September 16th 1847



The Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust is founded and purchases the property after which it is named. The body - funded totally through public charitable donation - is therefore officially the oldest conservation society in Britain and the house it preserved Britain's first officially "listed" building.

In the same month the death toll from starvation and diseases related to the Great Famine in Ireland had just passed the 300,000 mark.

23 September 1803, Sir Arthur Wellesley wins the Battle of Assaye, a feat he later considers to be his greatest military achievement, surpassing even Waterloo;

23 September 1779,

"I have not yet begun to fight" John Paul Jones' reply to HMS Serapis when called on to surrender;



Jones captured the Serapis, though his own ship, Bonhomme Richard, was so badly damaged it sank two days later.

Triceratops wrote:

23 September 1803, Sir Arthur Wellesley wins the Battle of Assaye, a feat he later considers to be his greatest military achievement, surpassing even Waterloo;

It was indeed a very close run thing, far more so than Waterloo, largely because the commander of the pickets either misunderstood his orders, disobeyed his orders, or just got confused in the heat of battle, or whatever ... but he led the troops under his command directly into an impossible position directly facing the enemy artillery ... a situation that Wellesley, as overall commander, had to recover from by diverting troops into the melée, and of necessity Wellleseley had to lead this counter-attack himself, during which he had his horse shot dead under him. Eventually though, maybe not as planned, the enemy position was taken and the battle was won, but it was a very, very close run thing.

And now I should perhaps "own up" as it was actually a distant cousin of mine ... a cousin several times removed, but still bearing the same surname as myself (we link via his great-grandfather), that was the officer of the pickets who in 1803 so nearly ended Arthur Wellesley's career, if not his life, long before he'd got his dukedom, before the Spanish Campaign or Waterloo, and indeed well before anyone much had heard of him.

But in an interview years later when Arthur Wellesley was both Duke of Wellington and Prime Minister, he said that he "could apportion no blame" to the commander of the pickets (my distant cousin) who had so very nearly lost him the battle, if not his life ... saying simply: "these things happen in battle".

Made famous by Steven Spielberg in his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Devil's Tower in Wyoming became the United States' first National Monument on the 24th September 1906;



ps interesting story about your relation Meles.

It was Temp's birthday yesterday, I'm sure she knows who's birthday it is today.

Here he is counting how many people he'll have to have killed in order to seize the throne;

Ha ha, very funny.

Many belated happies, Temperance, though I can't come up with anything as witty as Trike has.  I was doing some audio-typing this morning and part way through the tape someone's mobile phone went off and the ring tone was the main theme from Game of Thrones.  Could have been the person had dictated the piece on the train.

October 5th 610CE - Carthage finally defeats the Roman Empire and takes over the whole caboodle.

Well, in a way. One of those strangely forgotten "heroes", Heraclius, having two years earlier been dispatched by his father (also Heraclius) who at that time was top bishop in Carthage ("exarch" they tended to call themselves), took his fleet on a murderous route through the North African coastal territorial ports, sacked and took as many cities as he could along that stretch, then continued on through the Levant, and finally on this day in 610 managed to seize the jewel in the crown, the empire's capital city Constantinople.

He could do this as Constantinople and its Byzantine territories had other things on its mind. Besieged (quite literally at times) by various ethnic groups and their armies - chief amongst them being the Slavs and the Avars - the emperor Phocas had basically told every regional commander to look out for himself. The elder Heraclius had taken this instruction at face value. Knowing that Carthage - at that time a declining area rapidly losing its status, its population and its agricultural land to desert - would soon be jettisoned completely by the Byzantine administration, he decided that it was time to do to Phocas what Phocas had done to Maurice six years earlier and mount a coup at the top level. This was probably the last great successful military and political manoeuvre  in the region pre-islam and, thanks to his son and the biggest fleet outside of the Dardanelles at the time, it worked a treat. By the time Heraclius junior arrived at the gates of Constantinople he and his bish dad effectively ran the empire, having secured along the way its food supplies, its remaining trade routes and - crucially - a deal with the Avars to split the divvies when the ultimate prize was won.

Heraclius was to be a rather successful emperor. In fact however it is the view of many historians that this very success was one of the chief developments which would ultimately lead to the empire's inevitable decline (though this would take another 800 years). His defeat of the Persians - something that no Romanesque ruler had ever achieved - and his pragmatic settling of Slavs and Avars so that they no longer represented a threat from without, left him and his empire thereafter to indulge in what ultimately proved catastrophic bouts of prolonged navel gazing. His authority, though never directly challenged again in his lifetime, suffered terribly during the great and acrimonious debate in the church about Jesus energy (such things mattered back then) and when he backed the monk Sergius's compromise to invent a new concept to replace monoenergism with monotheletism he effectively made enemies of the church patriarchs in the capital and by default therefore a large part of his bureaucracy.

Despite his theological shortcomings he managed however to hold everything together until his death - a respectable 31 years later - but his final act, to split the rule of Byzantium between his son and daughter as joint top dogs, backfired terribly and plunged the empire into yet another violent cycle of takeovers. Perhaps that is why history has tended to forget him somewhat, even though his reign as emperor proved to be third longest of any emperor, east or west, and included the only occasion when a Roman empire could say in all honesty that it had neutralised absolutely all of its neighbouring enemies.

Well, except for those mad Mohammedan lads in the southern wastelands who sprang up during his reign, though what harm could they possibly do?


Heraclius becomes head of the Persians by taking heads of the Persians.

5 October 1969, the first transmission of;

8 October 1829, George Stephenson's Rocket defeats four rival steam locomotives in the Rainhill Trials;

After Dicky III the next most villainous monarch in England's history is normally judged to be this lad:



On this day in 1216, King John, having recently lost all his jewels in the wash, finally succumbed to the poisonous odium that surrounded his brief stint as successor to his brother, the lion-hearted wastrel. History has not been kind to John, but then neither were his contemporaries (having to go around with the moniker "lack-land" just because he lost a bit of France that no one out tilling the fields probably even knew existed certainly didn't help the PR much either). Anything good he did was put down to pressure from other nice lads like the barons, anything bad that other bastards (like the barons) did in his name was seemingly down to him.

John, it must be remembered though, held the record in his day for what we might now call publicly funded improvements within the realm. He was a great man for building churches, big and small they say, but if this contemporary picture is any guide it seems he cheated a little by giving away models rather than the real thing:

21 October 1805, the Battle of Trafalgar;

30 October 1974; The Rumble in the Jungle;

In a recent survey 90% of people under the age of 35 in the USA thought that America "won" the Vietnam War, 80% that the USA fought "against Vietnam", and 75% that the war must have been "over oil". Most were not aware of any anti-war demonstrations within the USA during this period and said that this either simply could not be true or that those involved must have been "communists". Only 10% accurately located Vietnam on a world map.

November 2nd 1667 - Samuel Pepys went to see Shakespeare's "Henry IV" at the King's playhouse, the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, and encountered a little more drama than he bargained for. Luckily the prostitute "Orange Moll" was at hand to save the day. Moll's real name was Mary Meggs and like her famous employer Nell Gwynne was licenced to sell oranges in theatres along with her sister Rose. The small "china oranges" (mandarins) retailed at 6d each, a hefty price in its day! Mary, Rose and Nell also proffered after-play services in which fruit did not play a prominent role, but perhaps it was in that end of her line of work that Mary had learnt how deftly to rescue a customer in danger of suffocation?

... after dinner my wife and Willett and I to the King’s playhouse, and there saw “Henry the Fourth:” and contrary to expectation, was pleased in nothing more than in Cartwright’s speaking of Falstaffe’s speech about “What is Honour?” The house full of Parliament-men, it being holyday with them: and it was observable how a gentleman of good habit, sitting just before us, eating of some fruit in the midst of the play, did drop down as dead, being choked; but with much ado Orange Moll did thrust her finger down his throat, and brought him to life again. After the play, we home, and I busy at the office late, and then home to supper and to bed.

2nd November 1837 was the birthday of French illustrator Emile Bayard. Bayard's most famous illustration is of Cosette from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables;



the iconic image has continued with the musical;

November 3rd 1957 - this quiet retiring chappie from Ferriday, Louisiana, releases a sultry paean to all meteors with a brightness exceeding magnitude -4. Here he is performing it for the first time on TV ...



What a musically momentous day it was too! This little gem also escaped from a recording studio ...



What natural movers! Who said white men can't dance?

Godzilla makes his first appearance on 2nd November 1954;

4 November 1847, Drs Simpson, Keith and Duncan experiment with anaesthetic properties of chloroform;

In one of those "OMG Is It Really Forty Years Ago??????" moments let us pause to reflect that it is indeed exactly forty years ago today that this emerged from the recording studio:



If it hadn't been for DJ Kenny Everett this classic might now be known only to a few die-hard Queen fans as a pretty nifty finale to one of their best studio albums "A Night At The Opera". Everett not only played the six minute long track (from a purloined master tape) on his Capital Radio show (having been ordered never to play anything that exceeded three minutes and twenty seconds - go figure) but also famously played it fourteen times within two days, on one occasion locking himself and his producer into the studio to prevent a very angry station executive from storming in and ripping the tape to shreds. In the UK the record would remain at number one in the charts for nine weeks and ultimately registered sales of 2,440,000. A further 4,800,000 registered sales of the single in the USA plus comparable popularity in almost every market in which it was launched, when combined with sales of the albums on which it has featured, has made Bohemian Rhapsody one of the top ten most purchased songs since the recording era began.

5 November 1942 - Operation Kingpin. A true tale of subterfuge, betrayal, daring, honour, comedy and farce …

In 1942 as part of the planned allied invasion of North Africa (operation Torch) the allies tried to secure the cooperation of the French General, Henri Giraud, who was then under house arrest by the Vichy government for his anti-Nazi leanings. In Operation Kingpin, Giraud was to be sprung from his confinement in Toulon by a cadre of anti-Vichy officers, and secretly brought to　Gibraltar to meet with General　Eisenhower and General Clark. Giraud had agreed to support an allied landing in　French North Africa, provided that only American troops were used and that he or another French officer was the commander of the operation.



On 23 October Eisenhower secretly agreed that the invasion of North Africa was now "on", but the Americans promised only that Giraud would be in command "as soon as possible". Giraud, still imprisoned in France, responded with a demand for a written commitment that he would be commander within 48 hours of the landings. Furthermore, despite the urgency, Giraud insisted that he could not leave France before 20 November. He was however eventually persuaded that he needed to leave earlier and so be ready to leave just as soon as allied forces could effect his rescue.

On 26 October Captain Wright of the United States Navy was directed to command the mission to rapidly extract Giraud (code-named Operation Kingpin). Giraud had already flatly refused to deal with the British, but there were only British submarines anywhere near the south of France. To appease the French general, HMS Seraph, under the command of Lieutenant Jewell RN, briefly became USS Seraph, flying the US Navy ensign. Nominally, the submarine came under the command of Wright, although Jewell took care of actual operations. Seraph effectively had two captains: one American, the other British.

Capt. Jewell RN, now in command of USS Seraph, was ordered to patrol up and down the French coast until he received a signal giving the location from where he was to pick up his passengers. Finally on the night of 5 November Seraph arrived at a location some 20 miles east of Toulon, and secretly took on board the French General, his son, and three staff officers. In the spirit of things, the British crew, now officially sailors of the US Navy, affected American accents that they imitated from the movies. Of course it fooled nobody, including Giraud … but Gallic honour was maintained.

After the pick-up Seraph, now out at sea, transferred her charges to a Catalina flying boat and they were flown to Gibraltar for the long-awaited, face-to-face, meeting with Eisenhower and Clark. Eisenhower asked Giraud to assume command of French troops in North Africa during Operation Torch and direct them to join the Allies. But Giraud had expected to command the whole operation, the job that had been given to Eisenhower, and he adamantly refused to participate on any other basis, saying his "honour would be tarnished". However, by the next morning Giraud relented, although he refused to leave immediately for Algiers and remained in Gibraltar. However pro-allied elements in Algeria, having independently agreed amongst themselves to support the Allied landings, seized complete control of Algiers on the night of 7-8 November. Giraud, seeing that things were fast developing without him, flew to Algiers on 9 November, but his attempt to assume command of French forces was rebuffed and his broadcast directing French troops in the key cities of Oran and Casablanca to cease resistance and join the Allies, was ignored.

Instead, it appeared that Admiral François Darlan, who happened to be in Algiers, was the only one with real authority. Despite Darlan's Vichy-ite reputation, the Allies quickly recognized him as head of the French forces, and it was Darlan that successfully ordered the French to cease fire and join the Allies on 10 November. With nearly all North African French forces accepting Darlan’s authority, on 13 November he was recognized as high commissioner of French North and West Africa. Giraud was finally appointed commander of all French forces ….. but under Darlan.

Then on 24 December, Darlan was assassinated under mysterious circumstances. With the backing of the Allies, especially Eisenhower, Giraud was elected to succeed him … and so his honour was restored.

Meles meles,

yes the history of the Seraph and Giraud I digged it up already for the BBC in the time...and also the Seraph was in the Operation Mincemeat

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2483589/Skull-crossbones-flag-WW2s-HMS-Seraph-emerges.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Seraph_(P219)


As about the assassination of Darlan...I did a lot of research for this site:

http://www.empereurperdu.com/tribunehistoire/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=257
But as I was in the middle of such French authorities I have not commented that much...but read once the site of the grandson of one of the protagonists that I mentioned. It seems till now that there is a lot of controversy about the event as the "monarchist" side...yes French monarchists there in Algiers, with a pretendent of the French royal family overthere...how complicated it all was...

PS: In an English book about the conquest of Italy after operation Torch I read the experiences of an English major? and somewhere in his book he met some Italian royalists with their own resistance group to try to restore the monarchy...

Kind regards, Paul.

The often under-appreciated contributor to RAF success in the Battle of Britain, the Hawker Hurricane, made its maiden flight on this day in 1935.


The prototype K5083 immediately prior to take-off on its first test flight.

Like the Spitfire, the Hurricane had to overcome some operational limitations when engaged in dog-fights against its German counterparts, especially the Messerschmidt Bf109s which accompanied German bombers. In the Hurricane's case these involved low rates of acceleration, low top speeds compared even to the Heinkel 111 (considered almost obsolete by the Luftwaffe at the time and about to be replaced anyway), and along with the Spitfire one potentially fatal flaw associated with its Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. If the nose was suddenly dipped (something almost unavoidable in most dog-fight manoeuvres) the effect was to flood the carburettor and kill the engine, something of a drawback if one is attempting to engage the enemy.

A woman by the name of Beatrice "Tilly" Shilling, then an aeronautical engineer at RAF Farnborough, came up with the elegant solution which grateful (if rather rude) pilots immediately christened "Miss Shilling's Orifice", alternatively "Miss Tilly's Diaphragm", or simply "Tilly's Orifice". In fact what she invented was more like a washer, placed in the fuel distribution feed so that more controlled amounts of fuel at all times made their way into the combustion chamber and at particular angles and velocities were less likely to vacate the chamber, as had been happening. Tilly and her team travelled to every RAF base in Britain personally installing the modification on all Spitfires and Hurricanes (a task not completed until 1941) and her contribution to saving pilots' lives through the introduction of the "RAE Restrictor" (its official name) was rightly acknowledged and feted by RAF members (if not RAF command - Shilling never received any official commendation for her work).

Tilly, who had been a successful motorbike racer before the war (she allegedly refused to marry her fiance until he too had lapped Brooklands at over 100mph and received, like her, the Gold Star award for the feat), remained working for the Royal Aircraft Establishment until her retirement in 1969. In the 1950s she helped design the Blue Streak Missile - an ill-fated attempt at developing a British missile defence system but which enjoyed some success as a launcher for the later Europa Space Programme. Tilly (and presumably her orifices) died in 1990, aged 81.


Tilly on her Norton.

Invent a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. So goes the old adage, and in the case of William C. Hooker of Abingdon, Illinois, such was indeed the case. On November 6th 1894 he received a patent for the spring-loaded trap beloved of Tom & Jerry cartoonists, sadistic pranksters, astro-physicists and evolutionists explaining how random doesn't mean unpredictable in terms of cause and effect, and of course the rest of us who have ever been faced with an infestation of our long distant evolutionary relatives.



Hooker's design has remained relatively unchanged over the last 121 years, though a modified design patented in 1898 and again in 1899 by a British inventor James Atkinson has led to much false accreditation in the years that followed, especially in Britain.

Hooker was a farmer by profession and patented several other devices useful around a farm, mostly designed to trap vermin but also including spring operated gates and even a hedge trimmer. He wasn't slow to realise the earning potential of his discovery and his original "Animal Trap Company", thanks to various takeovers and mergers in the meantime, is now the giant Woodstream Corporation, a world leader in pest control with offices in London, Shanghai, and a still rather modest and unassuming headquarters in Lititz, Pennsylvania.

Well as the old saying goes:

"It's the early bird that catches the worm ... but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese".

A long one today - but one worth the telling ...

British people tend to accept that their empire must have been built with some atrocities committed on the way, but (unsurprisingly) British history as taught in British schools tends to gloss over most of these or ignores them completely, at least until some form of collective "faux-guilt" can be generated for contemporary political purposes - normally so an incumbent prime minister or similar figurehead can belatedly "apologise" on behalf of the British people for an event or a past practice that the majority of the British people find in fact surprising they are now being held accountable for. In that way British involvement in the slave trade, or the famine in Ireland in the 1840s, can in the 21st century be parceled up and consigned to the political out-tray so that future generations be spared the ignominy of having to contemplate the uncomfortable fact that others outside their immediate society might actually still harbour a grudge against them for such heinous crimes committed by their forebears. Politically the issues are rendered neutral and harmless and consciences wiped clean without the requirement henceforth to actually have to understand them. All very neat.

But then this only works really well for the really big crimes - ones that defy any sense of communal guilt anyway because of the scope of the atrocity's harm to others. It is easy to disassociate oneself from an ancestral crime of genocidal proportions, for example, and look the victims' descendants in the eye as equals in innocence, both being so far removed temporally and psychologically from the crime and the rationale in vogue by the perpetrators while it was being committed. Modern German society, for example, is a good example of just how quickly this attitude can be safely assumed and accepted by all as the best way forward. However other historical crimes are less easy to explain or dismiss, even after centuries have elapsed, and their contemplation inevitably throws up worrying questions regarding ourselves today and what we deem acceptable if not condonable, almost as if the intervening time has heightened rather than lessened their relevance. This discomfort tends to have one principal effect - the incidents are simply written out of history and ignored.

So let's take just one of these today, the 435th anniversary of an incident that was so shocking even at the time that it is "remembered" in the vicinity as if it occurred yesterday, and yet unlike the big issues like slavery or famine was never even graced with a label - no label sufficed in its day and it still doesn't.



The horror of the atrocity is only emphasised all the more by the sheer beauty of the area, even today. Dún an Óir (the Fort of Gold) is an Iron-Age defensive fort situated on a small rocky outcrop near modern Ballyferriter on the Dingle peninsula. In 1580 the area was part of a huge fiefdom under the ownership and control of a Norman family, the Desmonds of Munster. In recent years this nomenclature, through marriages and alliances, had come to cover almost a full sweep of the great Norman families based in Ireland and by 1580 it was a Fitzgerald, James Fitzmaurice, who held titular authority over the clan. Desmond was Fitzgerald as Ormonde was Butler and between the two dynasties almost two thirds of the island could be rallied to English support or mobilised to oppose it depending on the political views of their chiefs.



James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald (pictured above) chose the latter. Eighty years of Tudor rule in England had brought nothing but an escalation of interference and what was perceived as an arrogant assumption of authority in the affairs of Ireland and its governance. As the decades rolled on the true motive behind this interference had become palpably obvious - an avaricious grasp on revenues and a systematic dismantling of any source of power that might exercise itself independently of English authority and interests. At times the great clans, Norman and Gaelic, had acquiesced to these intrusions on their sovereignty. At others they had "rebelled" - as the English monarchy judged it - and the reaction from the English had been immediate, thorough and merciless in each case. Henry VIII, and his son and daughters in succession, had seen Ireland as a nut so desperately in need of cracking (as Edmund Spenser once phrased it) that they would bankrupt their kingdom in order to pursue the goal, and at least on two occasions did just that.

In 1569 a previous "rebellion" in Munster had led to such swift retribution. The English army sent to counter it adopted a scorched earth policy and by 1573 had reduced the Munster population to starvation. 30,000 died in the famine that resulted and when the Fitzgeralds finally surrendered not only were their leaders executed but the dynasty itself was held responsible for the starvation that had occurred and ordered to compensate the crown. It was an insult designed to hurt, and the fact was lost on no one - Fitzgerald sympathiser and foe alike.

It was against this background that the next generation of Fitzgeralds planned to stem the increasingly ruthless and devastating involvement of England in the region. James, while exiled in Europe, had wasted no time in soliciting support - both moral and practical - from just about every potentate he could reach who, like him, resented England. And he wasn't short of willing subscribers to his cause - Elizabeth's England in 1580 had practically run out of allies. Spain and just about every other Catholic power was arraigned against it. France had yet to be forgiven for what Elizabeth had seen as a Huguenot betrayal when they sided with Catholic forces to oust her armies from Le Havre. Even the Russian tsars were sensing England's wounded dog status and had reneged on previous treaties of exclusive trade to throw their country open to foreign investment and trade with England's foes.

England, under the Tudors, had become a giant war machine with no theatre of war in which it could practically engage its enemies without risking total annihilation. Piracy on the high seas attained the status of patriotic naval warfare and each raid and robbery that England's adventurers executed was feted in propaganda as a great victory. But such spin could not paper over the realities for long, and a standing army without reason to be deployed soon becomes a terrible liability to its paymasters. In 1580 England had only one theatre in which such a deployment could be made, its armies unleashed and the threat of mutiny at home abated. All they needed was a casus belli.

When Fitzgerald returned to Ireland in 1579 he knew that he would have to fight his way to regaining the lands and title lost seven years before. He had two immediate aims - reuniting the Desmond clan under his banner and leadership, and either buying Butler neutrality or intimidating that clan into inactivity while he consolidated his position. The Butlers in fact, despite earlier acquiescence and cooperation with the English destruction of their great rivals, by 1579 didn't need much convincing themselves that England would soon turn its avaricious attention to their own lands. A deal was struck therefore to turn a blind eye while Fitzgerald and a small army of European allies - mostly Spanish and Italian - landed in the small natural harbour of Smerwick.

The "invasion", as the English termed this Irish attempt at regaining Irish sovereignty in the region, did not go according to plan anyway. The Fitzgeralds of Desmond themselves were in two minds about whether they should aid James or sit tight and hope to ride out the inevitable military fury which England would unleash. However, while this was being sorted out through entreaty and discussion James himself was murdered by an opportunistic member of the Clanwilliam clan hoping to curry English favour for their own attempt to seize old Desmond land. At this point one would think that England, relieved to have thwarted a potential rebellion at almost no cost to itself, would have wasted no time in ensuring that the waverers be hauled back in and normality "English style" would again prevail.

But such was not an option to a country which had quickly mobilised an expeditionary force at home and in Ireland, and who now desperately needed a military campaign and victory to deflect what was fast growing into mutinous fervour amongst its military ranks (two of whose leaders having just been executed for treason in plots to assassinate the monarch). The fact that the threatened rebellion had fizzled out almost before it started simply could not be allowed to obstruct this aim.

All the Desmond leaders, and a sizeable chunk of the nobility in Ireland, were accused of complicity and outlawed by decree. Even the Clanwilliams were not spared the wrath of the crown - and in a sense one can almost understand this as it was they who had almost scuppered the whole English plan by arbitrarily removing the demonised leader of the revolt. The effect was immediate, and predictable. With the notable exception of the Butlers of Ormonde, always adept at straddling both camps and surviving the worst vagaries of both sides' policies, the country from Munster to Ulster rose up in rebellion.

The “Second Desmond Rebellion”, as it became known to history, was a much more bloody affair than the first. The largest English army ever assembled at that time went on a murderous and ruthless rampage through the country. Spoils of war would pay the troops and the resultant loose interpretation of what constituted such spoils saw cities and towns, churches and cathedrals, and countless homes both stately and modest, ransacked. In a country where effectively everyone had been outlawed there was no quarter given and no mercy shown to anyone seen as an enemy of the crown. The monarch in England even promised bounties to those forces which could account for the most “noble” heads duly sent to London to be mounted on the Bridge, a number that soon exceeded the bridge’s capacity to hold them and for which extra gantries had to be mounted on the Southwark embankment to accommodate them.

But these were bloody times and even the scale of this operation and the gruesome trophies it produced in abundance did little to shock public opinion. In England there was a sense of a “final solution” being imposed on a recalcitrant and troublesome land long overdue such punishment anyway. Besides, the wholesale looting of the land, once the money began finding its way back to the capital, more than compensated for any squeamishness that might have existed regarding its source.  As the months of war grew into years and the revenue it generated continued to exceed the cost there grew a large acceptance of the situation in England, and even to an extent in Ireland, that this was the new norm for Irish governance and the fate of those caught up in it became less and less relevant to English opinion.

Until autumn 1580.

In September a papal-appointed task force had been sent to Ireland to assist in the fight against the English army, whose activity in Ireland was fast being seen around Europe as unjustifiably vicious and to which no great political logic or reason could be sensibly applied. Even Protestant states joined the ranks of the condemners – the member states of what would later become the League of Evangelical Union signed a joint petition to their “sister” Elizabeth to have a care, her activities in Ireland were fast becoming seen by powerful Catholic states as a religious war which alone might explode the fragile peace established at Augsburg by treaty almost thirty years before. In their letter they likened her army to “the worst papal crusade”.

The current pope’s intervention, when it finally came, was not principally designed to swing any fighting in Irish forces’ favour. In military terms the Irish cause, such as it was, had been long lost. The country had lost much of its political elite, almost all of its wealth, and yet again a scorched earth policy had plunged the land, especially Munster, into famine. People were understandably more intent on surviving hunger and disease in a ruined landscape than taking up arms in any cause. However the 600 strong token army assembled under a papal banner, comprised again of Spanish and Italians but this time also some Bohemians and Germans, was more intended simply to best represent the growing European revulsion at English excesses. Its landing place, Smerwick in Kerry, was symbolically chosen as it was exactly where Fitzgerald himself had landed. Its plan of campaign was equally symbolic. The small force would occupy the Smerwick peninsula and serve as a reminder by its presence that England’s activities in Ireland were under close observation.  They would also aim to provide a safe haven for the few Irish leaders remaining who continued to attempt to oppose the crown forces.

The English commander sent to meet this “threat” was one Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton. He had replaced William Pelham, whose bloodthirsty callousness and sadism had shocked even his own superiors. Grey was seen as being more conciliatory in his approach, but whatever tendency to mercy with which he might have arrived was to evaporate rather quickly when his first military engagement met with failure at Glenmalure and he was lucky to escape with his life. Since then he had simply taken up where Pelham had left off – seized estates and farms, had their crops burned, their livestock slaughtered and dumped, and their houses set to the torch and stripped of their contents, killing wantonly any Irish encountered en route. On the way to Kerry he also enlisted as “deputy” Elizabeth’s childhood friend and “reliable Irishman” Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormonde. There was a pause while the army was consolidated in his train. Winter was approaching and everything now pointed to Grey besieging Smerwick, a stand-off situation that would allow parley and treaty be negotiated to give both sides an honourable exit from a war that had long since lost meaning in most people’s eyes. The presence of Ormonde seemed to reinforce this view, and in fairness to Elizabeth this also seemed to be her official intention too. It was she who had personally commanded Ormonde attend.

At Smerwick, in effect just a small undefended hamlet, the small papal force had set up camp and awaited envoys from Grey’s forces. Their complete lack of preparedness for any kind of combat, let alone a siege conducted in any fury, was evident from their placement – bivouacked haphazardly around the area, no buildings commandeered and no artillery placements established. Their leader, Sebastian di San Giuseppe, keen not to impose on the already beleaguered population in the area, had arranged to have supplies sent by ship from France (an indication of the multi-national nature of the expedition) and had been quick to send letters to both English and Irish commanders affirming his unwillingness to engage in any hostilities that might lead to even more civilian deaths.

A first indication that Grey meant to do anything but parley was when San Giuseppe’s supply ships, three in total, found themselves blockaded into Smerwick harbor by the guns of Richard Bingham’s two brigantines moored outside it. The Spaniard’s entreaties to Grey fell on deaf ears and, seeing the writing on the wall, he ordered his forces to retire from Smerwick and away from the civilian population. Their destination was nearby Dún an Óir, near another natural harbor from which maybe some escape could be engineered and as defendable in a siege situation as its Iron Age builders had once intended. Surrounded on three sides by water its land connection to the mainland was small enough to mean effective use of their few defensive cannon. On the way a skirmish with Grey’s forces saw some prisoners taken, and it was from these that Ormonde later recorded that Grey could accurately estimate the force’s actual firepower and ability – not a lot as it turned out.

If San Giuseppe had hoped Dún an Óir would provide some measure of safety he was cruelly disabused on the morning of the 5th November when his force suddenly found itself at the receiving end of a naval bombardment from newly arrived ships under the command of William Winter and artillery fire from Grey’s army, whose own firepower had been greatly augmented with guns that Winter had brought him. On the 8th November Grey commanded his troops to pulverize the small promontory and, as Ormonde recorded, soldiers took shifts on the cannons to ensure that sleep or meals would not interrupt the process.

Amazingly enough San Giuseppe and his men held out for three whole days under such total assault, unable to respond but quick to engineer trenches in which they could take some degree of cover. By the 10th of November the scene must have resembled something approaching the Western Front scenes three centuries in the future. Ormonde, sickened by what he was witnessing, protested to Grey and left, bringing his own troops with him back to Kilkenny. At last San Giuseppe pleaded to surrender and Grey apparently accepted his terms – to be allowed bring what was left of his troops to Smerwick harbour and evacuate them on the impounded supply ships that had been marooned there for three weeks.

What followed next was what made this already bloody encounter horrific, even by Grey’s own account in his dispatch to Elizabeth afterwards, an account which was roundly contradicted by his own commanders. Grey denied he had agreed any terms. His men, including one who had actually done the negotiation, disagreed. But what all agreed was that Grey first sent troops into Dún an Óir to collect the arms of the enemy. He then sent “certain bands” of men to separate the nobility from the commoners, the latter being immediately executed on the spot. Around 500 defenceless men were butchered to death where they stood. To the remaining 100 he made an offer – to convert from Catholicism or die. Those who refused first had their arms and legs broken “in three places” and left on the ground in agony for up to three days, after which Grey had them hanged. These “bands” were led, amongst others, by a then young and up-and-coming officer Walter Raleigh. His conduct on that day would many years later be brought up as indictment in his trial for treason.

After this blood fest only a handful of prisoners remained alive. Grey, not convinced of the genuiness of their promise to renounce their faith, decided he may as well finish what he’d started. These men were duly beheaded.

When word got back to Nonsuch Palace and the queen of what had transpired there began a flurry of diplomatic activity to prevent accounts being quickly relayed by ambassadors and emissaries back to their masters. Elizabeth knew that even by Tudor standards this massacre exceeded in awfulness the worst estimations of her regime. There was genuine fear of a Catholic uprising in England inspired by news of the outrage, and when initial attempts failed to stop the spread of this news, overtures were made to even her worst international enemies to the effect that the guilty would be punished. Grey was summonsed back to London but – probably knowing what awaited him there – refused to go, saying his work in Ireland was not yet finished. A flare up of rebellion in Ormonde’s own territories conveniently provided him with the pretext he required to stay on. By 1582 however even he could no longer pretend that there was a “rebellion” to be put down and he relinquished his commission and his title, returning to London to a court that quickly exiled him to his country estates and away from public office. No other punishment was ever suggested, let alone imposed.

The Smerwick Massacre has left some gruesome evidence of those murderous three days in its wake. Even today the small promontory yields shot and cannon balls from the barrage it absorbed. Only a few years ago an adjacent field known as Gort na gCeann (the field of the heads) confirmed its title when archaeologists found the skulls of the last of San Giuseppe’s men to fall victim to Grey’s sadism – including probably San Giuseppe’s himself. At least two of the skulls were female - women would have been present in the train of most armies at the time. However Grey nor his men had ever recorded their presence or their beheading.

In Ireland “Grey’s Faith” is still used to denote a barefaced liar, and even seventy years later as Cromwell conducted his own ruinous military tour of the land he was quick to point out to his commanders that they must never conduct themselves in a manner that would place them in the same scope of infamy as Grey represented – even to English sensibilities.


The monument recently erected in the "Field of the Heads"

PS: In one of those ironic twists that history sometimes provides Grey’s son Thomas was to be attainted and lose the family their title of Barons Grey de Wilton for his role in the Catholic “Bye Plot”, an attempt to allegedly assassinate James I. Grey pleaded his innocence and was in fact reprieved on the scaffold, though only to serve the last eleven years of his life as a prisoner in the Tower of London. He died convinced he was being punished for his father's sins - the horror of Grey's butchery still remembered with revulsion even in England.

On this night in 1940, an unusual piece of ordnance was dropped on Taranto - a pair of Marine boots. The pilot concerned, Captain Oliver Patch being a member of that service (not as Wikimisleadia claims a Captain RN - doubtful if anyone senior enough to have reached that exalted rank would still be flying operationally). It is not clear to what extent the success of that raid inspired the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (nor to what extent Lumley Lyster was inspired by the Japanese torpedo boat attack on Port Arthur when he first planned an air attack on Taranto).

Oddly enough, the Fairey Swordfish was one of only two aircraft types which remained a front line operational type (the other was the Spitfire) throughout WWII in British service.

A propos of Taranto and the 1904 Japanese attack on Port Arthur ... I seem to recall that following the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse in December 1941 the Imperial Japanese Airforce for the first and last time in WW2, dropped a wreath onto the Sea where the two ships had gone down. This was partly to honour the seamen that had died but it was also explicitly in acknowledgement of past service by the Scottish aristocrat, Lord Semphill, William Francis Forbes.

In the 1920s Forbes had been sent to Japan on an official British military mission to help build up the Japanese Fleet Air Arm  (Japan had of course been a loyal ally in WW1). It was Forbes that had taught the Japanese about modern torpedo bombing techniques and advised them on designing aircraft carriers and on the handling carrier-borne aircraft. For his work Forbes was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, and by the dropping of the wreath in 1941 was duly credited for some of Japan's skill in destroying the British ships, as well as US ships at Pearl Harbour just three days earlier. In October 1941 Forbes had been forced to retire from his position at the Admiralty after being discovered passing on secret material to Tokyo. But being an aristocrat and a top-ranking official in the Admiralty it had all been hushed up at the time (it was also vital that the Japanese did not realise that Bletchley Park had broken their secret codes), and so his role as a spy only became common knowledge when documents in the Public Records Office were released in 1998.

November 12th, 1028

Zoe is appointed empress of the Byzantine dominions. Her sister Theodora is appointed a short while later as co-empress, both appointments being made by a senate-inspired mob (who dragged a furious Theodora from her monastery in to Constantinople's Hagia Sophia and crowned her while she "issued oaths and utterances unbecoming a bride of Christ"). The sister act reigned for eight years together and their deep hatred of each other made for a sequence of entertaining episodes that would put any modern "Tudors" style TV mini-series to shame for incidents of debauchery, political conniving, assassination and just about everything that contributes to great ratings these days.

Theodora began by having Zoe's adopted son Michael V blinded and consigned to a monastery - he was a potential claimant to their crown (a spiteful Theodora always suspected that Zoe and her second husband had murdered her own hubby in his bath a few years before). Zoe responded by testing out (use your imagination) several potential partners (her first husband had also died in mysterious circumstances and her second, Michael IV, had effectively pleaded lunacy and run away to a monastery to die with strict orders that Zoe never be allowed visit him). When she married Constantine he joined the sisters as joint ruler - the plan had been to outmaneuver Theodora - to which Theodora responded by basically buying the senate.


... Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister
And lord help the sister, who comes between me and my man ...

And so the foursome reigned right up until 1050 (did I forget to mention Constantine's mistress Skieraina who shared a bed with both Zoe and the hubby?) - in entertainment terms quite a good series run for the Byzantine public who must have anticipated snippets from the court as people in more recent times anticipated the next episode of Dynasty, The Sopranos or Game Of Thrones - when alas Zoe died - a sprightly, still unwrinkled, and by all accounts still stunning, 72 years young.

Meles meles wrote:

But being an aristocrat and a top-ranking official in the Admiralty it had all been hushed up at the time (it was also vital that the Japanese did not realise that Bletchley Park had broken their secret codes), and so his role as a spy only became common knowledge when documents in the Public Records Office were released in 1998.

Sempill's co-spy, Frederick Rutland*, not being an aristocrat was not so fortunate, being interred in December 1941 and later committing suicide in 1949.

Rutland flew an aeroplane during the Battle of Jutland, thus becoming known as "Rutland of Jutland"

Triceratops wrote:

Meles meles wrote:

But being an aristocrat and a top-ranking official in the Admiralty it had all been hushed up at the time (it was also vital that the Japanese did not realise that Bletchley Park had broken their secret codes), and so his role as a spy only became common knowledge when documents in the Public Records Office were released in 1998.

Sempill's co-spy, Frederick Rutland*, not being an aristocrat was not so fortunate, being interred in December 1941 and later committing suicide in 1949.

Rutland flew an aeroplane during the Battle of Jutland, thus becoming known as "Rutland of Jutland"

Oh nasty, buried alive for 8 years!

Speaking of which, the story of Ol' Rip, the horned toad;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ol%27_Rip_the_Horned_Toad

November 13th 1968 - and the summer of love continues well into winter ....

In the USA at least, where this little ballad has just reached Number One in the US Hit Parade;



Whereas in the UK it's got way too drafty to be running around in kaftans and knickers so everyone's gone back to the pictures. Hence this gem's arrival at the Number One spot today in the charts as reported by Radio Luxembourg ...

17 November 1810, the start of the Anglo-Swedish War, which lasts until July 1812.

This war is somewhat unusual, in that no fighting actually takes place and exists on paper only.

19 November 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts, Pete Conrad & Alan Bean land on the moon;

And the Vraveíos Oscaros for First Actor goes to ...

On this day (reputedly) in 534BCE the world's first acting award was given to a certain lad by the name of Thespis, after whom of course the profession of all subsequent luvvies to this day has been named.

Thespis started as a singer - such was acting in his day, standing on a stage and belting out a ditty (dithy?) called a dithyramb, a musical number based on some mythological tale, by default a tale that usually ended badly for all concerned. What Thespis did that was so new (and parents of children at bed-time who insist on a story being read to them will identify with the challenge immediately) was attempt to adopt a different voice for each character in the song as he went along. He was the Bernard Cribbens of his day and the audiences loved it. So much did they love it in fact that the style caught on immediately and critics even gave it its own name - "tragedy" (critics have always been the same). By the time the competition came around the characterisations had superseded the music in importance and the old traditional orchestras and choruses had been gradually dropped in favour of a "thespian" style of acting which replaced singing with the spoken word.

Spurred on by his success at the Athens Academy Awards of 534 Thespis then invented another long-lasting theatrical tradition, the "touring-" or "repertory company". We don't know if this rep company adopted a name at the time but we do know that during its career it travelled throughout the length and breadth of non-barbarian civilisation (probably all within a ten miles of Athens) and that Thespis wrote several new plays along the way. Thanks to an early version of the Hayes Commission called the Christian Church most of those surviving plays are only fragments at best, and even these are regarded as having been so utterly bowdlerised or even re-written entirely that we can't now be sure how they might first have been presented to the original Greek public (his hugely popular attack on top ranking priests in the play "Hiereis" for example certainly didn't make it past later Christian censors).



In such acclaim was he held by the general public, and so great was their gratitude to Thespis for having rescued them from an interminable cycle of musical productions, that his renown would far exceed his land of origin and his lifetime; the immortalisation of his name despite the concerted efforts of early Christian killjoys to expunge it speaks for itself. This Roman statue of the world's first Ahktoooooor (say it in a Patrick Stewart voice) was unearthed at Herculaneum.

23 November 955 : The accession of king Eadwig ... the teenage king who wouldn’t get out of bed for his own coronation.

On the death of his uncle Eadred, sixteen year old Eadwig ascended to the throne of England. According to legend, on the morning of his investiture all the nobles and senior churchmen of the realm were duly assembled in Winchester cathedral. But there was a hitch, the young king was nowhere to be found. Dunstan, Bishop of Worcester and Abbot of Glastonbury, was sent to find him. When Dunstan eventually located the young monarch, he was "cavorting in his bed-chamber with a strumpet and her mother", and refused to return with the bishop. Shocked and infuriated Dunstan physically dragged Eadwig back to the hall and forced him to publically renounce the girl "as a whore" before the coronation could proceed.

If one ignores the ‘strumpet’ accusation, even Dunstan’s own version of events could easily be interpreted as the young king dallying in his private room with a girlfriend, whilst suitably chaperoned by the girl’s mother. The girl, Ælfgifu, was of noble birth and despite the forced denunciation as a ‘strumpet’ she married Eadwig shortly after his coronation. Dunstan meanwhile, realising that he had seriously crossed the new king, fled to Flanders.

But there is likely much more to this tale than just a spat between a churlish young monarch and a haughty churchman. The feud was probably based more on a political struggle for power between Eadwig and senior church officials who saw a chance to gain control of the young king for their own benefit. Indeed it is highly likely the tale of the lazy, wanton, disrespecrful young king was spread and duly recorded as fact by the church, specifically to blacken the king’s reputation for posterity. And the church certainly did close ranks against Eadwig. The ‘strumpet’ in question, Ælfgifu, was the sister of Æthelweard the Chronicler who described himself as "a grandson's grandson" of King Æthelred I, which would have made Eadwig and Ælfgifu third cousins once removed … so related but not particularly closely. Yet on the grounds of too close a degree of consanguinity, Oda, the Archbishop of Canterbury, forced the pair into an annulment, very much against the will of both Eadwig and Ælfgifu.

When Dunstan fled the kingdom he had vowed to remain in exile until Eadwig was dead, which bearing in mind the king’s youth might well have been a very long time. In the event he didn’t have long to wait. Eadwig, his authority continually undermined by Archbishop Oda and other churchmen, rapidly lost the support of most of the nobility. Eventually in 957 the Mercians and Northumbrians openly revolted and chose Eadwig’s brother Edgar as king of the country north of the Thames. Eadwig died (neither the cause nor the circumstances are recorded) just two years later in 959. One of the first acts of Eadwig’s successor Edgar, now king of the reunited realm, was to appoint Dunstan as Archbishop of Canterbury. Dunstan died in 988 and was formally canonised as a saint in 1029.

On this day in 1916 the famed inventor Hiram Maxim passed away in his adopted homeland of England (he changed citizenship from USA to Britain when he was 50 years old).

Maxim will be forever most associated with the Maxim Gun, the word's first first recoil-operated machine gun, a lethal device which had already been superseded in deadliness by later inventors but which still was accounting for hundreds of thousands of fatalities in the Great War being waged even as Maxim lay on his death bed.

However that is probably a gross disservice to the man as an inventor. His patents for "improvement to automatic fired weaponry" are far exceeded in number by many which, it must be admitted, have played huge contributions to modern life and comfort. Not least of these was the lightbulb - as his patents history proves Maxim had almost perfected a working electric lamp that could be mass produced long before Edison even turned his mind to the task.

But others also have made their mark on modern society. The world's first portable inhaler designed for asthma sufferers was down to Maxim - he suffered from bronchial problems all his life and designed the apparatus (which released menthol vapours) for his own use. Its popularity was immediate, and while asthma inhalers might have moved on in the meantime many present-day nasal inhalers for cold sufferers still owe a debt to his creativity. He was actually accused at the time of pandering to medical quackery - to which the machine gun inventor replied - "it will be seen that it is a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine, and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering".

However Maxim's most long-lasting (and by some criteria therefore his most popular) invention will surprise many, especially anyone who for their sins has been subjected to Blackpool's seaside delights. As a fundraiser for his experimentation in powered flight - a much patented fancy of his that did not however yield any great success - he also invented what he called "the Captive Flying Machine". This was a popular fairground amusement ride which allowed the punter the illusion of flying in a heavier than air machine at great speeds. And believe it or not, it still is.


A Maxim CFM still in use in Blackpool in 2006

November 26th 1942 - New York's "Hollywood Theater" screens the world premiere of the film "Casablanca", having brought the release date forward from January 1943 so it would coincide with "Operation Torch", the very recent allied invasion of North Africa that had just "liberated" Casablanca from French Vichy rule.



The film has given rise to much apocryphal belief in how Casablanca and other parts of Morocco actually operated as areas on the verge of the European theatre of war in the early 1940s, but laughable historical inaccuracies aside it still spun a good yarn about a group of licentious alcoholics marooned in a large city with a total population of 25.

3 December 1800, the Battle of Hohenlinden wins the War of the Second Coalition for France and inspires Thomas Campbell's poem, which has appeared in innumerable school books;

"On Linden, when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow;
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly."

December 7th, 43BCE ...



... literary criticism reaches new depths when Cicero's "Philippics" - published speeches denouncing Mark Antony's character and conduct - is met with a rather piercing retort from its subject.

We cannot be sure that a certain Titus Pollo really done the dastardly as depicted in the above, but we can perhaps be a little more certain about Chickpea's last words as recorded by witnesses, which went along the lines of "there is nothing proper about what you do, soldier, but please do it properly"-  rather than the Rome TV series version above which has him channeling Martin Luther King and/or Charlton Heston in one of his hairy moments.

25 December – and despite all the consumerism and hype I really feel that on this day we should celebrate the birth of one of the greatest men that ever lived ... an original and influential thinker whose words of wisdom still resonate and are of great relevance to all mankind today ...
 
… Isaac Newton, born 25 December 1642.




...while of course its widely acknowledged that Jesus, if he indeed ever existed, almost certainly wasn’t born on this day.

15 years old today;

Jan 16th 1950, Listen with Mother on BBC Radio first broadcast. Did anyone here ever do that?

Yup, I remember 'Listen with Mother' .... "Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin... ". And I did listen with my mother, or sometimes with granny ... not in the 1950's, but certainly during the early 1960s.

Priscilla wrote:

Jan 16th 1950, Listen with Mother on BBC Radio first broadcast. Did anyone here ever do that?

 Priscilla, Priscilla...

I read and I know with my poor English..."Listen (and of course I had to know that it had to be "listened" then) with my mother on BBC Radio('s) first broadcast"...
Had a look to the BBC first broadcast...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_BBC
14 November 1922...
Thinking she can't be that old...
But then read Meles meles': "Listen with Mother"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/schoolradio/subjects/history/britainsince1930s/media/listen_with_mother
And yes 16 January 1950...

After all those years of reading English language I am still from time to time tricked by my quick reading

Your friend, Paul.

We ought now discuss the content Paul - i being about my intellectual level! But not yours  so we'll give it a miss. The first broadcasters all had posh voices and there was an inncocent belief that the little angels would sit by mother at 1.45pm and quietly listen. Perhaps they did. MM seems to have done so. I wonder if it did him any good?
I do recall my father's horror that classically trained singers rendered all the nursery rhymes with silly banter and sound effects. .... and how daft they must have seemed in the studio.

18th January 1486.

Henry Tudor gets round to marrying Elizabeth of York.

Giovanni de' Gigli's epithalamium recorded:

"Hail! Ever honoured and auspicious day,
When in blest wedlock to a mighty king,
To Henry, bright Elizabeth is joined.
Fairest of Edward's offspring, she alone
Pleased this illustrious spouse..."

...and so forth.

The nuptial union of Lancaster and York was, of course, a continuing theme in Tudor propaganda: even more than a century on, Shakespeare was wise enough to write:

"We will unite the white rose and the red.
Smile Heaven upon this fair conjuction
That long hath frowned upon their enmity!-
What traitor hears me, and says not Amen?"

One cannot but wonder what Elizabeth was thinking as she awaited the visitation of her illustrious spouse on that Janary night some five hundred or so years ago.