whart57

You are aware I hope that Vladimir Putin is using those same arguments to justify his war against Ukraine to the Russian people. I quite agree that we should learn about military history, but not the selective military history we are constantly fed. We've covered some of that here, there is a quite justifiable censorship of the harsher aspects of war at events that are really meant to be a nice day out. However military historians are all too frequently prone to writing partisan accounts, and politicians and others are quite happy to present a country's military history as a highlights show. It's when that spills over into politics that it gets dangerous. I've mentioned Putin, but we also have the tragedy of Gaza where an inability of Israelis and Palestinians to see that they have a shared history drives the brutality. One of the emotional drivers behind the Brexit argument was the myth of Britain standing alone against Hitler and Napoleon. A myth some are very happy to lap up. If we did really learn about Britain's military history we would learn that even after Dunkirk, Britain still had the Empire on its side - including one very large Indian army - the navies and merchant navies of the likes of Norway and the Netherlands were still in the war on the Allied side, and de Gaulle was working on getting France's not inconsiderable colonial forces under Free French control. If we did really learn about military history we would learn that, actually, Britain played a minor role in defeating Napoleon. The Germans were the ones who did, first at the battle of Leipzig and then the coup de grace at Waterloo. And we might learn of the disaster that was the Walcheren Expedition. A lesson in incompetence at the top. We might also learn that to the British government in 1914, "gallant little Belgium" was a fortuitous twist that turned the general opposition to joining the war in Europe that existed in late July into a swing behind Britain's entry as a consequence of treaty commitments secretly made. Given how we've been played ourselves over Iraq it might have been good to have had a more cynical view of military history.

If you're talking about nostalgia then perhaps make clear - to yourself if to no-one else - what you are nostalgic about. I can't imagine anyone is nostalgic about outside privies or ice on the inside of the windows of unheated bedrooms. Or the all-pervading damp in winter. Some may be nostalgic for drinking and eating is a fog of tobacco smoke but I'm not, or for the rasping sore throat the next morning even though you are a non-smoker. I do feel nostalgic for my first car - a Morris Minor since you didn't ask - but I much prefer my automatic Skoda for anything over half an hour. A lot of nostalgia is really for a lost youth but I think it's dangerous to get too nostalgic over past times. If you are nostalgic for a time when you knew your neighbours and everyone knew everybody then surely its better to ask why that isn't the case any more and try and do something about it. Rather than feel resentment at the changes over the years.

Usually bands provided the instruments. Back in the day the price of an instrument was beyond the means of a working man, even today the larger instruments can be worth more than the car the player drives to gigs in. Players in amateur bands often swap roles as well, moving from one instrument to another. You need a flugel horn - Gloria's instrument in Brassed Off - but few players specialise in that. The lower ranking amateur bands are also lucky if they have a specialist soprano cornet and not just someone giving it a go. In those circumstances you can't expect the player to provide the instrument. Or when you rebalance the middle of the band, moving players between back row cornet, horn and baritone. A lot of bands got Lottery funding 20 or 30 years ago to re-equip, which was very helpful.

Sorry, I had to smile at this from your recruitment ad in 2022: Numbers are good except the Cornet section. 'Twas ever thus

Bill Gelderd was a Bass Trombonist with the Ted Heath Band (not the PM obviously) and quite heavily involved with brass bands in the South. He was a good arranger and arranged a number of Ted Heath numbers for Black Dyke. They were stunning. Bloody hard for the sort of players Gelderd mostly worked with but Dyke's virtuosos took to it like ducks to water. So it can be done, even without Euphonium top D's. Though I'd be more impressed by the Soprano Cornet player hitting something above a top A and holding it. Or getting to the end of the Dambusters March without suffering a heart attack. I played in a ten piece ensemble for a while. That struck me as a very suitable format for a lot of the gigs around. Or for the repertoire of the 1940s and 50s. We had a very good arrangement of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, as an example. Trouble is a lot rests on the quality of the first cornet/trumpet and I wasn't really good enough for that but too often had to fill in.

I photographed this Thai navy special passing through the old station at Bang Sue in 2010. It had come up the Southern Line, so from the isthmus that ties Thailand to Malaysia and could have been heading for Bangkok or the base at Sattahip. Not a great picture but I was distracted by the loco movements of the train on the left. It had come up from Bangkok double-headed. The locos then uncoupled from the train and headed up the line to the diesel shed about a mile further on. Some 30-40 minutes later a different engine returned to take the train onward. It was a so-called "free train", one where Thai citizens didn't have to pay a fare, so presumably the SRT thought no fare, no customer service.

Music in public parks was paid for out of the Council's wider entertainments budget. I don't know what the rates are now but back in the day they were between £100 and £200 for one or two two hour stints on a Sunday afternoon. Given that a brass band has 25 or more players that was well below Musician Union rates, but they were a valuable contribution to an amateur band's funds. Typically a band would do five or six of these gigs over the summer, perhaps more, though going out every weekend generally causes discontent among the bands' players' partners. Things changed from the mid 1970s onwards. In 1975 Wolverhampton hired a band to play in all three of its parks that had bandstands every weekend through June, July and August. By 1980 they only provided a full programme in West Park. Now, who knows. Or the park's disappeared. We did a regular gig in Newcastle under Lyme. That park is now the Tesco car pack I believe. I moved South but picked up playing again before retiring for good in 2008. In the last ten years I was playing though we lost all our remaining council funded gigs. Not because of incompetence but simply because councils stopped putting them on. Councils won't even pay for someone on their staff to come and open things up or put out a few chairs. Maybe they will for the local high school band on a single occasion but when councils have no money left to do the vital stuff they won't spend on the nice to dos. I presume you are aware that the best bands in the North are now professional outfits, the colliery or mill that supported them before having been replaced by a raft of commercial sponsors. Take those away however and the amateur set up is in no better health than it is in the Midlands or the South.

Councils won't, or can't, pay for a band to play. A summer programme requires a county's worth of bands whose players incur significant travel costs. Bands also require instruments which aren't cheap and if they want to improve they need professional direction. Simply put, bands can't lay on Summer Sunday concerts for free. Covid also took its toll.

Way back in 1995 when all this obsessive memorialising started with the 50th anniversary of VE Day - though that was actually a Europe wide thing and good old Colonel Jingo was not so much in evidence - I was playing in a brass band. That year the most crowd pleasing thing we did was to team up with a local dance group to do a jive set to Glenn Miller's In the Mood. The other thing I remember from that year was I was conducting the band in a church service. All the usual stuff, Abide With Me, Last Post and Reveille, but I ended it by having the band play Joy from Handel's Fireworks Music. My justification, should I have needed it, was that the Fireworks music was written to celebrate the Treaty of Aachen at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Joy was the end of the war. I needn't have worried. Afterwards the vicar and quite a few old boys from the British Legion came up to say what an excellent choice that was for the exit from the church. The generation that actually fought in the war were a lot less reverential about it than their children turned out to be.

I suspect a major factor for focusing on the war rather than the 1940s more generally is that military uniforms are better for a sense of dressing up. A bit of khaki rather than something from the back of granny's wardrobe sets the period a bit better.

Surely for that authentic wartime railway experience the heritage railway should stop maintaining their locos for eighteen months and not clean the carriages either. The refreshment room should have a large menu and a loud woman announcing "it's off, dear" when anyone tries to buy something. And of course the trains should stop somewhere miles from a station for no apparent reason and wait there for half an hour. Don't think that would catch on somehow.

A few years ago I was in the German town of Mettingen, twenty miles or so from the Dutch border. I was waiting for my other half to come out of a meeting there and was killing time in the churchyard. In one corner were a dozen or so graves of German soldiers killed in the war, all killed in 1945 and all aged either over 50 or under 20. Obviously these were Landsturm men, the equivalent of Britain's Home Guard. Captain Mainwaring's crew were fortunate they weren't put to the test, the old men and boys of Germany weren't so lucky.

I've just finished reading this interesting book: It's the story of a 1940s propagandist who ran British radio stations sending propaganda to Nazi Germany. Unlike the high-minded BBC types who tried to win the Germans over with facts, this guy used low tactics like untrue stories of officers living it up while the troops sheltered in trenches. That's the fun part of the book, but the serious part is that this guy had been part of the Nazi party campaign in the last elections in pre-war Germany and saw how Hitler's propaganda worked from up close. The author then looks at the present day and how the likes of Putin, Trump and Xi in China use very similar techniques. Critics might say he stretches a few points, but it's still worth reading, if only for one of the best explanations of how Hitler and Goebbels managed to create Nazi Germany.

Actually it is. I recently watched the film biography of Bert Trautmann, the Manchester City goalkeeper in the late 1940s and 1950s. Despite having been brought to Britain as a POW he became a sporting hero in Manchester. His story is not unique. Other POWs, German and Italian, also settled in Britain after the war, married British girls and stayed. Part of the reason is that Brits had been given the propaganda image of Germans as evil hulking storm-troopers so that when real Germans turned up as POWs and were not really any different from their own young men that was a bit of a shock. My family lived through the Occupation in the Netherlands and one thing one of my aunts said once is that you never knew where you were with a German soldier. The uniform was the same whether they were a hard core Nazi or just a young bloke doing a job he never asked to do. One reason the Resistance used young women as couriers is precisely because most German soldiers preferred flirting with the Dutch girls to doing the nasty stuff of checking for illegal stuff. Of course if you got a real Nazi, who might well have been Dutch anyway, then you were in trouble. Particularly if your papers were a bit dodgy. The socialists used to say that "a bayonet is a weapon with a working class lad at each end". In the end wars are fought by men and women who don't really have any quarrel with those they are actually fighting. It's that that makes reconciliation possible.

I thought the Spitfires were temporarily grounded.