Castle Aching

[Hroth]

7 hours ago, Annie said:

I am beginning to think there's been an alien invasion since nobody has been posting lately.

 

38 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Most of Britain is under heavy attack by furiously strong radiation rays from outer-space at the moment, so pretty much as you say.

 

Its those damn Martians again!

 

The miserably hot weather seems to be a phenomenon affecting the South more than the "North" and so commented on by Metropolitan based news media.

 

Here, its warm and muggy which is just as unbearable as extreme heat.

 

 

I'm looking forward to the promised thunderstorms to clear the air!

 

 

[Nearholmer]

All part of the climate change weather that now gives us ‘once in a lifetime’ events once a month. It was 37C in the shade here last Friday afternoon.

[Annie]

Just like all the second hand remains of tropical storms that we get all the time here that we never used to get a decade ago.  

My daughter and I were talking earlier about how the world's got 16 years left to stop global warming from going over the 2 degrees tipping point after which we'll all be well and truly screwed.  I seriously think that we haven't got a prayer of doing that given the poor performance of most governments so far.

[Hroth]

7 hours ago, Annie said:

 

 

 

Given the angle of the illustration, the writhing victims in the middle ground must be standing in the Thames.  Its similar to the Triang 7th edition catalogue cover, which appears to show Britannia chugging across Westminster Bridge...

 

 

[Annie]

I'm fairly certain that the picture is from the cover of one of those old American Sci-Fi magazines so the artist most probably only had the sketchiest idea (pun probably intended) of what London looked like.

 

The person who put together the Triang catalogue cover wouldn't have had that excuse though.

Edited August 8, 2020 by Annie
more to say

[Nearholmer]

The view from the LSWR main line out of Waterloo is not massively different from the Triang catalogue, and maybe the sci-fo one is a hard-core party on a boat in the river.

[Edwardian]

58 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

The view from the LSWR main line out of Waterloo is not massively different from the Triang catalogue, and maybe the sci-fo one is a hard-core party on a boat in the river.

 

You do see some odd sights at Waterloo from time to time ....

 

[Compound2632]

What you're not seeing there is the column Imperial Guards coming up the facing escalator, singing the Marseillaise. 

[Edwardian]

2 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

What you're not seeing there is the column Imperial Guards coming up the facing escalator, singing the Marseillaise. 

 

Or ABBA on the concourse singing Waterloo, causing the dismayed cry of "la garde recule" from parties of French school children, who, of course, had been taught that Napoleon had actually won the battle!

 

 

[Compound2632]

1 minute ago, Edwardian said:

had been taught that Napoleon had actually won the battle!

 

 

Dear me, surely everyone knows it was the Prussians under Blücher who won the battle - the Iron Duke's Allied army being, by the narrowest of margins, undefeated. 

[Nearholmer]

 

“Always the blasted same when they don’t put up the platform for the 5:12 to Guildford until that last moment - carnage!”

[Edwardian]

1 minute ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Dear me, surely everyone knows it was the Prussians under Blücher who won the battle - the Iron Duke's Allied army being, by the narrowest of margins, undefeated. 

 

It seems so obvious to me that neither the Prussian nor Anglo-Allied armies could have turned the engagements of 18th June to a decisive victory without the other, yet so hard, apparently, for historians to accept this simple fact. 

 

That's just British and German historians, of course; everyone knows that no one lies like a Frenchman writing history!

[Edwardian]

4 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

 

“Always the blasted same when they don’t put up the platform for the 5:12 to Guildford until that last moment - carnage!”

 

I'd say they were off to Farnbourgh to visit the grave of the Prince-Imperial, then I reflected that this was the wrong Napoleon.  Empires, for the French, are Like monarchies and republics; they go through so many that one tends to lose count.

[Compound2632]

Thought that would get you going. I shall retire the mossy shade of my intrados, there continue my lockdown reading - working my way through Mrs Compound's collected works of Georgette Heyer - just finished An Infamous Army, so I'm well up on the subject. 

[webbcompound]

People treat Waterloo as if it was some kind of decisive event, when it was simply another battle in the eleven hundred year long war between  the Germanic tribes of East Francia and Middle Francia, and the Germanic tribes of West Francia, which all started with the division of the Kingdom of the Franks into three parts on the death of Louis the Pius, Charlemagne's only heir, in AD840, and only ended with the Treaty of Rome in AD1958

Edited August 8, 2020 by webbcompound

[Edwardian]

1 minute ago, webbcompound said:

 ended with the Treaty of Rome in AD1958

 

Or so, until four years ago, we thought.  

 

There is a fashion to debunk all sorts of battles once thought decisive. I hear people do it about Waterloo.  This only goes to prove that in academia, as in all walks of life, we are blessed with many idiots. 

 

It rather depends, of course, on how long your long view is.  Like the housing and stock markets, if you wait long enough, no slump really matters. For those who are destroyed in the meantime, however ....

 

They call it the "long peace of the 1830s" for a reason, and, in general, Waterloo did result in half a century of relative peace in Europe, and a century before the next Europe-wide conflagration. True, for most of that period Britain continued to regard France as the principal threat and a present danger, but, the Napoleonic Wars was the "Great War" so far as people of the Nineteenth Century were concerned.  Such wars and their outcomes can make more than one generation pause for thought before risking another such.  After Waterloo it took a century to forget that a Great War is a bad idea, and then it was the Germans, rather than the French, who decided to risk one.

 

 

[Northroader]

“Roll up that map of Norfolk, it will not be wanted these ten years..”

[webbcompound]

Well it is true, people either only see the present, or they see the long duration. Half a century of peace in Europe, well up to a point. By 1830 the Dutch Belgians were at each others throats. Within France there were serious domestic conflicts at a scale above simple disorder in 1830, 1831, 1832, 1834 and 1838. Within the Germanic sphere there were military conflicts in 1848-51 and 1864  France was also involved in a military adventure in Spain in 1823, and in a major conflict with Austria in Italy in 1859. And of course there was the "year of revolutions" in 1848. Admittedly it was not until after 50 years that things started to accelerate with Prussia going to war against the South Germans in 1866, and subsequently the French German war of 1870.  No global wars, but an amount of serious discomfort for a variety of peasants and bourgeois in a variety of places. If we were to include all the allies of both sides then we have to accept even more warfare involving Russia, Poland and Galicia as well.

[Edwardian]

1 hour ago, webbcompound said:

Well it is true, people either only see the present, or they see the long duration. Half a century of peace in Europe, well up to a point. By 1830 the Dutch Belgians were at each others throats. Within France there were serious domestic conflicts at a scale above simple disorder in 1830, 1831, 1832, 1834 and 1838. Within the Germanic sphere there were military conflicts in 1848-51 and 1864  France was also involved in a military adventure in Spain in 1823, and in a major conflict with Austria in Italy in 1859. And of course there was the "year of revolutions" in 1848. Admittedly it was not until after 50 years that things started to accelerate with Prussia going to war against the South Germans in 1866, and subsequently the French German war of 1870.  No global wars, but an amount of serious discomfort for a variety of peasants and bourgeois in a variety of places. If we were to include all the allies of both sides then we have to accept even more warfare involving Russia, Poland and Galicia as well.

 

A series of largely internal matters.  No general war between western the powers, so relatively peaceful compared with 1690s-1815.

 

HMG tended to wake up when there was a serious threat to the balance of power in Europe. The only example of this was Russia threatening the Ottoman Empire, hence the Great Russian War, fought brilliantly and successfully by the Royal Navy in the Baltic, which I suggest was rather more decisive than events in the Crimean theatre.   

[Compound2632]

48 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

the Great Russian War, fought brilliantly and successfully by the Royal Navy in the Baltic, which I suggest was rather more decisive than events in the Crimean theatre.   

 

Around 40 years ago read a children's novel in which the hero was a midshipman in that theatre. What sticks in my mind is the account of the ineffectiveness of the RN's paddlesteamer sloops - not only did the paddles reduce the number of broadside guns (not mitigated by painting faux gunports on the paddleboxs) but once the paddles were shot away, the sloop was unable to manoeuvre. I think in the story it was taken in tow by a sailing sloop, much to the satisfaction of the latter's conservatively-minded captain.

 

EDIT: Following a quick scan of Wikipedia, I find they might both have been frigates rather than sloops.

Edited August 8, 2020 by Compound2632

[Edwardian]

The main drag, I reckon, on the transition to steam in the Navy, was endurance.

 

The school-boy narrative I was given was that early steamships had full suites of sails because steam was not trusted or reliable.

 

That is not really true. The main problem was endurance. The early steam engines were relatively inefficient, thus the cruising endurance of the ship was limited between coalings. Just as early submarines had to spend most of their time above the waves, the steam warships did most of their sailing with, well, sails.

 

It was the advent of better boilers and the efficiency gained by triple expansion that allowed a coal-fired fleet to gain the endurance it needed. 

 

So long as ships needed to combine sail and steam, the steam bits, paddles or screws, were literally a bit of a drag. The advantage of screws is that they could be made to be raised when not in use, though this created its own problems. 

 

See, I'm being a good boy and keeping up with my homework!

[nick_bastable]

2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

The main drag, I reckon, on the transition to steam in the Navy, was endurance.

 

 

See, I'm being a good boy and keeping up with my homework!

swot you should be with Matter and Patter having high tea with Nannie  enjoying the long Vac

 

Nick B

Edited August 8, 2020 by nick_bastable

[Hroth]

3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

So long as ships needed to combine sail and steam, the steam bits, paddles or screws, were literally a bit of a drag. The advantage of screws is that they could be made to be raised when not in use, though this created its own problems. 

 

See, I'm being a good boy and keeping up with my homework!

 

You're doing well with the Cruisers book!

 

I've just got up to the bit discussing why different sorts of ships were so called, but as far as I'm concerned its fighting for bedtime reading with Roman crime novels and not a race....

 

Fascinating that the first sea-going boilers were more or less the type used for Newcomen beam engines, merely a kettle, no wonder that they were coal-guzzlers and had to rely on sail to eke out the coal.

 

[wagonman]

On 08/08/2020 at 20:19, nick_bastable said:

swot you should be with Matter and Patter having high tea with Nannie  enjoying the long Vac

 

Nick B

 

I think you'l find the whole point of having a nanny was to save mater and pater from having any but the most cursory contact with their heir and spares.

 

 

[Donw]

On 08/08/2020 at 11:06, Edwardian said:

 

Or ABBA on the concourse singing Waterloo, causing the dismayed cry of "la garde recule" from parties of French school children, who, of course, had been taught that Napoleon had actually won the battle!

 

 

 

Knowing our propensity to label fiascos as victories they may have it right. However did they also get told he went to Elba for a holliday?

 

Don