The Pride and the Passion (1957)

I was reminded by a post on Stryker's splendid blog of my appreciation of CS Forester's two novels of Napoleonic land warfare in the Peninsular War - Death to the French and The Gun - and of the travesty of a film version of The Gun which staggered into cinemas in 1957, under the title The Pride and the Passion.

It would be possible to devote a very long criticism to this film, highlighting the complete lack of respect to both history and Forester's fine book, the awful characterisations and accents, the unrelenting flood of moronic national stereotypes and, especially, the spectacular switch of the plot to replace one of the guerrilla leaders with Sophia Loren; I shall rise above all this, and I merely offer a couple of glimpses, for those who have not seen this epic and for those who, like me, have seen it but may not be able to believe how bad it was.

Behind the impressive branding this was, as you will observe, a joint production by the Reader's Digest and Miss Bentham's class at Beaconsfield Primary School, but it cannot be faulted on expense or dedication to tasteless excess. Here is the assault on Avila, which is stirring stuff, though you may feel that the French could have been a bit more businesslike about the defence. I recall that my cousin and I, after we had seen it, were not surprised that poor old Sophia was wounded in the chest, since, if only from the point of view of proportional surface area, that seemed a very high probability. Shame, though.

Whatever else the French could have done better, I certainly hope they executed the uniform consultant - and you've seen nothing - wait till you see the cavalry. I was tempted to see how cheaply I could get a DVD of this film, but I haven't found one cheap enough yet. I shall continue to keep an eye open. In the meantime, perhaps you would join me in a quiet salute to the real CS Forester.

An Important Anniversary

18th June, of course, is just like any other day, and this year it happens to fall on a Thursday, but, as you go about your business today, do not forget that this is an important anniversary. As anyone with the slightest awareness of history knows, on this day in 1892 the first Macadamia nuts (which are native to New Guinea and Australasia) were planted in Hawaii.

For anyone with more of an interest in military and political history, this is also the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty (or Pacification) of Berwick (1639), by which Charles I was forced to acknowledge that he had been defeated - expensively and embarrassingly - by the Scots, and this brought to an end the First Bishops' War. He followed this up with the equally successful Second Bishops' War, and - since he was now on a bit of a roll - then proceeded to declare war on his own parliament, which caused a great deal of unpleasantness and killed a lot of people - including himself.

Oh well.

Bishops' Wars

Hooptedoodle #177 - TB Maund - A Prince Among Nerds

I have occasionally mentioned here my interest in buses - I have also emphasised that it stops short of being a hobby, as my little box of model buses stops short of being a true collection. This is a matter of policy. My focus, if there is one, is on the nostalgia associated with vintage buses from my home town and the surrounding area during my childhood, which is a bit contrived, I guess, as are a lot of old men's follies, but there is something profoundly special about buses for a man of my age, in a way which may be less obvious to, even less easily understood by, someone from a later generation.

For a start, public transport was an ever-present in the 1950s and 1960s - just about everything I ever did, everywhere I went, involved buses - half the childhood conversations I can remember seem to have taken place on the bus. Life was arranged around bus routes and bus timetables - and the limits of everything acceptable and decent were defined by the times of the last bus home. I knew people whose families owned cars, of course, but my family never had one until after I had gone away to university (you don't suppose that was deliberate, do you?). Buses were, and remain, important to me.

The other thing about old buses is the photographs in the hobby books - wow! - time-capsule stuff. Some bus enthusiast taking a routine photograph of the number 82 driving along Park Road in 1953 is just another old picture of a bus, but if it wasn't for the bus enthusiast no-one in his right mind would ever have taken a casual picture of Park Road otherwise, so these old snaps are a goldmine of social history - absolute nostalgia bomb. I bought a couple of old books, to fill in some of the huge gaps in my understanding of the subject, and I was hooked. I am still concentrating on what used to be termed the North West (a term which must have mystified anyone from Fort William), but I have branched out (ha!) into trams, local railways and the Mersey Ferries, and my time horizons have widened a lot.

One common thread that I picked up on straight away is that a large proportion of these books is the work of one Thomas Bruce Maund - TB Maund - the high priest of Northern transport. I have learned to associate his name on the cover with a guarantee of a well-written, balanced, thorough presentation, and (OCD bonus point) I believe that I have not been aware of any transposed pictures, misprints, spelling errors or even incorrect punctuation. Mr Maund is the business. Bus-spotting may be another classic example of a minority interest (no-one ever got rich publishing books about Birkenhead buses), but it is blessed - TBM is a perfect example of the sort of quiet superhero without whom hobbies would be impossible - a man whose love of his subject becomes a treasure trove for those who come after.

Mr Maund is, of course, very famous in his field (though he would have hated the very idea), but I had never heard of him until last year. I have more of his works on order - this time a 2-volume history of the Mersey Ferries - and I know they will be excellent. He died just a couple of years ago - after a lifetime of painstaking research and careful, flawless documentation; he died before I had even heard of him, but I hope you will forgive me if I extend this off-topic post to offer a small tribute to him - this was his obituary in the journal of the proceedings of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, of which TBM was, of course, a Fellow.

Obituary: Thomas Bruce Maund FCILT

Renowned transport historian and author Thomas Bruce Maund, former bus company manager and author of some of the most authoritative transport history books, died on 1st October 2013 at the age of 89. 
He was born in Wallasey on 10th August 1924 and had remarkable personal memories of trams and buses in the Merseyside area, which he was able to date back as far as the age of four. He was almost certainly the last person alive with clear memories of the operation of Wallasey trams, the system having closed on 30th November 1933.

He attended the Oldershaw School in his home town and his first job was as a junior railway clerk in a local goods office. After army service in Africa towards the end of the Second World War and for a period thereafter, he began work in the bus industry in 1948. Initially he worked for Basil Williams’s Hants and Sussex operation, involved in what he described as: ‘the seamy side of what appeared to be a glossy operation’. The following year he obtained a position with Ribble Motor Services, where he was known as Tom. He served the company for 18 years, with the parent company and with Standerwick, latterly as District Traffic Superintendent in Blackpool and finally Preston. For a time in 1966/67, he was seconded to the Traffic Research Corporation to work on the Merseyside Area Land Use/Transport Study (MALTS) project. 

In early 1970, he took the opportunity to move abroad when he took up a position with United Transport in Kenya, working for Kenya Bus Service in Nairobi. Staying with United Transport, he moved on to South Africa in 1973, where he worked for African Bus Service in Pretoria, Greyhound Bus Lines in Krugersdorp and Rustenburg Bus Services in Rustenburg, before finishing his working days at United Transport’s head office in Johannesburg. 
He took a great interest in training and further education, lecturing at colleges at Blackpool and Preston and at Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg. He was a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Transport, having studied for his Institute exams in his early Ribble days. He retired in 1987 and he and his wife Kathleen (Kay, who died in 2002) returned to the UK in 1992 and made their home in Prenton, Wirral. 
Alongside his professional career, Bruce was developing a reputation as a thorough researcher of transport history and a prolific author of his findings.

He could trace his interest in transport back to the late 1920s, having vivid memories of the introduction of double-deck buses in his home town on 4th April 1928. His family accepted his interest but, in his own words: ‘All attempts to wean me off my “mania” failed.’ His adventurous nature took him on a solo trip to Liverpool via the ferry at the age of six (which he never told his family about!), and he remembered seeing Ribble buses in Lime Street, shortly after the company had changed its terminal arrangements. The Ribble terminus gave him a ready source of used tickets, and by the age of 10 he was already what he described as a serious ticket collector, identifying different types of ticket and forming them into sets. After school, he was often to be found watching traffic movements at the busy Seacombe ferry terminus and committed the full contents of the Wallasey Corporation destination blind to memory. Over 70 years later, he could still recite this verbatim. 

The reward of a Royal Enfield bicycle (cost £3 19s 9d) for passing the grammar school scholarship widened his horizons and he undertook ambitious cycle trips to places as far afield as Greater Manchester and the Potteries. He also got as far as Birmingham to visit his aunt unannounced, but she was out at the time and he and his bicycle caught the train home. Until this time, Bruce was unaware of the existence of any other bus enthusiasts, although he had a small set of contacts with whom he corresponded in connection with his ticket collection. One of these was the tramway expert W H Bett who lived in Birmingham and who persuaded him to take up membership of the Light Railway Transport League. Through the LRTL Merseyside area representative he met Peter Hardy, who, before being called up for war service, had been researching the history of Liverpool bus routes. This initial contact awakened Bruce’s serious interest in road passenger transport history, as well as starting a long friendship that lasted until Peter Hardy’s death in 1986. 
Through Peter Hardy, Bruce met a wide range of other enthusiasts, including Omnibus Society North Western Branch founder member Jack Baker. He joined the OS in 1943 and was one of its longest-standing members at the time of his death. He acted as the Branch’s visits secretary for a short time, helping to organise a fine array of summer visits that reached, in that pre-motorway era, as far as Darlington and Northampton. In the winter he was involved in arranging a programme of meetings with guest speakers. He subscribed to Buses Illustrated from its first edition in 1949 and it was fitting that the month he died coincided with the current buses calendar displaying a picture of Wallasey PD2 No 54. 

His first piece of published work was an article about Bere Regis and District which he wrote for Modern Transport while based at Salisbury during the latter years of the war, for which he was paid £5. He followed this up with a piece on Kenya Buses when posted to that country by the army in 1945–47. With respect to the bus industry, in his own words he had become: ‘interested in everything but as a consequence became expert on nothing’. He therefore made the decision to concentrate on the Merseyside area because that was what he knew best and began work in the early 1950s on what was much later to emerge as the five volume Liverpool Transport series, jointly authored with John Horne. He revelled in making new discoveries from minute books or other records, and in debunking some oft-repeated untrue statement. His first publication was a booklet in 1958 for the Omnibus Society on Transport in 
Rochdale and District, much of this being based on material left to the OS through the estate of a deceased member who had been researching the subject. This was followed soon afterwards by one on Local Transport in Birkenhead and District based on Bruce’s own research. He went on to author or co-author a total of 28 books during his lifetime. 
Through well-known Liverpool photographer and enthusiast Norman Forbes, Bruce was introduced to John Horne, who Forbes was aware was ploughing a similar furrow with respect to research on Liverpool. The Horne/Maund partnership produced the first volume of Liverpool Transport in 1975 (published by the LRTL) and the lavish set of books – including a significantly rewritten version of the first volume in 1995 – stands as probably the most thorough piece of published transport research on any UK city. It was all the more remarkable for the fact that for the majority of the period Bruce was living in South Africa and much of his contribution to the research was conducted on trips back to the UK, where he and Kay would work as a team at the Public Record Office and local archives to record as much information as they could in their limited time available.


Following his return to the UK in retirement, Bruce’s output averaged almost a book a year, with detailed books on Crosville, Ribble and St Helens (the latter jointly with Mervyn Ashton) and a series of illustrated soft-backed books for a Wirral-based publisher of local interest titles. Although predominantly targeted towards buses, his researches widened to cover titles on tramways (a Birkenhead and Wallasey title with Martin Jenkins in 1987), two volumes on Mersey Ferries (the second one again jointly with Martin Jenkins), and three railway books. He was persuaded to write up some of his previously unpublished material on Birkenhead and early bus services in South Lancashire and these were published by the Omnibus Society, the latter being his final title in 2011. He also undertook editing work for publishers such as Venture Publications and NBC Books, and was often asked to provide text verification for other transport titles. 
This prodigious volume of published work is a fitting legacy to a man who devoted a large part of his life to his research and, importantly, ensured it reached a wide public. Although at times appearing stern – and with what could be viewed as unreconstructed opinions forged in different times – Bruce was loyal to his friends and colleagues and a devoted family man. He is survived by his two sons Derek and Philip, granddaughter Vanessa and great-grandsons Liam and Ethan.

Charles Roberts and Ken Swallow     

Hooptedoodle #176 - Don't Visit Scotland - Tourist Scam Exposed

Boring

I was very impressed by a BuzzFeed item which you can access here - extracts from TripAdvisor giving customer reviews - the genuine lowdown on overrated tourist attractions, and quite right too. It's about time someone had the courage to publish stuff like this, I think.

Dreadful tales of castles which have been allowed to deteriorate, untidy countryside and even mountains without a cafe at the top. It makes me ashamed, to be honest. If these poor people never come back, I could hardly blame them.

And as for that lake - it's a lake, right?

Boring

Hooptedoodle #175 - Old George

George's beach

As I’ve mentioned here before (and I’m sure it was just as interesting then…) I live on a farm. I am not a farmer, I just live on a farm. It is a very large farm – the bit I live on was originally 3 separate farms, but they have all been acquired by a single family, and two more of the adjoining farms are also owned by cousins of the same dynasty, so this is a very big set-up by UK standards – thousands of acres devoted to potatoes, wheat, barley, leeks, cabbages, sprouts and so on. Apart from a thriving riding stable and livery business, the only livestock here now are in a big indoor piggery a couple of miles from my house.

This is probably screamingly obvious to everyone apart from a townie such as I was when I arrived here, but the economics of farming have altered greatly over the last century; when I first moved here it was very clear that a small number of men with tractors and motorised equipment could handle all the work which had required a whole lot of manual labour before WW2, and much of the farm workers’ housing here had thus been sold off to reclusive people like me – mostly in the 1970s, in fact, but that is how I come to live on a working farm. In the last few years this has changed further – the farm now leases out most of its fields to be planted and harvested by specialist contracting firms – big, industrial-scale operators who own no land of their own, but rent acreage on a year-by-year basis. Thus the farm now has very few permanent staff – their involvement in the leased fields is merely in the preparation of the land – ploughing and so forth – for each year’s new planting. They do still harvest their own wheat, in fact, but otherwise our fields are regularly full of strange machines, and a great many young people from Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, you name it – British young people, it seems, are not interested in working that hard, thank you, and anyway it would impact their housing benefit.

Well, Old George was my next-door neighbour when I first moved here in 2000. He lived on his own, and, while not exactly antisocial, he liked to keep to himself. He’s dead now, but I often think about him. He was the oldest person I ever met and, in his quiet way, he offered a valuable reminder of what is comforting and what is scary about old age.

First thing I remember about him is that he never complained about anything, even when his eyesight was mostly gone and his hearing was dodgy and he was having difficulties with his balance, he was always cheery and polite, always put on his best clothes for church or for his weekly visit to the Buttercup Café in the village.

George was born in 1909, in the Shetland Islands – his family had a grocery business in Lerwick, and he was one of seven children. When I first met him he was 91, and he was at least as lucid as I was at the time. It became very clear, very quickly, that George did not appreciate people fussing after him, or doing things for him, so a great deal of secrecy and deceit went into the concealment of any favours anyone did him. I asked him what he did in the war, and he simply said he had been too old to be called up, so I didn’t pursue the matter, but after he was dead I read that he had served in the RAF (he was a sergeant) on motor rescue boats in the Mediterranean, based for a while in Egypt – not only that, but he had been decorated for gallantry in rescuing downed aircrew.

RAF fast launch based in Egypt

His family had moved to Edinburgh in the 1930s, in search of employment. George worked as an accountant for a well-known confectionery company, and after the war he moved to work for the hydroelectric company. When he retired from the power company he took a job at the farm where I now live. He had never married, and he had care of two of his sisters, one of whom was mentally handicapped, so he was concerned to keep up his income. He managed the farm office here for a good many years, well into his 70s, and is still remembered very clearly by any lorry driver who ever had the temerity to turn up late with a delivery, or who brought some kind of short measure. The farm’s books were invariably spot on – and woe betide anyone who compromised that situation.

When I met him his sisters had both died, and he had retired at last (by 91, we should hope so!). He had indefinite use of one of the farm’s own cottages, and remained fiercely independent. I used to be aware of him going for his daily walk down to the beach, or in the woods, and used to worry a bit about his safety, but one very real concern was that he was still driving, though his eyesight wasn’t nearly good enough. He had a little, sky-blue Ford Fiesta which he kept in the sheds across from my house, and one day – sure enough – he knocked a lady off her bicycle on the country lanes because he couldn’t see her. Fortunately she was not hurt, but he received a letter from the County Sherriff’s office, requiring him to present himself at the court to answer charges of dangerous driving. Typical of the man, he told me that he had written back to them, stating that he did not care for the tone of their letter (since it sounded as though he were “a criminal or something”), and that they had replied that if he would surrender his driver’s licence by return they would drop the matter and not pursue the charges – and he laughed aloud at his own cheek.

For a while he used to spend the Christmas period with relatives in Surrey – so a great deal of planning went into organising taxis and flights to get him down there. Since I was one of the keyholders for his personal alarm (provided by the local authority), I started getting phonecalls late at night from the social work department, saying that George’s electricity was switched off, and would I check that he was all right. I knew he was away, but went next door anyway to check his house was in order, and kept finding his power was switched off. I would switch it back on, and next night I would get another call, and again I would find it was switched off. After a few iterations of this, it became clear that another neighbour, who also had a key, was coming in each day to check his mail (i.e. snoop around?) and, being very safety conscious, was switching off his mains electricity.

We sorted out that misunderstanding, but it became very obvious that poor Old George wasn’t really able to cope on his own – his house was filthy, and one aspect of this which gave me the creeps was that in each room there was something like a giant hammock stretching between the picture rail and the central light fitting – about 10 or 15 years’ accumulated spiders’ webs. It was very tempting to get an industrial vacuum cleaner and smarten the place up a bit while George was safely in Surrey, but he would have been mortified, and would never have forgiven me.

Not coping comes under various headings, of course. At one point his regular taxi driver mentioned to the social work department that he appeared to have nothing to eat in the house, and a couple of well-meaning girls from the Council came and visited him and brought some ready-meals for his fridge. George, predictably, was very angry, which is understandable since he could not read well enough to identify what was in the packets in the fridge, nor how to cook it, and since his eyesight was so bad that he could not safely use his cooker without risk of burning the place down.

As time passed he had a couple of falls when out walking, and then one winter I kept finding his lights on at strange hours of the night – on investigation, it turned out that he was refusing to take his medication, and was very confused what time it was – some nights he forgot to go to bed, and on one occasion was found on the floor. This is difficult to think about now, since it sounds – even to me – that we should have done more to take care of him, but George would have chased us with a broom if anyone had tried anything more invasive than keeping a general eye open. He told me once that he had a standing reservation for a room at a nursing home in the village, but he couldn’t see why he would wish to go and live with a lot of old people.

“I’m sure I’ll have to go there one day, but I’ll be dead in six weeks if I do. I’m happy here - I love to see the deer crossing the farm roads, and I like to hear the tractors setting off at daybreak to work on the land.”

 George was taken into the local cottage hospital around Christmas 2008 – I knew he would be outraged, but at least he would be warm and safe, and would get his meals and his medicine. He was still in the cottage hospital when his 100^th birthday came around, and there was a surprisingly large celebration, involving press photos of the Lord Lieutenant of the County and all sorts of people who would not normally cross the street to speak to George. I got a brief chance to speak to him, and asked him how he was doing.

He said, “Well, I’m not sure – mostly I think it would have been a lot less bother if I had just shot myself when I was 80!” and he laughed, of course.

Obviously he couldn’t stay in the cottage hospital indefinitely, and it was just as obvious that he couldn’t go home again, so eventually he moved into the nursing home, as he had feared he would. I know that you expect me to say this, but it’s true – he didn’t last six weeks, he died within a month of being admitted to the home. Maybe he just lost interest. After he died there was a bit about him in the local paper – things that I never knew, and that he would never have dreamed of telling anyone. In his day, apparently, he had been an excellent golfer, and also a fine singer and fiddle-player, and his wartime activities were always a secret.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I imagine him lying awake next door, and I wonder what he used to think about.

1809 Spaniards - Interim Group Photo

The new guys are at the far end

It's still early days for my 1809 Spanish army, but they are shaping up nicely, and the arrival of some long-awaited flags allows a first attempt at a mass photo. I haven't started on the grenadiers yet, the light and line infantry still have a lot to  come, and there is some more artillery (including some excellent stuff from GB Miniatures at Hagen). The light cavalry is about there now, but I haven't begun the dragoons or the line cavalry.

There is no attempt to line these up according to any OOB for this photo - the group on the viewer's left is the new stuff, painted up specifically for 1809. The group on your right represents the bits of my existing army which will fit in for 1809 - they are what in 1809 are termed "new regiments" - formed from May 1808 on.

I also have a sizeable force of irregular, partida-type troops who will be OK for 1809, but I've left those out of the picture simply because I felt it would be cheating to include them.

Current logic, then, is that anyone from my existing army who is wearing any British-style uniform, any artillery in shakos, plus any units which did not exist as early as 1809 (such as the Coraceros Españoles) are excluded from the new 1809 line-up. Rules, you see.

New, bicorne-hatted infantry

Light cavalry - 2 regts of cazadores and 2 of hussars - which reminds me - that
blue unit of Kennington figures at the back does not exactly fill me with delight
 - some creeping elegance required, methinks

Assorted Staff bods - more to come

The voluntarios and other units shared with the 1812 army

The new infantry march proudly into a stiff breeze, complete with flags at last

So it's a work in progress, as you see, but the arrival of the batch of new flags means that quite a lot more of them are suddenly ready for action.

* * * * * * * * *

Late edit: Completely different topic...

Anyone who, like me, got slightly burnt in the demise of NapoleoN Miniatures in 2009 may be interested to read a recent announcement from the management of Napoleon at War, which is an ambitious rules-plus-figures project run by some of the same people. I don't really have anything informed or worthwhile to say about what is going on there, other than that it would be a pity if it fizzled out, since the rules package and the 18mm(?) figures which are marketed under the same branding are really rather good, and since a lot of customers seem to have invested in the game and might - if things don't work out - end up stranded and out of pocket.

I didn't fare too badly at the end of NapoleoN - just some incomplete orders; other customers did much worse. In hindsight, NapoleoN was not such a strategic loss to the wargaming world as the Napoleon at War set up could be, since there were, and are, other suppliers of 1/72 metal figures - 18mm is much more rarified. [Though the loss of the NapoleoN-owned Les Higgins Napoleonics reissue was another matter altogether...]

I bought a lot of NapoleoN figures over the period they were active, and I purchased some stock remainders after they went under - a large part of my new 1809 army is built from exactly those NapoleoN figures. I don't know how NaW's 18mm soldiers match with other 18mm or with big 15mm (or small 20mm), but that sounds more tricky. I would be very nervous indeed at the prospect of committing my long-term hobby interests to a single supplier if there were no obvious back-up in the event of a commercial failure. Over the years, how many of us have eventually regretted getting involved with the little RSM figures, or Bataillon Fleur, or Hinchliffe System 12, or whatever else was heralded as the New Big Thing when it started up? Left snookered with incomplete armies, and no hope of rescuing the situation - especially in the days before eBay.

I bought the Napoleon at War rule book, and it really is well done. I never had any intention of going anywhere near their 18mm soldiers - even if I were not already committed to another scale, I wouldn't have entertained the idea. Too risky by half. Anyway, I hope they come through whatever problems they may be having at present, but - especially - I really hope that their loyal followers and collectors don't get hurt in the process.

1809 Spaniards - Odd Flags

My new book on the Regimientos Provinciales sets out standard patterns for their flags which are the same as those of the line regiments - the book also gives a page of line drawings of the provincial escudos which would have been placed in the corners for each unit. I am still poring over that lot.

I was reminded that I also have some Bueno plates on file showing various chaps carrying regimental flags which don't look much like the regulations. I can't remember where I got them - I think they may be from a book on the history of units from Asturias - but anyway I thought it might be useful to post them here, if only to add to the confusion!

Milicias Provinciales de Oviedo - 1808

Regto de Candas y Luanco - new unit raised May 1808

Regto de Cangas de Onis - new May 1808

Regto de Luarca - new June 1808

Apart from the militia unit at the top, these all purported to be regiments of line infantry - they each had a single battalion, so the last example may be related to the practice of combining a central coat of arms with the Bourbon cross which was introduced as a new-look coronela for single battalion units. All of this, of course, has to be seen in the light of the general confusion which reigned over the classification of units (such as which ones were irregulars, for a start) and the level of informality in design of colours which might be accepted to show allegiance to a locality, or to reflect the personal whim of the guy who was paying for the regiment's kit.

Some of these would certainly produce a touch of colourful variety on the battlefield.