Australia Day (local chapter)

R. Fiddes
Originally uploaded by bltphoto

Went to Nunhead cemetery on Sunday, shamed by not having been before it's wonderfully atmospheric, peaceful and wild. There's a wonderful view down to St Paul's from the top of the hill and myriad of rambling toppling graves and old trees.

There's a number of military graves/memorials in Nunhead  I chose R. Fiddes as he was sadly the youngest of the Anzacs in this group and with it being a gloomy day this young lad having traveled across the world to die (of his wounds?) barely out of school seemed extra poignant. You can imagine him not being that dissimilar to the people from down under etc we see/work with everyday. Not that dieing at age 34 like his neighbour is any good either. They are surround by the mass of everyday London folk so they are in good company.

Oddly near the entrance the entrance is another link to Oz with the Scottish martyrs monument who in 1790's got sent down under simply for campaigning for the vote! If you not been to Nunhead have a wander over. Oh and then there's the view from Telegraph Hill I should really get out more.

Hot New Steamy Video.....

If you're ever in Tottenham (yeah I know It's unlikely!) but the Markfield Beam Engine  is worth a trip, (you need to go on a steam day check the website) and you can have a wander down the  Lea and feed the ducks!

A corner of a foreign field..

Acts of remembrance
I found this a while ago (which may be appropriate for today), while going through some crates of vinyl. It’s from a BBC lp from the early 70’s, at first I thought it was one of those endless military brass band lp’s but it seems to be something a bit more complex. It is a sort of sound picture of various naval activities.

 Most of the tracks are existing bits of popular music with recordings of Royal Navy personnel going through their day to day operations such as firing missiles and launching aircraft all with the tunes over the top. By today’s standards it's a little unsubtle but a nice idea, if under produced. One track is quite odd if has a choir of monks singing plain chant while we hear a missile being guided onto a drone aircraft as part of practice exercise.

Anyway the best track not unsurprisingly is by the Radiophonic workshops which mixes the account of the funeral of the Poet Rupert Brook.  It’s of its time (and seems to be narrated by Brian Sewell’s cousin) but the sound effects and music work well together. If you listen right to the end there is a final twist which adds to the complex nature of remembering  the dead of all wars.

Counting the Cost

Pause for thought

I’m not sure I have point here so bear with me.

Down the road from work is a (pictured) war memorial. As these things go it’s not a bad one. They are never going to show soldiers fighting on the Somme in their true state i.e. hiding in shell holes desperately trying to dodge machine gun fire. But at least this one shows a man in battle dress keeping an eye on us all looking like a normal if slightly heroic Tommy. Whatever you think of war having memorials to the people who died in them in and around where we live and work must be a good thing, even if sadly like me most people walk past them without taking much notice.

One of the most chilling things that probably goes unremarked by most people passing this statute is the inscription half way down that says.

“To the glorious memory of the 22000 Royal Fusiliers who fell in the Great War
1914 – 1919.”

That’s 22,000 dead or a well attended football match or maybe Oxford Street when it’s very busy.

The list of Royal fusiliers regiments (they were a London based Battalion) all have regiment names like the bankers, lawyers, public schools, sportsmen, East ham and of course “Young soldier” which serve further humanise the loss.

Underneath in a slightly legal phrase is:

"And those fusiliers killed in subsequent campaigns"

Being opposite the Inns of Court I suppose “subsequent” is appropriate cold legal term the sort you find in a lease “the landlord reserves the right... any subsequent damage...”
It almost seems like they couldn’t face counting once they’d reached 22,000.

Like I say I’m not sure if I have point really just that when it comes to people dying it’s too easy to get lost in statistics (putting aside Stalin's pithy remarks on the subject) each death on any side is tragedy worth remembering.

Last night's tv: 1066 and all that tat

Oh and Ian get those battle axes of
the van an 'all Treacle
Originally uploaded by bltphoto

List of the day:
Anachronism in last night's Channel 4 film about 1066.

Not sure even medieval armies camped on the beach at Beachy Head below the tide line!
Every one had nice shiny white uniform round tents.
The cgi Vikings rowing their longboats the wrong way round.
The general healthy look of all the actors
The English army’s campsite “comic” who seemed to have a rather dinky caplet that had a Burberry checked lining.
The replica of Stamford Bridge seemed closer to pooh corner than anything made by people who didn’t have galvanised steel bolts with square washer and yards of yards of smooth machine cut and planed timber. You half expected to see a sign Wol’s house this way
War as a game of American football, “you open them up on the left and I’ll nip though the middle and nick their flag”.
Oh and why didn’t they shoot the big f*ck off Viking on the bridge with arrows like they did Hardrada later on.
Why is Harald Hardrada the only name you can remember from history?

This is all not to say it wasn't a lot of hairychested chainmail and battle axetastic shouty fighty fun.

Which side are you on?

The Genius of Don Mcphee:

After seeing this masterful shot again, I wrote a long post about my whole experience of the miner’s strike and how it affected community and people I grew up in and with but then I realised what I’d written was half formed bile at best ! Particularly when Don Mcphee picture tells the story much better than me. Go here and read the story of the two main characters and if it doesn’t move you well you are David Cameron and we’ll know which side you are on the..... wrong one.

My New Car!

One careless owner, High mileage sold as seen....

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to trek down and take some pics of this marvellous addition to south London’s armoury, (yeah watch out you cocky north bankers with your houmous bars and glamorous west end if you get too umpity we’ve got our own armoured division namely this T-34, that pink elephant with a castle on it’s back from just down the road and if you really get above your station we’ll swing round the big guns on HMS Belfast and get all 1944 on your a…… sorry were was I ,oh yes Tanks.

Just off the old Kent road just after the fly over on the northside of the road is this T-34 tank it’s a bit of local curiosity. I think some bloke bought it and put on this patch of land (as some blokes do) the council complained and tried to move it but it turns out to be his land. Anyway it get’s tagged from time to time and numpties like me take pictures of it etc.

Up close it’s really quite impressive and if it didn’t represent some thing terrible you could go on about its sculptural form etc.

This T-34 really shows the power of the tank on our imagination, from the very start they were almost mythical creatures, early cartoons show them like monsters or landships. One of tanks early proponents JFC Fuller was an acolyte of magician Aleister Crowley. Their mere appearance has cleared riot filled streets and stricken with fear protesters world wide. It’s no surprise this is one of the most recognised photos ever.

Indeed of all tanks the T-34 is one of the most mythical and most paradoxical. Because basically it gave the world freedom from fascist terror (well the men and women who drove it did with some helps form lots of other Russians and some American and English and Polish, and French and Indians and……..)

But then t-34 and its' descendents then spent 50 years being used to suppress Eastern Europe. Like I say a paradox.

Even with a rather timid cat living underneath it in the drizzle and the gloom of a Southwark autumn afternoon this tank did seem t be brooding as if the engines would cough back into life and the turret would slowly traverse as the tracks clanked forward.

By way of tune here's a live version of Tank Park Salute by Billy Bragg Mp3 live in Austrailia in 1992.

Lessons from History

In the winter gloom and bluster S and I headed to the Cabinet war rooms in Whitehall. The usual “lived in London for so long never been” excuse. I was a little put off when I got there and found it was £12 to get in. However I think it’s worth the cost as you get a 2 for 1 deal as you get to explore the tunnels and war rooms but also the interactive Churchill exhibition.

I am always wary of interactive displays (mainly because they are always broken) but this display has a good mix of hi-tec and unique objects, photos etc. One spooky system projection a very narrow band of sound down from the ceiling literally the width of your head, so you get to hear Winston’s speeches as if wearing head phones. Because the band is so narrow, you have to stand still and look at the illuminated pictures in front of you. One in particular struck me, it was of a young couple, a cheery looking soldier in a forage cap and uniform and his “girl” a young friendly lass in air raid wardens (ARP) overcoat and tin helmet. As usual you have to put aside the 1940’s hair etc to see faces like you’d see in London today, the girl looks happy but weary the lighting on her helmet with the rim catching the light makes her look as if she has a halo. Her “chap” is looking relaxed and jolly, UK battle dress always making Tommys look slightly scruffy, the short jacket looks ill fitting and draughty quite unlike the smarter or more casual German or American uniforms. The genius of this display is you have to look at the picture for the length of speech, taking time to think about these “unknown everyday heroes”.

The rest of the displays are just as good/fascinating and in the case of the voiceover free footage of Winston funeral quite moving. One last thing it’s not all hero worship there’s lots of negative stuff about Churchill to give balance and honesty to the whole affair.

The rest of the War rooms are quite evocative, the use of Foley sounds such as disappearing foot steps, air raid sirens and typewriter noises brings the place alive, the most evocative thing however is the smell of some of the rooms. They have that smell of my grandparents’ homes a mixture of dust, musty canvas and paper and as S point out old cleaning products.

I know that some people think places like the CWR glorify war, ironically I think they occasionally go too far the other way, on dwelling on “CND” side of things without reminding us of why they are important and that we live pleasant free lives today because people did brave, scary, selfless deeds in the past.

The personal nature of the world war is always brought home to me by the picture at the head of this post, a famous picture of a German bomber flying over East London in 1940.
Stan Boardman’s joke about “bombing our chippy” is sadly sometimes true, my chippy is under the “r” in “imperial”, flats like mine are here because the terraces in this picture were bombed out. Just up the road from my chippy is the Iceland in Newcross, which use to be a Woollies until one Saturday afternoon late in the war a V2 rockets hit it and killed over a 100 shoppers in a split second. Sadly there are 29,000 other stories like this in London to go with the untold sorry millions of others in Russia, Poland etc.

So if you haven’t been the Cabinet War Room is worth visiting, having said that as usual London’s history is all around us too...