panofsky, who died on September 24 aged 88, was a particle
physicist and director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre
(SLAC) in California; with Jack Steinberger, he was the first to
isolate the neutral pi meson, one of the subatomic particles which
had been predicted by theoretical scientists to account for the
strong force which binds the nuclei of atoms. [ I
don't know what they are either - Editor ]
UNQUOTE
He was on the right lines with
nukes. Witness Bush's secretive attempt to nuke Iran -
American
Air Force Mutiny Prevents Bush Nuking Iran
QUOTE
Lois Maxwell,.... played
Miss Moneypenny in 14 James Bond films;... though other younger women
later took over the part, she was widely regarded as the definitive
Moneypenny, M's spinsterly secretary secretly in love with
007.........
UNQUOTE
She had quite a life and finished
up in Frome, so she had taste too.
QUOTE
Major
Sir Hamish Forbes, 7th Bt, who has died aged 91, won an MC while
serving with the Welsh Guards and was later appointed MBE (Military)
in recognition of his numerous attempts to escape from a series of
PoW camps.
UNQUOTE
He tried but he was not that lucky.
QUOTE
Lieutenant Commander
Harry Wardle, who has died aged 88, devoted five years after retiring
from the Royal Navy to finding and plugging a leak in a mile-long
underwater tin mine on the seabed off Cornwall.
UNQUOTE
The
Irish Free State, Spain during the civil war, Shanghai when the city
was bombed by the Japanese, bringing back French and Polish troops
from St Nazaire, the battle of Taranto, the siege of Tobruk and the
evacuations of Greece and Crete, Matapan, Arctic and North Atlantic
convoys and the Normandy landings. He really got about.
QUOTE
John Gardiner, who has
died aged 64, was considered the most inventive and capable
restoration engineer in the world of classic cars. Crosthwaite &
Gardiner (C&G), the company he established with Dick Crosthwaite
more than 40 years ago, built a reputation as the leading specialist
restorer of almost everything "interesting" on four wheels.
UNQUOTE
A
sound Englishman, the sort who made the Industrial Revolution.
QUOTE
Ambassador to
France who was granted an almost lyrical reception by the French on
his arrival in Paris.
UNQUOTE
A good man it seems.
QUOTE
The
Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar, who died on Friday aged 81, was an
urbane intellectual who drew his political inspiration from the "one
nation" Toryism that dominated the Conservative Party in the 30
years after the Second World War;......
UNQUOTE
He was involved
in the fall of Rhodesia and the rise of Mugabe. A decent man got it
disastrously wrong. He didn't see through Blair, another little crook
either. He owned The Spectator once.
QUOTE
... Three weeks after
his arrival at Courtney's Post, Gallipoli, the former labourer in
Victoria's Forestry Department had amazed his commanders by jumping
into an enemy-held trench and single-handedly battling a group of
armed Turks, killing two with his bayonet and shooting five. It was a
stunning act of bravery for which he was awarded Australia's first
Victoria Cross of World War I.
UNQUOTE
The establishment
didn't like him for not being a yes man. See -
First
Digger to win VC in World War I
QUOTE
Lady Jeanne
Campbell , who has died aged 78, was a journalist who reported for
the Evening Standard from New York for many years; she was also the
former wife of Norman Mailer, the daughter of the reprobate 11th Duke
of Argyll and the favourite granddaughter of Lord Beaverbrook.....
James C Humes... claimed.., that she was the only woman to have known
"Biblically" Presidents Khrushchev, Kennedy and Castro —
and all, he claimed, within the space of a year.
UNQUOTE
She
lived. It seems to run in the family.
QUOTE
Major-General
Sir John Anderson, who has died aged 91, was on Montgomery's
operational staff in the North African campaign and subsequently
became head of the Royal Corps of Signals (RCS) as Signal
Officer-in-Chief (Army).
UNQUOTE
He was not just anyone but lucky not to be
with Scott on his last run.
QUOTE
He
was a Luftwaffe fighter ace shot down over Stalingrad in 1942 whose
changeable loyalties were to exasperate his fellow Germans over the
next 60 years.
UNQUOTE
He made
The
Vicar of Bray sound steadfast but with loyalty to Adolf or Stalin
as options consistency was difficult.
QUOTE
Commander of
Land Forces during the Falklands War who had earlier won MCs in
Malaya and Brunei.
UNQUOTE
He got about. There was Ireland and
Operation Motorman too.
QUOTE
Pilot who helped
to sink the Königsberg and later spent five years as a PoW
despite frequent escape attempts.
UNQUOTE
Rather a sound man.
QUOTE
Group
Captain 'Benny' Goodman, who has died aged 86, was a Mosquito pilot
who marked some crucial targets for Lancaster bombers to destroy in
the lead-up to the D-Day landings in June 1944......
UNQUOTE
One tour of thirty operations is dangerous.
Well over two tours means lucky and competent.
It was North Africa, Bavaria,
EOKA, Kenya. Join the Army and see the world
QUOTE
The 4th Lord Bethell,...
was a hereditary peer.. and unsung hero of the Cold War..... among
those he helped were Irina Ratushinskaya, Vladimir Bukovsky, Oleg
Gordievsky, and the Sakharovs. For this he was denigrated by the KGB,
Private Eye, the Foreign Office, and the former Conservative prime
minister, Ted Heath.
UNQUOTE
Being libelled by the Eye was a
nuisance. They don't always get it right. Heath was a malicious Trot
who liked choir boys and brown envelopes. The Foreign Office is
little better and we can see why the KGB didn't like him. Vladimir
Bukovsky is a very sound chap who saw the reality of tyranny close up
- see Former Soviet
Dissident Warns of EU Dictatorship
QUOTE
Sir Tasker
Watkins, the former Deputy Chief Justice of England and Lord Justice
of Appeal who died yesterday aged 88, was awarded a Victoria Cross
for his conduct during the North-West Europe Campaign of 1944-45. On
August 16 1944, when commanding a company of 1/5th Company of the
Welch Regiment, Watkins attacked a German machine-gun post
single-handed while leading a bayonet charge.
UNQUOTE
There
were not many like him. Did we deserve him? Certainly our politicians
do not.
QUOTE
Author and
unabashed snob who scorned full-time employment, quarrelled over
money and haunted London's club land.
UNQUOTE
He was amusing
from a distance and confirmed socialists in their views.
QUOTE
Leonard
Williams,.... becoming chairman then president of the Nationwide
Anglia Building Society, after an eventful war as a Spitfire
pilot..... The squadron flew Spitfires in the fighter-reconnaissance
role and worked closely with the Allied armies, often identifying
targets for artillery and reporting the results.
UNQUOTE
Interesting
times but he survived. Not every one did.
QUOTE
The 9th
Duke of Buccleuch and 11th Duke of Queensberry, who died yesterday
aged 83, was Scotland's grandest aristocrat and the largest private
landowner in Europe.
UNQUOTE
He is well thought of and doubtless
saw life in the Royal Navy unlike the draft dodging lot that are
today's politicians.
QUOTE
Wartime anti-submarine
officer who later patrolled off Palestine and oversaw the arrival of
Polaris on the Clyde.
UNQUOTE
He was in when the Navy saw the
world.
QUOTE
Group
Captain Willie "Tirpitz" Tait, who died on Friday aged 90,
had a brilliant wartime career as a bomber commander; he attacked
some of the most demanding and difficult targets, the majority as the
leader or master bomber, and will long be remembered for his three
attacks against the German battleship Tirpitz. By the end of the war
he had flown more than 100 operations, in respect of which he had
been awarded, uniquely, four DSOs and two DFCs.
UNQUOTE
Getting the Tirpitz was a
major achievement. He did well.
The
Guardian, at its very occasional best tells it so well
George Macdonald Fraser, who has died aged
82, was the creator of Harry Flashman, one of the bright gems of the
English comic novel. Fraser was already 44, and a long-serving
journalist, when he decided to leave his job as deputy editor of the
then Glasgow Herald to write fiction. He had the happy idea of
resurrecting Flashman, the cowardly bully of Tom Brown's Schooldays
and seeing what happened to him after he had been expelled from
Rugby school for drunkenness.
Of
The Poona Horse made
it to Rome with the
6th Horse aka
Watson's Horse. Then it was Perugia, Assisi and
time for a quick prayer. His luck ran out half a mile later. He
began as a real cavalry man. Tracks came later.
In Flanders fields the
poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our
place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce
heard amid the guns below.
We
are the Dead. Short days ago
lived, felt dawn, saw sunset
glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders
fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from
failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If
ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies
grow
In Flanders fields.
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