Castle Aching

[Edwardian]

5 minutes ago, Hroth said:

The early years of the twentieth century were a worrying time in England, what with the Zombie Apocalypse in Norfolk and the Martians in Surrey.  I was just wondering, are there still traces (in the form of new building, etc) of the Martian onslaught, or was the destruction covered up by associating redevelopment with the aftermath of German bombing, and the impact of V weapons?

 

Conspiracy Theorists Want To Know! 

 

(Its about time a programme concerning  these events was broadcast on digital TV...)

 

One of the themes in E M Forster's Howard's End (1910) is the destruction of London' Regency terraces to make way for blocks of Mansion Flats.  Similarly, the great aristocratic town houses were being decimated, with few if any left for the Luftwaffe to take out in 1940-41 (see Brideshead Revisited).

 

The accepted explanation has been the economics of population pressure.  In general, the re-use of this land for more intensive occupation no doubt is the explanation, but what is forgotten is how this redevelopment effectively disguised the devastation wrought by the Martian incursion in the 1900s.  Whilst this affected only a small percentage of London's fabric - essentially only buildings and blocks directly in the path of heat ray discharges - where it did occur the devastation was total.  The logical answer in residential districts was immediately to replace that corner, block or part of a street with a block of Mansion Flats of the type that in any case had begun to proliferate. 

 

What is also not widely understood is that the Asquith Government had to intervene to subsidise much of this building within the first few months, as fast-paced reconstruction was seen as essential in effacing visible evidence of extra-terrestrial depredations, and, as a result of this policy, initially accommodation outstripped the population as it took some time for many Londoners to return and for the upward population trend to resume.   

 

Culturally there seems to have been a collective wish to deny what had happened, as incomprehensibly awful, and references to recent events were officially discouraged.  The Pennyfeather sedition trial  affords a rare glimpse from official records of the Government's campaign of denial. It appears that a senior clerk in a City Bank had boasted to a friend that he was in the process of buying an apartment in a new block of "Martian Flats".  His interlocutor was not amused  and promptly reported him to Special Branch.  H G Wells's account was, of course, banned, but in a inventively sinister manipulation of history more appropriate for Soviet (or Putin's) Russia than a Liberal administration in Edwardian England, Wells's story was faked up as a work of fiction published some years before (during the late 1890s), thus disassociating the work with more recent historic events. This explained away any extant copies of the 1906 first edition, and it is understood that the Literary Culture Section of the new, and secret, Department of Extra-Terrestrial Obfuscation, even faked up some earlier editions. This strategy largely worked, the book is generally regarded these days as fiction and one explainable as one of a raft of novels in the 'invasion literature' genre of the late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.   Censorship is never total, however, and one can surely detect something of the anxiety and upheaval of recent events in Elgar's Second Symphony?

 

Fortunately for all concerned, attempts by the German High Command in the latter part of 1917 to contact the Martians with a view to forming an alliance that would provide Germany with a decisive advantage on the Western Front, were entirely unsuccessful.   Germany made a similar attempt in the 1940s, but this, also, came to nothing when Hitler insisted that the V2 rockets all be used as offensive weapons against London, rather than developed as manned spacecraft for a Mars mission.  Indeed, so far as we know, there has never been anything further heard from Mars. 

 

In more recent years, barrister Toby Frost is suspected to have investigated the cover-up, but official records remain sealed and even now Frost evidently feels the need to disguise his findings by placing them in one of his novels, though he is surely correct that the pioneering research undertaken in the 1970s by leading invasion scholar Jeff Wayne was unlikely to convince either academics or the public when presented in rock-opera format.  One assumes that Wayne had not dared be more explicit, especially as the conclusion of his work hints that the NASA space programme might have uncovered evidence of recent Martian activity.  Dark forces ....

 

 

[Hroth]

That explains a lot.

 

A supplementary question.  Given that the Martians were of superior intelligence and had advanced technologies. why did they target their invasion on Great Britain, a densely populated, highly cohesive society with technological expertise and a militaristic bent?  Surely it would be more appropriate to target the Great Plains of the USA or Russia east of Moscow, both relatively underpopulated and with relatively less sophisticated military forces?  In such places they may have been able to create a world-conquering base, free from human interference before they struck with devastating force!

 

Of course, they would have succumbed to the deadly bacteria of Earth before actually setting forth to bring doom and disaster to the planet and it wouldn't have been such a thrilling yarn.  Perhaps their rotting carcasses and abandoned machinery might have been discovered by Professor Challenger, but that would be another story.....

[Joseph_Pestell]

Ignoring the Martians if I may, it has never occurred to me to ponder what was previously on the site of all those mansion flats. I must start to do some research on old-maps.co.uk. London may have been a much more attractive city.

[Martin S-C]

53 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

A supplementary question.  Given that the Martians were of superior intelligence and had advanced technologies. why did they target their invasion on Great Britain, a densely populated, highly cohesive society with technological expertise and a militaristic bent?  Surely it would be more appropriate to target the Great Plains of the USA or Russia east of Moscow, both relatively underpopulated and with relatively less sophisticated military forces?  In such places they may have been able to create a world-conquering base, free from human interference before they struck with devastating force!

A Martian canister was fired at Siberia to establish a base in an area well away from human interference but it exploded above the Tunguska forests and was destroyed.

 

As regards that Woking .pdf I had no idea Wells lived on Maybury Hill. There's a lot of auto-biography in the story. I can imagine him sitting in his living room or staring out of a bedroom window looking at the Surrey skyline and plotting where the Tripods would advance from and to, like one of us planning a model railway. He was a geek of the finest calibre.

[Edwardian]

58 minutes ago, Hroth said:

That explains a lot.

 

A supplementary question.  Given that the Martians were of superior intelligence and had advanced technologies. why did they target their invasion on Great Britain, a densely populated, highly cohesive society with technological expertise and a militaristic bent?  Surely it would be more appropriate to target the Great Plains of the USA or Russia east of Moscow, both relatively underpopulated and with relatively less sophisticated military forces?  In such places they may have been able to create a world-conquering base, free from human interference before they struck with devastating force!

 

Of course, they would have succumbed to the deadly bacteria of Earth before actually setting forth to bring doom and disaster to the planet and it wouldn't have been such a thrilling yarn.  Perhaps their rotting carcasses and abandoned machinery might have been discovered by Professor Challenger, but that would be another story.....

 

It was, of course, always an affront to Gallic pride that the Martians disdained to invade France, and French anglophobes have always resented Britain for becoming Mars's first and only victim.  Of course, we do not know what the Martians' thinking was, or, indeed, what their long-term plans might have been.  There have been many theories, though we are hampered by the relative paucity of public and published academic debate due to the extent of the cover up.  Some distinct trends of thought emerge, however.

 

The 1900s were, perhaps, the last days in which the Whig-historical view of history as the course of inevitable upward progress held sway among the educated classes, and it might be thought that the Great War had put a dent in such beliefs.  The Martian Invasion was, however, a significant and earlier challenge to the confidence implicit in the Whig-historical view.  Nevertheless, a natural view of the time was that Britain, and London especially, had been the target because Britain was the pre-eminent world power and London the capital of Empire.  Taking out England, the theory went, was to destroy the most powerful force on the planet, the centre of civilisation. With Britain neutralised, world domination would ensue.  We stopped them and, therefore, saved the world.  It was also genuinely believed by many that England represented the best of the world's people, both morally and physically, whose wholesale loss would be irreplaceable.  

 

This ignored the fact that as early as the 1870s, Germany's industrial output had exceeded ours and, I believe that of the US had, too.  So, the anglo-centric motivations ascribed to the Martians by British commentators may be to attribute to us greater significance in the eyes of the Martians than was in fact the case.  Britain, in many ways already a power past her peak, had many sub-conscious anxieties, even before the Martians added to these. The self-delusional assumption of superiority perhaps was a natural way to assuage the insecurities of a civilisation under both present threat and in terminal decline. 

 

But, in general, Britons needed to and did believe that their victim-hood was a symptom of their superiority and leading place in the world.  One of the reasons that the authorities so detested Wells's account is that he saw it rather differently.  The focus of his book is not really the war, but the absolute, total and very sudden collapse of order and civilisation.  He shows Britain and her population not merely helpless, but almost instantaneously reduced to a state of primitive savagery in the face of the Martians.  This is not a self-image that Edwardian England wanted to accept. 

 

So why did the Martians invade England? Well, one theory is that Britain's military strength was overseas, defending the Empire.  Regular forces were always comparatively weak at home, compared with the large Continental European armies, backed by the ability to mobilise vast reserves, present in-country and ready to defend it.  For an Enemy that could largely bypass the Royal Navy by landing from space on the British Mainland, we represented a soft target.  In the event, conventional military forces of the day had no effective response to the Martians, but it does not follow that the Martians were reckless as regards casualties. While evidently difficult to bring down an armoured Tripod with the air-bust shells of the day (there being no armour-piercing ordnance at that time), it was evidently possible, and Wells recounted one such incident.  The artillery threat was obviously sufficient to cause the Martians to change their tactics, as they thenceforth destroyed conventional forces from a distance using their black smoke.

 

This explanation does not, however, answer the point that the Martians could have chosen an empty region with no effective defence whatsoever. The few modern historians who dare venture into this controversial area, and who are prepared to wrestle with continued censorship, have provided explanations that are more prosaic.  London as a city and Britain in general were relatively densely populated, and the grisly side of the Martian occupation was their evident intention of farming human beings for consumption.  Britain, bounded by sea on all sides, was a self-contained, human-rich environment that the invaders could use to meet their needs. 

 

One can interpret the Thunderchild incident in this way.  Observers certainly understood the Tripods to be attempting to prevent the departure of the civilian steamer to France, having no evident interest in the Thunderchild until it attacked.  This can be seen as part of a wider strategy to prevent the escape of prey and to seal off the coast in order to trap the entire population of the UK. 

 

I could go on all day, but that would not be a good idea ...

 

 

 

 

[Martin S-C]

James, you should post on that steampunk forum that was mentioned up the page a way. This contemporary view of politics, empire and British self-importance would freak them out.

[Nearholmer]

Or, maybe they landed just up the road from the bloke who wrote the story, who happened not to be Jules Verne.

[Edwardian]

13 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Or, maybe they landed just up the road from the bloke who wrote the story, who happened not to be Jules Verne.

 

Well, you say that, but we know that aliens generally do not appear in front of Sci-Fi writers.

 

For some reason they prefer to reveal themselves to backwoodsmen in Michigan. 

 

 

 

Edited March 29, 2019 by Edwardian

[petethemole]

Paul Magrs' novel Never The Bride includes a storyline based on the fact that one of the Martians survived, stranded in a remote village in Norfolk, where he fathered children with the local women, the resultant 'mixed race' community becoming a closed, isolationist society with various Martian bodily mutations.

[Edwardian]

56 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

James, you should post on that steampunk forum that was mentioned up the page a way. This contemporary view of politics, empire and British self-importance would freak them out.

 

Thanks, Martin.  I seem to have missed the reference to a steampunk forum, however.

 

4 hours ago, webbcompound said:

There is film of the events, you just have to know where to look. And yes they are wearing khaki (and field gray) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bERNcnaT-ko

 

 

That's quite chillingly effective.

 

Was there some mention of a BBC fillum?

[Caley Jim]

And where does Roswell fit into all this?  Or is that another story again?   

 

Jim

[Edwardian]

24 minutes ago, petethemole said:

Paul Magrs' novel Never The Bride includes a storyline based on the fact that one of the Martians survived, stranded in a remote village in Norfolk, where he fathered children with the local women, the resultant 'mixed race' community becoming a closed, isolationist society with various Martian bodily mutations.

 

Given the physical description Wells gives us of the Martians, I find that quite disturbing. I doubt that the concept of "normal for Norfolk" could be stretched that far.

 

Meanwhile, over the border in the Cambridgeshire Fens, they had already proved that you don't need aliens in order to produce mutations; just keep it in the family ....

 

Hat ... coat ...

 

4 minutes ago, Caley Jim said:

And where does Roswell fit into all this?  Or is that another story again?   

 

Jim

 

A good question, but then, as it does not feature Edwardians or shunting at Woking, who cares?!?  

[Hroth]

It must be remembered that the events described by HG Wells were probably only the most recent attempt by Martians to reach Earth...

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0141m1f/quatermass-and-the-pit-1-the-halfmen

 

 

[Martin S-C]

29 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

as it does not feature Edwardians or shunting at Woking, who cares?!?  

[Martin S-C]

51 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Was there some mention of a BBC fillum?

https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a25890001/war-of-the-worlds-2019-cast-bbc/

[NeilHB]

Well I can say the last few pages have made my afternoon at work far more interesting than it normally is - must try not to write about Martians in my report though! 

 

Carry on folks!  

[Edwardian]

15 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a25890001/war-of-the-worlds-2019-cast-bbc/

 

OOOoooooooh, WotW is out of copyright, according to that article!

[Martin S-C]

Some more stills here taken during shooting (so some have modern crew in them).
 

According to one comment on YT by a person who was an extra in the filming there is a faithful scene set on Horsell Common with the heat ray being first deployed as well as a scene on the coast with people having to run down a beach and get into small boats. There are also comments that the black smoke is featured.

Apart from two new characters (male and female leads) the story seems pretty faithful to the book.

Lets hope there are trains too.

Edited March 29, 2019 by Martin S-C

[Edwardian]

I think WotW is close to unfilmable as a narrative drama; there's is too much missing, so I would see the need for additions.

 

No doubt this reflects the fact that Wells's wrote a factual account, not a novel at all!  Well, Hroth had asked for a conspiracy theory ...

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, Martin S-C said:

Some more stills here taken during shooting (so some have modern crew in them).
 

According to one comment on YT by a person who was an extra in the filming there is a faithful scene set on Horsell Common with the heat ray being first deployed as well as a scene on the coast with people having to run down a beach and get into small boats. There are also comments that the black smoke is featured.

Apart from two new characters (male and female leads) the story seems pretty faithful to the book.

Lets hope there are trains too.

 

Hope no Red Squirrels were inconvenienced in the pinewoods of Ainsdale! Lots of Liverpool and Port Sunlight village on the Wirral in the stills. 

The corporal with the stretcher looked remarkably like John Alderton.....

 

Looks interesting!

[Edwardian]

Faced with the choice between a hour or so modelling and drinking heavily, I opted for the former, but I just cannot persuade any cube of plasticard small enough to be a bolt on a wagon strap to be glued to it.

 

Any suggestions?

[Compound2632]

8 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Faced with the choice between a hour or so modelling and drinking heavily, I opted for the former, but I just cannot persuade any cube of plasticard small enough to be a bolt on a wagon strap to be glued to it.

 

Any suggestions?

 

Stop trying to use the Gin as solvent and / or stop drinking the MekPak.

Edited March 29, 2019 by Compound2632
Exchanged Scotch for Gin - it's Friday!

[ChrisN]

Fraid when I could not get small things to stick with Mek Pak or similar I resorted to liquid poly, applied with a pin.

[nick_bastable]

18 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Faced with the choice between a hour or so modelling and drinking heavily, I opted for the former, but I just cannot persuade any cube of plasticard small enough to be a bolt on a wagon strap to be glued to it.

 

Any suggestions?

works for me wheres the problem

 

Nick

[petethemole]

That video has greatly disturbed my inner pedant. The corporal wouldn't have a beard; in the Edwardian Army moustaches were compulsory, once you could grow one. The private on the left is quite young, so OK.   Plus the curse of the white window frames has struck again. Some looked suspiciously like UPVC.