I not sure what to make of the drama series now that it has completed its broadcast run. Overall I'd like to say that the BBC made a good fist of it. My main interest, however, was to see how they handled the novel’s Chapter Seventeen The Thunder Child and I have to say that that was botched. The main point of the Thunder Child episode is that the ship was torpedo ram. H.G. Wells writes:
‘The Thunder Child fired no gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.’
Yet the series producers had the warships all firing at the tripods immediately on sight. None of the ships was identified by name and none was torpedo ram. Wells also says that the Martian Fighting Machines were:
‘standing so far out to sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such another as themselves.’
The drama producers, however, had the ships firing ship to shore and bringing the tripods down while they were still on land. Oh dear.
Away from the television series, criticism has sometimes been levelled at Michael Trim, Geoff Taylor and Peter Goodfellow (who created the iconic artwork on the album of Jeff Wayne’s 1978 musical version) for depicting the ship as a two-funneled pre-dreadnought such as a Swiftsure-class or a Canopus-class battleship rather than as a one funnel torpedo ram like HMS Polyphemus:
Yet in the novel Wells does describe Thunder Child as having ‘twin funnels’. In this it would more closely have resembled the torpedo ram KDM Tordenskjold of the Royal Danish Navy. Translated as 'thundershield' it was built in 1882 it had 2 funnels raised on it lengthwise:
(Torpedo ram of the Kongelige Danske Marine named after the 18th century Norwegian admiral Peter Tordenskjold)
Having two funnels, however, is not necessarily the same thing as having ‘twin funnels’ as specified by Wells. Having twin funnels (i.e. funnels abreast) was a feature of the Majestic-class battleships including the appropriately named HMS Mars built in 1896:
(HMS Mars belching enuff black smoke to make a Martian’s eyes smart)
It’s also worth noting that nowhere in the novel does Wells use the prefix ‘HMS’ when referring to Thunder Child. Neither does he state which country’s fleet she belongs to. He does say of the ironclads at the scene that they were part of the ‘Channel Fleet’. So presumably they’re British. He does, however, mention the multi-national make-up of fishing vessels in the Thames Estuary – ‘English, Scotch, French, Dutch, and Swedish’. The word Danish, however, is conspicuously omitted from that list. Mmm. I would guess that Wells imagined the Thunder Child as being a sort of cross between HMS Mars, HMS Polyphemus and KDM Tordenskjold. A formidable literary creation in any event.
Meles meles Censura
Posts : 5037 Join date : 2011-12-30 Location : Pyrénées-Orientales, France
Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Wed 04 Dec 2019, 20:22
The French Navy also had some hefty barbette warships at about the same time (or a decade earlier: 1880s rather than 1890s) which sported rams, twin, side-by-side funnels and no primary, centre-line gun-turrets, eg the Dévastation and the Amiral Duperré:
La Dévastation
L'Amiral Duperré
Unlike the ships of other navies at the time, French warships usually had a massive superstructure and a very pronounced tumblehome: they look rather like floating tenement blocks or factories and must have rolled terribly in rough seas:
Le Marceau
Meles meles Censura
Posts : 5037 Join date : 2011-12-30 Location : Pyrénées-Orientales, France
Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Thu 05 Dec 2019, 09:52
When writing 'War of the Worlds' HG Wells was surely also influenced by the novella, 'The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer', written in 1871 by George Tomkyns Chesney.
Like WOTW, 'The Battle of Dorking' is a hypothetical invasion story (of Britain by a German-speaking European nation), but with a serious political 'message' about the then parlous state of the British army: it was written immediately following the sudden defeat of France by Prussia. But even Chesney could not realistically imply any great weaknesses in the Royal Navy of his time. Although the RN had not had to fight any major fleet battle since Trafalgar in 1805, successive governments had maintained generous investment in ship-building and technological improvements, and so towards the end of the century Britain's navy was equal in numerical strength to any two other powers combined.
Accordingly Chesney had to find a way of plausibly neutralising the British navy so that the thrust of his story could rapidly move onto land and the critical engagement at the titular Battle of Dorking. He does this by having the fleet dispersed around the globe due to various local threats, in India, North America, the West Indies and Ireland, and additionally by the main fleet being lured to the Dardenelles after a cunning ruse by the enemy. Even so he then - just like with HG Wells' martian invaders - has the remaining home fleet unexpectedly liquidated in the Channel by a devastating secret weapon, 'the fateful engines':
"So far all had been expectancy, then came the first token of calamity. "An ironclad has been blown up"--"the enemy's torpedoes are doing great damage"--"the flag-ship is laid abroad the enemy"--"the flag-ship appears to be sinking"--"the vice-admiral has signalled to"--there the cable became silent, and, as you know, we heard no more till, two days afterwards, the solitary ironclad which escaped the disaster steamed into Portsmouth.
Then the whole story came out--how our sailors, gallant as ever, had tried to close with the enemy; how the latter evaded the conflict at close quarters, and, sheering off, left behind them the fatal engines which sent our ships, one after the other, to the bottom; how all this happened almost in a few minutes. The Government, it appears, had received warnings of this invention; but to the nation this stunning blow was utterly unexpected."
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Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Mon 23 Mar 2020, 15:54
Vizzer wrote:
The word Danish, however, is conspicuously omitted from that list. Mmm. I would guess that Wells imagined the Thunder Child as being a sort of cross between HMS Mars, HMS Polyphemus and KDM Tordenskjold. A formidable literary creation in any event.
I like the Tordenskjold theory, Vizzer.
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Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Mon 23 Mar 2020, 16:10
Meles meles wrote:
Even so he then - just like with HG Wells' martian invaders - has the remaining home fleet unexpectedly liquidated in the Channel by a devastating secret weapon, 'the fateful engines':
Fear of German underwater weapons was very real, before and during WW1. In a letter to the Admiralty in October 1914, Admiral Jellicoe wrote:
If, for instance, the enemy battle fleet were to turn away from our advancing fleet, I should assume the intention was to lead us over mines and submarines and decline to be so drawn............Such a result would be absolutely repugnant to the feelings of all British naval officers and men, but with new, untried methods of warfare, new tactics must be devised....The situation is a difficult one: it is quite possible that half our battle fleet might be disabled by underwater attack before the guns opened fire at all.
Not just submarine fired torpedoes. Pre war exercises suggested as many as 30% of surface fired torpedoes would be hits if no avoiding action was taken.
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Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Wed 25 Mar 2020, 14:46
Cover of the April 1897 issue of Pearson's magazine which first introduced the story:
I'm doing the dearest little serial for Pearson's new magazine," Wells wrote to a friend, "in which I completely wreck and sack Woking — killing my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways — then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, which I sack, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity." That dearest little serial, after its 1897 run in Pearson's Magazine in the U.K. and Cosmopolitan in the U.S., appeared the next year in book form as The War of the Worlds, a common publication procedure for popular English-language novels in the 19th and early 20th century.
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Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Wed 25 Mar 2020, 15:16
One of Warwick Goble's illustrations for Pearsons;
Posts : 805 Join date : 2018-10-19 Location : Kingdom of Mercia
Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Wed 25 Mar 2020, 16:11
Triceratops wrote:
Meles meles wrote:
Even so he then - just like with HG Wells' martian invaders - has the remaining home fleet unexpectedly liquidated in the Channel by a devastating secret weapon, 'the fateful engines':
Fear of German underwater weapons was very real, before and during WW1. In a letter to the Admiralty in October 1914, Admiral Jellicoe wrote:
If, for instance, the enemy battle fleet were to turn away from our advancing fleet, I should assume the intention was to lead us over mines and submarines and decline to be so drawn............Such a result would be absolutely repugnant to the feelings of all British naval officers and men, but with new, untried methods of warfare, new tactics must be devised....The situation is a difficult one: it is quite possible that half our battle fleet might be disabled by underwater attack before the guns opened fire at all.
Not just submarine fired torpedoes. Pre war exercises suggested as many as 30% of surface fired torpedoes would be hits if no avoiding action was taken.
iirc a torpedo fired from the cruiser Weisbaden hit and damaged HMS Marlborough. Her reduced speed opened a gap in the formation which helped the night-time escape of the High Seas Fleet.
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Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Wed 25 Mar 2020, 16:21
Gil, this is from wiki:
After the opposing fleets disengaged late in the day, the Grand Fleet steamed south in an attempt to cut off the retreating Germans and destroy them the following morning. The 6th Division was slowed down by Marlborough, which could make no more than 15.75 kn (29.17 km/h; 18.12 mph) by this point. By around 02:00 on 1 June, the 6th Division was about 12 nmi (22 km; 14 mi) behind the rest of the fleet. At that time, the bulkheads in the starboard forward boiler room started to give way under the strain, forcing Marlborough to reduce speed to 12 knots (22 km/h; 14 mph). The damage control teams believed that if the main battery were to fire, the shoring supporting the damaged bulkheads would give way, greatly increasing the risk to the ship.
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Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Sun 05 Apr 2020, 11:14
The Wells' short story The Star, first appeared in The Graphic in December 1897.
It looks as though it takes place in the WOTW Universe, though in a different timeline:
It was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December
Ogilvy, of course being the name of the astronomer in WOTW.
And at the end of the story:
The Martian astronomers—for there are astronomers on Mars, although they are very different beings from men—were naturally profoundly interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of course. "Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was flung through our solar system into the sun," one wrote, "it is astonishing what a little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white discolouration (supposed to be frozen water) round either pole." Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.
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Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Tue 16 Jun 2020, 19:44
Here's a statue, The Martian in Woking:
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Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Tue 05 Jan 2021, 18:16
The Royal Mint have issued a £2 coin for the anniversary of Wells' death.
Features a four legged TRIpod !!!!!
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Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Tue 04 Jan 2022, 09:38
A new way to experience the Jeff Wayne musical:
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: War of the Worlds Sat 21 May 2022, 14:15
Not quite invisible. Adaptive camouflage suit for the creature in Predator, 1987;
Adaptive camouflage is being researched and developed at present;