Halloween

Halloween goes back to the time when the Celts parts of the UK and parts of Northern France. Back then November 1 was their New Year's Day. They believed that the night before the New Year, 31st October, was a time when the living and the dead came together.

The Celtic new year was eventually taken over by the Christian church and they named it All Saints Day or All Hallows. This was a special holy day to honour the saints and other people who died for their religion. The night before All Hallows was called Hallows Eve. Later the name was changed to Halloween.

Many people of that time also believed that the spirits of the dead would visit the earth on Halloween and that the evil spirits would cause problems or hurt them. So it became a tradition that on the night Halloween people would dress up with costumes that looked like ghosts or other evil creatures. They thought if they dressed like that, the spirits would think they were also dead and not harm them.

Originally the people in Europe would carry lanterns made from turnips, however the influence of America reaches far and now in the United Kingdom we use pumpkins. These we carve and by putting candles inside them we create lanterns. The other idea that has come over from America is trick and treating, turning something that was once serious into something that is fun. 

Lancaster - F for Freddie

61 years ago, on the night of the 3rd to the 4th September 1943, Lancaster Bomber F for Freddie flew a raid over Berlin, leaving RAF Langar in Nottinghamshire together with a BBC reporter and his engineer as passengers to record the nights events. The two broadcasters were the reporter Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and his engineer Reg Pidsley who joined the crew of the aircraft as it flew its mission over enemy occupied territory swarming with night fighters. It was possibly the most hazardous eye witness account given on the radio during the whole war.

Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and  Reg Pidsley before the flight

The aircraft from which the recording were made belonged to No.207 Squadron of Bomber Command which was at the time of the recording based at Langer. The aircraft is itself was a Lancaster B.Mk,I (ED586:EM-F) and it was crew that night was:

• Ken Letford (Pilot)
• Charlie Stewart (Flight Engineer)
• Bill Bray (Air Bomber)
• Jock Fieldhouse (Mid Upper Air Gunner)
• Con Connelly (Navigator)
• Bill Sparkes (Wireless Operator)
• Henry Devenish (Rear Air Gunner)

All were lucky enough to make it through the war accept one who was killed in action. As for the aircraft itself it was shoot down over Stettin on the night of 6th/7th January 1944 with the loss its Pilot George Edert and of all of its crew.

Lancaster bombers of 207 Squadron of Bomber Command 

The attack on Berlin on the night of 3/4 September 1943 involved 316 Lancasters and 4 Mosquitoes, which were used to dropped 'spoof' flares at a distance from the heavy bombers' route to mislead German night fighters. Although pathfinders marking mostly fell short of the target as was the bomb loads of the bomber force that followed them. However the industrial area of Siemensstadt was hit as well as the residential areas of Charlottenburg and Moabit. On the ground 422 people were recorded as being as killed while a total of 22 Lancaster Bombers were lost.

Damaged caused to a residential of Berlin during an RAF air raid

The record of the raid is rare insight into the the bombing raids and the people that flew them. Wynford Vaughan-Thomas captured both the spirit of the time, the sights he saw, the bravery of the people that flew these aircraft and the feeling they went through night after night. Each member crew knew their chances of survival were poor but they still flew mission after mission hoping they would make it through their tour of duty. Even Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and Reg Pidsley would have known they were putting themselves in grave danger by going on the mission.

A view of Berlin shortly after a RAF air raid had finished

Talking in an interview after the war, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas said "It was certainly the most terrifying eight hours I have spent in my life because I didn’t know what was coming.", before going onto to say about the sight below him: "Berlin burning seen from 19,000 feet was the most beautifully horrible sight I have ever seen." and of the flack that was flying up at him: "It was like watching somebody throwing jewellery on black velvet, winching rubies, sparkling diamonds all coming up at you."

Many Lancaster bombers never made it back to Britian

The recordings of the raid were made on direct cut acetate disks using BBC midget recorder. These machines looked like old style gramophone recorders and they were used clockwork mechanisms and batteries to power the valve amplifier. The uncut discs at the altitude in a Lancaster bomber flew at had to be placed inside his flying jacket of Reg Pidsley to warm them up, since otherwise the ultra low temperatures made the disc lacquer too brittle to cut.

If you are interested in finding out more about the bombing raids by the RAF during the Second World War I would suggest a good place to start would Night Bombers, a documentary you can watch on YouTube about a 600 bomber raid on Berlin.

FOOTNOTE: Each Lancaster Bomber was made up 55,000 components (if you excluding nuts, bolts and rivets), it required 500,000 manufacturing operations that took more than 70,000 man hours to complete. Each aircraft cost £42,000 back in 1942, which in today's money (2014) is around £1,850,000 per aircraft. On the night of the raid, the 22 aircraft lost represents the loss 1.5 million man hours of work in the construction of the aircraft and the loss of equivalent 40.7 million pounds .

Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago today at the same time as this blog post appeared on this blog at 8am, two keys turned in two different prisons, one in Manchester and the other in Liverpool, moments later two people were dead. They were the last two people to be hanged in Britain and their names were Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen and their crime was the murder of a man during a burglary that went wrong.

The who process from trial to execution took between three weeks and five weeks depending if the person being executed appealed the sentence or not. The execution itself was even swifter by modern standards used in the US, from the key turning in the door and the person being being hung would take between 10 to 30 seconds. It is believed that the prisoner became unconsciousness almost instantly as the neck was broken by the drop, with death, in terms of the last heart beat occurring a few minutes later.

Over a year after these two executions on the 8th November 1965 the Abolition of Death Penalty Act 1965 into force, and although it only applied to cases of Murder, it effectively ended the use use of all capital crimes in mainland UK. Although in theory there were crimes you could be executed for in the UK up until 1998 such as treason. The bill itself was a private members bill and it was passed by over two thirds of the house of commons. The taste for revenge killing by the state come to an end in parliament at least.  

Over the years there has been calls by the press for the reintroduction of the death penalty in the UK which has been supported by a number of Members of Parliament generally on the right wing of British politics. This has led to a number of debates and votes the House of Commons to see it reintroduced, all have been unsuccessful, up until the time of this blog post at least. The last attempt to reintroduce it was in 2013 and this bill was withdrawn before it was debated. Of course any attempt to reintroduce it would fall fail of Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Given the chances of actually making a mistake and executing the wrong person for a crime they did not commit, as occurred when Timothy Evans was murdered by the state when the real crime was committed by John Christie who was executed three years later for the same crime. Also I am of the opinion that it doesn't stop murders taking place, if anything it would sensationalises them in todays the press, and of course it could be used for political reasons. For these reasons and many more I think in general Capital Punishment is wrong in all it forms that it is used around the world.

Britian goes to War

Today marks the centenary of the entry of Great Britain's entry into the Great War of 1914-1918.  An  event nearly nobody alive remember or took part in but one that will always be etched in history as something that changed the world in so many ways. It was just a shame the fruitlessness of war as proved in this conflict was never really learned and even today we see so many conflicts and many of them pointless. All we have today is the history of the time and the people that fought and died and fade photographs of the time like those below.

The facts from the war are truly horrific in February 1916 One and a half million men died in the battle of Verdun, that was over eight percent of the total number of lives lost in the war in one single month, it was worse than the whole of the Battle of the Somme when 1.3 million died. The average life expectancy of a machine gunner under fire could be measured in minutes and the average life pilot once he was sent to the front was three to four weeks.  In total some seventeen million people died. The waste of human life was truly epic proportions and involved nations across the globe. 

Every town and village in the Britain was effected by the war. Even in the house I live in today was once home to one of the men that left his family and went away to war only to die frighting for his country. He is commemorated on the village war memorial by the church and remembered in book of war dead in the church.

It is right that we teach our children the pointless of war and try and keep Europe strong and united to avoid conflicts in the feature, because by being united we have unity and from that comes peace. At 2200 hours we will be turning the lights out for an hour and lighting a candle to remember all those that died for a war that changed the world and still impacts on the world today.

The Children of Lidice

On June 10, 1942, the German government announced that it had destroyed the small village of Lidice. The Germans proudly proclaimed that the village and it residents, and its very name, were now forever blotted from memory. They did this by killing every adult male and some fifty-two women. Then they sent all the surviving women and children to concentration camps, or if found suitable to be "Germanized", sent to the greater Reich.

So what was the story behind the destruction of the village and it people. Well is all has to do with the attempted assassination on 27th May 1942 of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich,  a evil man, that even Hitler described as "the man with the iron heart" who was one main architects of the Holocaus. Locally he was nicknamed the Butcher of Prague, the Blond Beast, and the Hangman. The operation to assassinate him was called "Operation Anthropoid" it had been prepared by the British Special Operations Executive with the approval of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. The attempt was only partially successful at the time but later Heydrich died of his injuries on the 2nd June.

On the day of the atempt Hitler ordered an investigation and reprisals, suggesting that Himmler send SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was even harsher than Heydrich, as Hitler favored killing 10,000 politically unreliable Czechs. However after he consulted  Himmler, the idea was dropped because Czech territory was an important industrially, but all the same some 13,000 people were arrested some of whom later dieded in contraction camps. Intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky, with a Gestapo report identifing Lidice as the assassin's suspected hiding place.

The Germans issued a deadline  for the assassins to be apprehended by 18th June 1942 or the they would would start revenge killings, this deadline was publicly issued to the military. It was thought that this would be enough for the people to revel those that killed Heydrich. This made it hard for the assassin's and they were passed from safe house to safe house until the Germans managed to bribe one of the sabotage group for one million Reichsmarks. Eventually the assassins where cornered and despite the efforts of 750 SS soldiers they couldn't take the assassins alive.

However before the deadline of 18th June, on the 9th June, the decision was made to "make up for his death" and the Führer had commanded the following concerning any village found to have harboured Heydrich's killers:

• Execute all adult men 
• Transport all women to a concentration camp 
• Gather the children suitable for Germanisation, then place them in SS families in the Reich and bring the rest of the children up in other ways 
• Burn down the village and level it entirely

Given that that the Germans had identified Lidice as the assassin's suspected hiding place, it was this village that was targeted by the Germans.

Early in the morning of the 10th June operations started on the village and it was surrounded by German forces so that nobody could enter of leave. The men were rounded up and taken to the edge village where they were shot in in groups in a barn. So rapid was the executions that the those about to be killed had to stand among those that had died before them. By the afternoon all the 173 men over the age of 15 had been murdered by the Germans.

The women and children were taken to the village hall before being transported to a near by town to be detained with the children being separated from their mothers. During their three day detention four of the women were found to be pregnant and they were sent to the same hospital where Heydrich had died to have their babies aborted. On the 12th June the 184 women were loaded onto a train and sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück were they forced to work in leather processing, road building, textile and ammunition factories.

This just left the children some of which were selected for Germanisation, as Hitler had ordered and the remainder were sent to a former textile factory in Gneisenau Street in Łódź. The care was minimal. They suffered from a lack of hygiene and from illnesses. By order of the camp management, no medical care was given to the children. They stayed there until Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organisers of the Holocaust, ordered the massacre of the remainder of the children.

It was 60 years ago today, on the 2nd July 1942 that 82 children from the village Lidice were handed over to the Gestapo, who transported to the extermination camp at Chełmno where they were gassed to death in Magirus gas vans where they were poisoned by the Cardon monoxide produced from the vans exhaust gases. It would have taken 20 minutes at least for the children to die and their voices would have as the driver drove them to a pit where they would be buried.

To mark this horrific event a sculpture stands today overlooking the site of the old village of Lidice. "The Memorial to the Children Victims of the War" is a bronze statue of 82 children (42 girls and 40 boys) aged 1 to 16 to honour the children who were murdered at Chełmno in the summer of 1942. You can help but feel for the children as you look at the sculpture. They died so young and they wouldn't have understood why.

It is so sad that man can do things like this to other men, especially children. It is horrid what we are capable of as race, especially when we have been radicalised in some kind of way. I just hope we remember things like this and it stops us doing them again.

RMS Titanic

Over the recent months a lot interest has been shown by the press into the story of RMS Titanic which struck an iceberg on 14th April 1912 at 23:40 (Ship time) and sank at around 02:20. Of course many of us have seen films, television programs and some of us have read books about the subject, and for some reason this tragedy has touch many people more than most.

At the time it was hailed as the "Worst Ocean Disaster in Worlds History" with the loss of 1,514 souls, including some of the wealthiest people in the world, when the ship sank. The ship itself  was the last word in comfort and luxury, with an on-board gymnasium, swimming pool, libraries, high-class restaurants and opulent cabins. She also had some of the most advanced safety features including watertight compartments and remotely activated watertight doors. The there was just one thing she lacked, enough life boats to carry all the crew and passengers, although she was designed to carry 64 lifeboats only 16 where carried by the ship.

A lot has been made over the years about the lack of lifeboats on the Titanic but it has to be remembered that at the time, the Board of Trade's regulations required British vessels over 10,000 tons to carry 16 lifeboats and in that respect the Titanic didn't break any regulations. The fact that she was designed with space for more lifeboats shows the company that built her were thinking of the future. The thing was that at the time lifeboats were intended to ferry survivors from a sinking ship to a rescuing ship, not carry all the people on the ship. That was later to change after Titanic sank when passenger liners were required to carry more lifeboats and carry out regular lifeboat drills. 

Another of the advanced features carried by the Titanic  was a powerful wireless telegraph. This was provided for the convenience of passengers as well as for operational use of the ship. In the end it proved to a life saver. It also gives us one of the few factual records of what happened that night minute by minute as the operators tapped out messages to the other ships that were in the area, The value wireless telegraph system installed can be seen by Britain's postmaster-general comments when he said while referring to the Titanic disaster that, "Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr Marconi...and his marvellous invention."

One of the big controversies of the time was why the SS Californian, which was a few miles from the Titanic, never picked up the distress signals from the Titanic or responded to the distress rockets. If it had then the number of people lost would have significantly lower. It took over two hours for the ship to sink which should have allowed many of passengers and crew to be transferred to the SS Californian. As it was the it was the RMS Carpathia, who after hearing a distress signal, made it's way to the sinking Titanic, only reaching her last know position after she sank. She was over fifty miles away when it arrived it went about picking up survivors. Much has been written about why the SS Californian had failed to go to the assistance of Titanic, but it remains a fact that if the wireless telegraph on the ship wasn't manned during the night thing might have been so different,

As you can imagine after such a disaster there were investigations in to the sinking of Titanic in the United Kingdom and in America. The findings of both sets of investigations had a profound affect on the safety of passenger ships for years to come. To give an idea the level detail the investigations went into the American enquiry lasted 18 days, heard the testimony of 86 witnesses and produced a 1000 page transcript. Recommendations included the manning of radio telegraph equipment twenty fours a day on passenger liners, increasing the number of lifeboats, the implementation of lifeboat drills, the setting up of International Ice Patrols and the harmonisation of safety regulations internationally. Both investigations also found that the captain of SS Californ had acted improperly in failing to come to the aid of the sinking ship.

The fact that we are remembering this disaster one hundred years on show how much it has become part of our folklore. The whole story has captivated generation after generation, produced book after book, and made it to the big and small screen. It is a story that will continue for another hundred years.