Lots of great doors in Norwich including the wonderful ladies lavs in the Castle. (I expect the gents is just as good.) Work on the Cathedral began the year 1096 and but the chapel dedicated St Catherine of Alexandria is a later 14th-century addition. This beautiful etched glass door to the chapel is by Sally Scott 1989. Above the door…
I started on a shelf-clearing exercise which – of course – was doomed from the get-go. I mean – if you are sorting through books, it’s guaranteed that you will very quickly find something that you must immediately sit down and read. The culprit in this particular case was a novella I’ve read twice before but – as the last…
So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets,…
March is Dewithon Month #Dewithon. You can read about this celebration of literary Wales at the link We are all invited to join in and I thought it was about time I did especially as this project – now in its 5th year – is the work of The Book Jotter whose weekly post of literary links always gets my weekend…
Poetry is critical to a complete understanding of the First World War because in the years leading up to and including the war, poetry played a central role in public and private life. Constance Ruzich, in the introduction to the anthology. It was Paul Fussell who showed us that the young British officer class that went off to the Great…
The Year Begins in October Armistead Maupin based his vignettes of gay life in 1970s San Francisco – Tales of the City – on Jan Struther’s Mrs. Miniver (1939). They first appeared in a long-running serial in the San Francisco Chronicle. Instinctively I wanted to write a gay male Mrs Miniver, the minutiae of gay life with Michael Tolliver as…
In his series of WW1 epitaphs, Rudyard Kipling comments on the all too common fate of a new soldier at the front who – curious about the enemy – cannot resist taking a look and unwittingly exposes his head to a sniper. The beginner On the first hour of my first day In the front trench I fell.…
This post is in answer to the question “Operation Pied Piper: What were they thinking?” At least in terms of the evacuation scheme. The choice of code-name remains ambiguous. It begins with a little history. Napoleon In the first years of the 19th century, Napoleon made no secret of his intention to invade Britain, destroy the monarchy and take…
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this…
Yeats wrote the poem “The Wild Swans at Coole” (see Game of Swans) in 1916 /17 when he was staying with Lady Gregory at her home in Coole Park, Galway and feeling lovelorn. In 1919 he used the title for a collection of poems that he dedicated to her son – Major Robert Gregory – the Royal Flying Corps fighter…
The Background One evening in the spring of 1919 a soldier in his uniform appeared at the front door of 115, Strathyre Avenue, Norbury, London. Frances Sims knew who it was immediately. It was her husband – Lance Corporal Frank Herbert Sims, known as Bert. The only problem was that Lance Corporal Sims had died at Taranto, Italy in January. …
Two quite different wartime farewells at Charing Cross Station: The first is from Vera Brittain on the eve of 1915: At Charing Cross, with half an hour to wait for the last train to Purley, we walked together up and down the platform. It was New Year’s Eve, a bright night with infinities of stars and a cold, brilliant moon;…
It started with a tweet from yesterday morning: So off to google where I found the same inaccurate one-line biography pretty much everywhere, including Wikipedia. May Herschel-Clarke (1850–1950) was an English poet. She is chiefly known today for her Anti-War poems Nothing to Report and The Mother, the latter of which was published in 1917 as a direct response to Rupert Brooke‘s famous poem The Soldier.…
Update: 15 October 2020 I’ve heard from Lyn who is the Project Lead for ‘Away from the Western Front’. ‘No Parades’ was commissioned by them as part of their First World War centenary project. The project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund in the UK and accordingly, they were able to commission Chris Hoban to compose this song for…
They had all watched him die, in a foreign landA warning to others from the High Command. Forfeits medals (sentenced to death). Sentence Duly carried out. This grim notation is in the UK, WWI Service Medal and Award Rolls, 1914-1920 entry for Private 7429 Herbert Morris of the 6th Battalion of the British West Indies Regiment. Amid all the cruelty,…