Was using the name Oliver Cromwell on a loco controversial at the time?

[Michael Hodgson]

7 hours ago, petethemole said:

The Germans got round this problem by using national flags.  All the leading vehicles of the attacking formations had the flag draped over the engine deck, bonnet or roof.

 

Seems a bit like painting black and white stripes on your aircraft wings overnight prior to D-Day, or a crudely daubed "Z" on your tanks nowadays.

[Steamport Southport]

22 hours ago, Matt37268 said:

I appreciate I’m throwing a massive hand grenade into the mix here and it’s  nothing to with naming BR 7MTs but wasn’t there a plan to name something after a certain DJ from Leeds several times and that got vetoed? 

 

The story I was told was the name was going to be go on the power car at the other end of the HST that broke the record live on Top Of The Pops, one power car got that name.

 

But it was pointed out that BR policy at the time was that locomotives weren't named after living people unless they were Royalty. Although one or two did get past such as Laurence Olivier and Harold McMillian who were both high up the pecking order anyway.

 

 

Jason

[Michael Hodgson]

I seem to recall a photo of an Isle of Wight train formed 1923 tube stock carrying a headboard proclaiming its 60th anniversary. 

Captioned "This is the age of the train".

[pH]

Back at the time prices for loco nameplates, smokebox plates etc. were starting to get really silly, I remember a letter in one of the magazines suggesting potential names, with a view to them eventually being available for sale when the engine was being withdrawn. One suggestion was “Royal Foolish Souvenirs”.

[jjb1970]

They may have been advised exactly why naming a train after a certain DJ was a terrible idea given his behaviour was widely known behind the scenes. Private Eye were running oblique references to it for years before he died but never had the nerve to actually run the story properly. 

[jjb1970]

For enthusiasts of Blitzkrieg I recommend  the book 'The Blitzkrieg Legend- the 1940 campaign in the west' by Karl Heinz Frieser. The book has official history status and is well worth a read. As is so often the case reviewers who claim it busts myths are just displaying an ignorance of the subject but the book is probably the best single volume work on the evolution of German planning for the campaign and the fighting between what would have been almost a second attempt at the Schlieffen plan and the famous shichelschnitt plan and Frieser's analysis of the campaign is superb. His final sections especially so, he posits that the campaign was disastrous for Germany as it led German generals to believe tactical success equalled strategic success and led to Germany invading the USSR with an assumption they'd inflict the same tactical defeats on the red army which would result in the same strategic victory and all but ignored strategy.

[Matt37268]

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

The story I was told was the name was going to be go on the power car at the other end of the HST that broke the record live on Top Of The Pops, one power car got that name.

 

But it was pointed out that BR policy at the time was that locomotives weren't named after living people unless they were Royalty. Although one or two did get past such as Laurence Olivier and Harold McMillian who were both high up the pecking order anyway.

 

 

Jason

43002 being involved is ringing a bell in the old grey matter… 

 

[Steamport Southport]

I think the programme is somewhere on YouTube. Obviously a warning about a certain person is on it if anyone gets offended.

 

 

Ironically the BBC DJ that is a railway enthusiast was Mike Read who presented a show on Channel Four called Steam Sunday.

 

 

 

 

[Cruachan]

18 hours ago, Matt37268 said:

I read that sometime ago  it was a possibility at some point in the 1980’s, and again just after his death by VTEC (just before we know what we know now) Someone at VTEC dodged a massive bullet there. 

That does sound vaguely familiar now you mention it, actually.

[petethemole]

11 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Captioned "This is the age of the train".

ISTR a graffito in a carriage that made the trivia news, "This is the Age of the Train, ours is 106".

[kevinlms]

13 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I seem to recall a photo of an Isle of Wight train formed 1923 tube stock carrying a headboard proclaiming its 60th anniversary. 

Captioned "This is the age of the train".

Yes, but was it 1st April?

[009 micro modeller]

4 hours ago, petethemole said:

ISTR a graffito in a carriage that made the trivia news, "This is the Age of the Train, ours is 106".

Has anyone done a spoof advert for Brunel’s broad gauge or similar ‘this is the gauge of the train’? Perhaps a humorous social media idea for Didcot Railway Centre (though given the association of the ‘Age of the Train’ ads with Savile probably not the best idea now).

 

On the subject of graffiti I did see a Thameslink class 700 the other day where somebody had simply written ‘HMP’ above the front cab window. In some cases the 700s seem to actually be improved by graffiti, given how dull the applied livery is.

[britishcolumbian]

On 19/04/2024 at 05:47, 97406 said:

 

Not all do. Edward Colston for instance.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-67370120

Would never have thought that when I took a photo of it in September 2019 that it would soon be gone...

[britishcolumbian]

On 19/04/2024 at 17:28, The Johnster said:

Depends which side you're on, but I tend in general not to be on that of the Normans.  Owain Glyndwr; national hero and the inspiration for modern Welsh institutions, and resistor of a murderous usurper, or a treacherous and treasonous rebel leader who destroyed more than half of his own country for no gain (both are valid viewpoints).  I was a little unprepared for the sudden release of my inner Welsh nationalist a few years ago prompted by the English flags on display all around the village of Tintagel.  Tintagel has an anglicised name in the Cornish language, Kernoweck, and Arthur, if he existed, was a saxon's worst possible nightmare, a Romano-British chieftain capable of effectively uniting opposition to them.  Welsh legends do not have him as a king, never mind the 'true king of all Britain', though there was a High King of the Isles at one time; he is described as Dux Bellorum, war leader.  Tintagel is a travesty.

 

Tintagel is in British Columbia!

 

https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMHQCR_Tintagel_Castle_Stone_Tintagel_British_Columbia_Canada

[The Johnster]

Well, bits of it are!  Hopefully without the Mittelengelander marketing. 

 

Once you leave the village and walk down to the castle itself, it is a properly spectacular place, on it's headland above the Atlantic.  It is almost a shame that it is conflated with all the Arthurian stuff, itself mangled beyond any hope of getting any solid facts out of it by various medieval writers of both psuedo-history and romances.  My view is that there very probably was an Arthur, The Bear, who successfully resisted the Saxon overlordship of what is now England for a generation in the late 400s/early 500s.  The battles of Badon Hill and Camlan probably really took place, Badon Hill being very probably at Solsbury Hill, Bath, a location that makes sense strategically, but the medievals have done us no favours.  Tintagel is the sort of visually impressive location that is almost bound to become associated with legends, and there was an Iron Age structure there that preceded the current Norman ruins, which are of course far too recent to have had anything to do with Arthur.  Iron Age fortifications on Cornish North Coast headlands are more or less obligatory, and appear at Port Isaac, Trevose, Bedruthan, Newquay, and other places as well, all of which could easily be associated with Arthur, but the ruins at Tintagel give it the edge in this regard...

 

The clincher, IMHO, is the poem 'Y Gododdin', a bardic account of a very real historic 6th century battle in which a warband of elite warriors are feasted at Dunedin (Edinburgh, then part of the Brythonic kingdom of Strathclyde) for a year before unsuccessfully besieging a Saxon stronghold at 'Cathraeg', quite possibly Catterick.  The Briton warband is wiped out.  The bard, Aneurin, writing in old Welsh and transcribed into later copies, names the heroes individually but ends each description with 'but he was not Arthur, and he fed the ravens on the walls of Cathraeg'.  This seems to relate to Arthur as a more accomplished warrior who had perhaps existed within the living memory of older people at time of the poems' writing.

 

If this battle took place at Catterick, then the resounding victory for the Saxons should be celebrated to a much greater extent in English history; certainly to the extent that it is mourned in Welsh-speaking history (it is little known amongst Welsh monoglot English speakers like me).  It would have broken the back of Brythonic domination of the island, clearing a path of Saxon-occupied territory to the Irish Sea in what is now Lancashire, dividing Brythonic territory into southern and northern parts.  Not long after this, the Saxons had advanced to Gloucester, and within 50 years to Exeter, dividing the Britons into three areas; Strathclyde/Cumbria, Wales, and Cornwall.  Only two of those remain as distinctly Brythonic in character, and their borders are in much the same locations as they were at the end of the 6th century.

Edited April 22 by The Johnster

[britishcolumbian]

6 hours ago, The Johnster said:

Well, bits of it are!  Hopefully without the Mittelengelander marketing

No, nothing like that, just the cairn in the pics in the link. Actually, I didn't even know about the cairn until I did a google search for Tintagel, BC, looking to reply to your post here. There's a lot in northern BC to see, but I haven't yet been north of 100 Mile House in the west and Tete Jaune Cache near the border with Alberta. Maybe one day soon.

 

Thanks for that lengthy reply, though, that was fascinating reading. The entire thing of myths and mysteries is something I can relate to with Hungarian history, there's precious little from before the 12th century that we can know for sure, and virtually nothing from "our own" sources, rather having to rely on Byzantine, Persian, Arabic, and other writers, especially for the period before the Magyars crossed the Carpathians, when they were allied with the Khazar Khaganate... but that's waaaay off topic now.