“Nanking”. A beautiful name, isn’t it? In Chinese, it means ‘Southern Capital’, similiar to how ‘Peking’ means ‘Northern Capital’. In the 21st Century, the city of Nanjing (it’s modern spelling) is one of the biggest and most important cities in all of China, just as it was back in the 1930s, when soldiers from the Japanese Imperial Army overran the city and murdered, burned, raped and pillaged it to the ground in one of the most horrendous war-crimes in the history of the world. The infamous ‘Rape of Nanking’ is one of the most brutal and controversial war-crimes ever. But what actually happened?
For the purposes of continuity, the original Wade-Giles spelling of ‘Nanking‘ will be used throughout this posting.
What Was Nanking?
Nanking was and is one of the most important cities in China. Built along the famous Yangtze River in southern China, it has been a major center for culture, trade, commerce, politics and government for centuries. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the last of the great Imperial Chinese dynasties, which for countless centuries, had ruled over the lands of ‘Zhongguo‘…the Central Kingdom…the new Republic of China nationalist government, the Kuomintang, set up shop in Nanking. This ancient and proud city was to be the capital of the new, capitalist, democratic China. After much thumb-twiddling, um-ing, ah-ing and foot-shuffling, in 1927, Nanking became the new capital of the new China.
Nanking, like almost every other major city in China at the time, played host to a significant Western expatriate community. Just like in Peking and Shanghai, Western businessmen, religious leaders, reporters, journalists, artists, writers and families descended on Nanking, carving out their own portions of the city where they lived alongside the local and native Chinese population.
The Second Sino-Japanese War
In 1931, the Japanese began their assault on China. By degrees, they claimed larger and larger swathes of Chinese land for themselves, starting with Manchuria in 1931. In 1932, they unwisely attempted to invade the city of Shanghai, an important sea-port. The Chinese Nationalist Army fought them off and kept the city safe for another five years.
In August, 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Chinese Shanghai. The city was then divided into two sectors – the Chinese sector on the outsides of town, and the famous Shanghai International Settlement, the vast expatriate zone, in the heart of the city. Not wanting to draw Western powers into the war (yet), Japanese troops only attacked Chinese Shanghai. After fierce fighting for three months, the city fell in October of 1937. Thousands of Shanghai Chinese fled into the Settlement, secure in the knowledge that the Japanese would not dare attack them within its boundaries, for fears of bringing British and American troops on their heads.
After the fall and occupation of Chinese Shanghai, and the road now clear into the interior, the Japanese headed westwards, seeking out the Nationalist capital, the ancient Chinese city of Nanking.
The Battle of Nanking
Nanking was the next great city that the Japanese attacked, after capturing Peking and Shanghai. The battle started on the 9th of December, 1937.
Back in September, the Japanese had carried out extensive air-raids on Nanking, softening it up for the impending invasion. Heavy raids were carried out for weeks on end. When Shanghai fell in October, the Nationalist Army abandoned the city and retreated to Nanking, to try and defend the capital.
It was soon realised that defending the capital against hardened Japanese troops was pointless. Although most Chinese officers had received the most modern military training (mostly in Russia), the majority of regular soldiers were uneducated peasants or working-class Chinese with only mediocre training, hardly fit to take on the strength of the Japanese.
Rather than risk his entire army being gobbled up by the Japanese, Chiang Kai-Shek ordered it to retreat even further into the Chinese interior, while leaving a small force behind to stall the Japanese.
By November, bombing-raids on Nanking had intensified and it was at this time that everyone who could leave, did leave. Wealthy Chinese of means, businessmen, Western expatriates and anyone who could find a car, boat, bicycle, horse and cart or had a decent pair of shoes fled the city to escape the Japanese.
The Japanese overran Nanking in a matter of weeks. The Chinese defense-strategies collapsed as inexperienced Chinese soldiers fled from the Japanese. Although there were pockets of resistance, the Japanese annihilated Nanking even easier than Shanghai. In early December, the city was placed under siege. The Chinese defenders were given an ultimatum of surrendering the city, or facing an all-out Japanese assault. When a surrender was not given, the Japanese began their invasion-proper, of the city of Nanking.
The city’s ancient defensive walls were blasted aside by the Japanese. Once they’d gained control of the city by mid-December, 1937, the most infamous Japanese war-crime in history began.
The Rape of Nanking
It’s called by many names. The ‘Nanking Incident’, the ‘Nanjing Massacre’…but most people will know it by its most famous name.
The Rape of Nanking.
Starting on the 13th of December, 1937, and lasting for six weeks until the end of January, Japanese soldiers raped, killed, pillaged, looted, burned and destroyed anything and everyone left within the confines of the city of Nanking. Men, women, children, the elderly, the babies, the walking-wounded, were all shot, clubbed, bayoneted, raped, burned alive, buried alive, decapitated or drowned in an orgy of destruction that went for a month and a half without end. Estimates of victims range from 40,000…to 200,000….to 320,000 Chinese civilians of all ages. That sounds even bigger when you consider the fact that in 1937, the population of Nanking about a million people.
It was the most horrific Japanese war-crime ever. And even today, seventy years later, it’s still not taught in Japanese schools. Japanese schoolchildren have never heard of it. Never read about it in their textbooks, and their teachers have never told them about it. They’ll learn about the battle and the siege and the invasion…but the rape is suspiciously absent.
During the war, the Japanese Imperial Army was notorious for ignoring the rules of war, more commonly known as the Geneva Conventions. Chinese prisoners of war were executed along with civilians, and no quarter was given to anyone.
The Chinese civilians still left within the confines of Nanking would search for anywhere to hide. Cellars, bunkers, bombed out buildings…but most famously, about 250,000 of them managed to find security…for a time at least…in the unofficial D.M.Z. in the middle of Nanking.
The Nanking Safety Zone
With the Japanese invasion imminent, Western expatriates still within the city (mostly religious leaders, diplomats and medical staff) took it upon themselves to try and set up a D.M.Z within the city…a demilitarised zone.
It was given the rather misleading title of the “Nanking Safety Zone”.
It might be a zone.
It might be in Nanking.
But it certainly didn’t guarantee safety.
The Japanese were not willing to attack Western institutions or persons, for fear of bringing Western powers into ‘their war’. To try and use this to their advantage, the Westerners attempted to set up a safety-zone in the middle of Nanking. The Japanese had said that they would not attack any part of Nanking where no threat existed (i.e: Where there weren’t any Chinese soldiers).
To that end, Chinese soldiers evacuated an area of the city about 8.5 square kilometers in size. Within that space were established about twenty to thirty individual refugee-camps, which took up about 3.8 square kilometers. For the sake of comparison, Central Park in Manhattan is 3.4 square kilometers in area.
Into this space was crammed roughly 250,000 Chinese refugees. Surveying the entire project were all the Western expatriates then left in the city, about 27-30 of them, all told.
One of the men who was central to the establishment and operation of the Nanking Safety Zone was a German. His name was John Rabe. He was a businessman, which some people might know…and he was a Nazi, which some people might not know.
Despite the name, the Nanking Safety Zone, the zone did not automatically provide ‘safety’.
The Japanese agreed not to attack any place which did not pose a threat to their interests. But at the same time, they did not recognise the fact that the Safety Zone existed at all. To them, it was just another part of the city for them to loot and pillage. So remaining within the Safety Zone did not mean that you were entirely secure. The Japanese were well-known for entering the Zone when it took their fancy, snatch up a few hundred men and women and either haul them off and execute them or rape them, or just shoot them dead where they stood. Unlike the International Settlement in Shanghai, the Japanese had no qualms about just going in and causing havoc.
At the end of January, 1938, the Japanese claimed to have ‘restored order’ to Nanking. The Nanking Safety-Zone was forcibly disbanded and everyone was made to return to their homes. Although not entirely effective, John Rabe, commonly known as the “Good Nazi of Nanking“, is credited with saving the lives of approximately 250,000 people.
We’ve all seen that movie ‘The King’s Speech’. We all know what it’s about. We all know about the struggles, trials, tribulations and torments that surrounded King George VI, the man who never wanted to be king, but who guided his country through one of the darkest periods in British history.
But all that would never have happened, and the film would never have taken place, if not for the very remarkable event that preceded it. The famous Abdication Crisis of 1936.
What Was the Abdication Crisis?
The Abdication Crisis of 1936 was the royal scandal of King Edward VIII abdicating the British throne to marry the woman he loved. Romantic? Perhaps. Scandalous? Certainly. Next to the rise of Nazism in Germany, it was the biggest talking-point all around Europe during the 1930s. In drawing-rooms, living-rooms, cafes, restaurants, boardrooms and down at the pub, people talked of little else except for the king and…’Mrs Simpson’.
Who Was King Edward VIII?
King Edward the Eighth is a figure shrouded in mystery. He was king for barely a year, he was known as a playboy, a dandy, a moderniser and a scoundrel. But who was he, really?
Edward VIII, full name…*deep breath*…Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David…was born on the 23rd of June, 1894, when his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, was on the throne.
Edward was the first of six children to the future King George V, and Queen Mary (formerly Mary of Teck). The other five kids were the future King George VI, Princess Mary, Prince Henry, Prince George, the Duke of Kent, and last but not least, the forgotten prince…John, who died at the age of 13 from the effects of epilepsy…a closely guarded royal shame and secret.
Life for the royal children was hardly the idyllic dream that we imagine it to be. And as we all know from horror movies, TV shows and the local tabloid news, those people who grow up to torture people in their secret underground lairs…like Joseph Fritzl…are almost invariably those who had horrible childhoods.
George V, rigid, formal and stiff to the last, instilled his children with naval discipline (it was, and still is a royal tradition for a prince to take up a posting in one of the armed forces), something that George himself had done with his older brother, Prince Albert-Victor (nicknamed ‘Eddie’), who died in the 1890s, with suspicions of him being Jack the Ripper and being as gay as Liberace still hanging around him.
George V once famously declared that: “My father was terrified of his father. I was terrified of my father. And my children are damn well going to be terrified of me!”
The two oldest brothers, Edward and Albert, the future George VI, were very close as children. They played, they spent time with each other, they hung out, they participated in sports (Albert or ‘Bertie’ was fond of hunting and fishing)…and they chased women.
The difference was that Albert chased after a society beauty. Her name was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon…the future Queen Mum.
King Edward, or as he was called at the time…’David’…chased after quite another kind of girl. In the end, he latched onto…Mrs. Simpson. Full name…
Wallis Warfield Simpson
She was born Bessie Wallis Warfield on the 19th of June, 1896. And almost from the start, scandal followed her everywhere.
Her first marriage was to Earl Winfield Spencer, a pilot in the U.S. Navy (the air-force at the time, not being a separate entity from the Navy and Army in the United States, as it was in England). It was during her marriage to Earl Spencer (1916-1927), that she travelled to Republican China. Wild rumors circulated that she attended whorehouses, brothels, bordellos, casinos, drinking-dens, and other disreputable establishments in the decadent and lively world of the Shanghai International Settlement in China, as well as other places in the Republic, such as the capital city of Peking (‘Beijing’ today).
Before she divorced Spencer, she suddenly got interested in another guy. Ernest Aldrich Simpson…from which the famous “Mrs. Simpson” comes from. She divorced Spencer in 1927, and married Simpson in 1928.
The Prince and Mrs. Simpson
In 1934, Mrs. Simpson effectively became the-then Prince Edward’s mistress. She wooed him, and he spent lavish amounts of money on her. The prince’s reputation as a playboy and a society mover-and-shaker made her sink her claws into him all the more.
By now, Wallis Simpson had already developed a bit of a reputation in the drawing-rooms of the British aristocracy and nobility. And everyone in-the-know began to whisper. The whisperings hit the ears of His Majesty, King George V, a notoriously straitlaced, uptight, old-fashioned, oldschool sort of monarch. He was furious and flat-out asked Prince Edward what the hell was going on!…Edward denied everything, even though royal courtiers brought the king secret reports that they had seen the prince and Mrs. Simpson sharing a bed together!
The Abdication Crisis of 1936
In January of 1936, King George V died. He was seventy years old. He was also full of conviction about two things.
ONE – That his second son, Prince Albert, was a hell of a boy with a lot of guts (not something he admitted to the prince’s face, of course).
TWO – That his older brother, the new King Edward VIII, would bring ruination to the monarchy with his involvement with the Simpson woman.
Prince Edward rose to the throne as King Edward VIII. All is well and good.
Except that he kept hanging onto the Simpson woman. And she was becoming more and more unpopular by the minute. The Duke and Duchess of York (the future George VI and the Queen Mum) were appalled by this. The Duchess and the Queen Mother (that’s Queen Mary, George V’s wife), were horrified by the new king’s carryings-on with Mrs. Simpson.
Not only was Mrs. Simpson unpopular, but Edward wasn’t much of a king.
He swept aside centuries-old traditions and customs. He shied away from his duties. He fired courtiers who had worked in the palace for decades. He didn’t even bother to read, sign or approve any of the bills, papers and documents that were sent to him to read…something that the current Queen Elizabeth does on a regular basis. He was barely a king at all!
Courtiers, government officials, and prominent aristocrats, were displeased with his overly casual attitude, his dislike of formality, and increasingly, his pro-Nazism stance. But it all came to a head when he summoned the prime minister, at the time, Stanley Baldwin, to tell him that he would marry Wallis Simpson, and that if he couldn’t, and if she wouldn’t become queen, then he would abdicate the throne.
This caused a HUGE sensation.
Several people in government and court and within the royal family itself, were mightily opposed this. But surely a king can marry who he wants…can’t he?
The reasons why everyone thought he couldn’t, were several. For one…
Social Implications.
Someone of such high standing as a king could not POSSIBLY marry a woman who was twice divorced, and who’s previous husbands were not even dead yet. On top of that, Mrs. Simpson was an AMERICAN!…which in itself was probably enough! And those two elements combined would ensure that she would almost never been accepted by the British people!
Religious Implications.
Edward VIII, as king, was the head of the Church of England. All British monarchs since Henry VIII back in the 1500s, were heads of the Church of England…since it was Henry VIII who created it! So what’s the issue here?
The Church of England does allow divorces. And it does allow remarriages.
But it does NOT allow the both things to happen at once! For the King to marry a woman who was divorced, but who had two living ex-husbands, was to go against everything that the church allowed! And the King, as head of the church, could not possibly do that and escape unscathed from the immense public outcry that would follow!
Political Implications
On top of that, even if the king married Mrs. Simpson. Even if she became queen, there was still the issue of what would happen?
Mrs. Simpson had divorced twice in the past! What happened if she divorced again? From the king? As the queen? Such a thing would never have happened before in British history, and it would’ve been a disaster!
Don’t start quoting Henry VIII here. His marriages were “annulled”, not “divorced”. He had them struck off the records, not just terminated.
Legal Implications
At the time, divorce proceedings between Mr. and Mrs. Simpson were not yet complete. And she had divorced her first husband, Mr. Earl Spencer, on grounds of “emotional incompatibility”. Under the Church of England, divorce was legal, but in England at the time, the only grounds for divorce lay in the act of adultery. Since adultery had not been committed, Mrs. Simpson’s divorce from her first husband wouldn’t hold water in an English courthouse. So even if she divorced her second husband, she would, in the eyes of the English legal system, still be married to her first. And if she was, then marrying the King would be a bigamous act, something that was obviously…illegal in England.
Nationalistic Inplications
The KING. The head of the United KINGdom…marry a lowly, disgusting, vile, peasantish, twice-divorced American slut!?
Such a thing would NEVER have worked out.
Although generally friendly, the United Kingdom and the United States were not yet the close chums and allies that we imagined them to be during the War years. The idea that the King should marry an American, whom most people in England saw as distasteful and just plain…WRONG, was repellent to the British aristocracy…and to just about every other class in the British system from that tier down!
On top of that, the Americans all seemed to be jumping on the idea that one of their lot, a Yankee girl, would become a British queen! The press was all over it!…and the Brits were getting all over her. No way was this ever going to work!
With all the uproar over this potential marriage, there were three possible avenues open to the King and his lover.
1. He marries her, she marries him. He remains king, she becomes queen.
No. Nobody wanted that (except maybe the King). It just wasn’t possible.
2. He marries her, she marries him. He remains king, she takes on some lesser aristocratic title.
Called a morganatic marriage, this was the style of marriage used to join a husband of higher rank or social status, to a woman of lower rank or social status. She wouldn’t get his titles or anything, but she would still be his wife. Such a thing had never happened in England (although it had happened in various royal houses in Europe), and it still…wasn’t going to happen. The king refused to accept this as an option.
3. He marries her. She marries him. He gives up the throne.
Ding!
This was the one!
On the 10th of December, the King formally abdicated the British throne. The first…last…and only…British monarch to willing do so in history. He signed this document, the Instrument of Abdication, in the presence of his brothers, who signed as witnesses to this historic event.
On the top right, you can see “Edward R.I.” (short for “Edward Rex Imperator” or ‘Edward, King-Emperor’, in Latin).
Below, you can see three more names: “Albert”, “Henry”, and “George”. In order, they are the future King George VI, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Prince George, Duke of Kent.
And so it was done. To this day, Edward VIII has had the shortest reign of any British monarch, in the history of the British monarchy. Unless you count the ‘reign’ of Lady Jane Grey, otherwise known as the “Nine Day Queen“, who was supposed to be the protestant successor to Edward VI, son of King Henry VIII.
The Effects of the Abdication
The Abdication, the first in the history of the British monarchy, destroyed the family. Once close as children, the new King George VI would now not even look at his brother, much less speak to him…and let’s not even mention Wallis Simpson! When the abdication was complete, and Prince Albert now realised that he would become the new king, and now fully understood that it was his own brother’s recklessness that had ended him up in this shitpile that he NEVER wanted to be in, he cried on the shoulders of his elderly mother, Queen Mary, for a full hour at her home at Marlborough House.
Prince Albert NEVER wanted to be king. He hated the whole idea of the job. It was his grandfather, Edward VII, the rakish son of Queen Victoria, who was the first royal to realise that for a monarchy to survive in the 20th century, things had to change. They had to do things differently.
Things like…attend openings. Give presentations. Cut ribbons. Pose for photographs. Greet famous celebrities. And worst of all…make speeches!
From childhood, Albert had suffered from a horrible and crippling stutter which, even with decades of therapy from his faithful friend and speech-therapist, Lionel Logue, he was never fully cured of. If you listen to any of George VI’s speeches, or watch any of his newsreel footage from the 1940s, you can still hear how bad his stutter was.
Ironically, this was not the first time that this had happened.
Just as Prince Albert was shoved into the limelight and jammed in the throne thanks to the actions of his older brother, so was his father, the late King George V, also shoved into the limelight. When his older brother, the Prince Albert Victor (the ‘Jack the Ripper’ suspect) died, the-then Prince George was shoved onto the stage, and even had to marry his dead brother’s prospective bride, the Princess Mary…which wasn’t that bad, because they actually loved each other quite devotedly…but it’s funny how history repeats itself. The scandalous older brother screws things up, and the younger, more intelligent one has to set right the incredible cock-up that was made as a result.
On the 11th of December, 1936, less than a year after his reign began, Edward VIII approached a microphone in a radio broadcasting-booth to announce to the world his abdication from the British throne, the first and only abdication in the history of the monarchy and the first real interruption to the line of succession since the Civil War of the 1640s. The announcer introduced the speaker as “His Royal Highness, Prince Edward”, since he was no longer officially king of England. The full speech made by the king may be heard here:
Once a popular, handsome, athletic celebrity, within a year, Prince Edward’s public…and private…image, had changed from one of the ideal royal prince, the heartthrob and glittering celebrity, to that of a second-rate king, who chose the love of a conniving, manipulative, gold-digging Yank over his much more important duties as king of a great nation in the years leading up to the Second World War.
Immediately after the abdication, the Duke of Windsor, as he was then styled, and his eventual wife, Wallis Simpson, left England for Europe. They were married on the 3rd of June, 1937. Had George V lived, it would’ve been his 72nd birthday. The furious Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, strongly suspected that her son chose this particular date for his wedding as a slight against the rest of his family, who had effectively disowned him for his disgraceful actions.
For the rest of his life, the Duke of Windsor, and his wife, the Duchess of Windsor, were not welcome in England. When Edward’s brother Albert ascended the throne as George VI, he refused to grant Wallis Simpson, by then Duchess of Windsor, the traditional “H.R.H” (‘Her Royal Highness’) form of address for a royal duchess. Edward was furious about this. Although only three little letters, their addition to the front of Wallis’s name (which would then read: “Her Royal Highness, the Duchess of Windsor’), would mean that she was officially part of the British Royal Family. This would mean that people would have to bow and curtsy to her, as such. George VI did not believe (and neither did his wife, or mother believe) that she deserved such privileges, and so denied her the form of address which his brother so vehemently wanted.
King George VI died in 1952. During the war he became an incredibly heavy smoker and drinker, with stress-levels shooting through the roof. The stress, combined with the other tolls taken on his body meant that he was dead before he was even sixty years old. By contrast, his brother continued to live the carefree, playboy life that he’d always done. He died in 1972 at the age of 77. Wallis Simpson in 1986 at the age of 89.
Some of you may remember that I wrote this posting for Australia Day, back in January. At the end of it, you may recall that I said I’d write about more Australian history sometime in the future.
Well, the future is now. So let’s get cracking.
Colonial Australia
For all of the 19th century, Australia was an island of colonies. They were given names such as “Van Diemen’s Land”, “Victoria”, “New South Wales”, and “Queensland”. Admittedly, the remaining colonies of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were hardly the most poetic of names to go along with the names of the other colonies, but I digress…
In the second half of the 19th century, Australia had finally broken out of the phase of being “Terra Australis Incognitia“, the great unknown southern land. It was now firmly established that an island south of Asia did exist, and that it was inhabitable, and that it now had a name. “Australia”.
Australia was seen as a great social experiment. Prior to this, no Western civilisation had colonised a landmass further south than this great, empty sandpit in the bottom left of the Pacific Ocean. The British Government was quick to realise that having Australia as a British colony would be very useful. It would be able to secure British dominance in the Southeast Asian region, along with their holdings in Singapore and Hong Kong. This would balance out the colonial scale, since nearby, the French, the Dutch and the Germans also had colonies. Colonies like French Indochina (Vietnam), the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and the German-held Papua New Guinea.
Colonial Australia was a hard and dangerous place to live. Summers are hot, scorching and dry. Cities were still mostly made up of wooden buildings, two storeys high, and streets were largely unpaved. Also, then, as now, Australia played host to the largest number of dangerous animals in the world – Spiders, sharks, snakes, and the vicious Spotted Quoll:
…D’awwwww…
The Victorian Gold Rush
Life in colonial Australia cheered up in the 1850s, though. Gold had been found sporadically for years, but in 1851, the great Victorian Gold Rush hit Australia. And it was a rush, alright. People from all over the world came to Australia, to go to Victoria, to find gold! The population of Victoria’s capital city, Melbourne, went from 10,000 people in 1840, to 123,000 people by the mid-1850s!
Towns like Bendigo and Ballarat popped up overnight and became booming centers of trade. Just like in almost every other gold-rush in history, in California, or Canada…a significant amount of the money made came, not from mining, but from merchants and shopkeepers who sold equipment to the miners at inflated prices. Shovels, buckets, pans, tents, billys (kettles, that is), bedrolls and countless other things were in high demand, and the scheming and unscrupulous shopkeepers could make a pretty penny or two from “mining the miners” for their hard-saved money.
The Victorian Gold Rush allowed Melbourne to grow at a fantastic rate, and it soon rivaled Sydney, the oldest city in Australia, in population, if not yet in size.
The Rush allowed Melbourne to build magnificent public buildings, like the state library, the town hall, the state parliament building, treasury, and several bridges across the Yarra River in the middle of town.
Australia slowly cast off the criminal element of its past and began to grow. Famous people came to Australia to look around. Prince Alfred, son of Queen Victoria, came for a look in 1868. Two hospitals (one in Sydney, one in Melbourne) were named after him. And it’s probably just as well that there were hospitals around, because the prince was the target of an assassination attempt while he was there! He was shot in the back, but the bullet was recovered and the prince made a full recovery.
Towards a Country
Australia was a ‘country’, but not yet a nation. It had separate colonial militias, but no national army. It had lots of railroads, but it was not possible to travel all around the continent without changing trains at each border, since each colony used a different gauge of rails. As the 19th century drew to a close, Australians wanted more and more to become their own country, their own nation and their own people.
Much like the United States, a hundred and thirty years before.
But unlike the United States, Australians didn’t start stockpiling rifles and muskets.
By the 1880s, there was increasing nationalism in Australia. A higher and higher percentage of people who lived in Australia were actually born there, instead of coming to Australia from overseas. Fewer people saw themselves as being “British” but as being “Australian”. Improved communications in the 1800s, such as finally, a nationwide telegraphic network in 1872, allowed them to communicate with each other faster and easier. This brought people closer together, and strengthened the ideas that Australia should become a nation.
To that end, in the 1880s, the Federal Council was formed, a body of men whose job it was to make Australia a nation. The Federal Council was the closest thing to a national government that existed before Federation itself.
Colonies were not all in favor of federation, however. They worried that having a big national government would mean that colonies with larger populations would bully those with smaller populations. They feared that individual colonial laws, taxes and tariffs would be stamped out by a more powerful national government. They were also scared that giving power over the country to one body, instead of splitting it up amongst lots of small ones, would cause problems, since any decision made by the national government would affect everyone. In the 1870s and 80s, the American Civil War was still very fresh, and Australians didn’t want to have their own civil war!
As the years ticked by, however, federation started looking more and more interesting, and in referendums held in each state, a higher and higher percentage of people were voting for the creation of the Australian nation.
1901 – Australian Federation
On the 1st of January, 1901, the 20th Century began. And so did Australia. It was now its own nation. Its colonies were now states, and it had its own national government. It was now the Commonwealth of Australia.
It still is.
Australia was the new kid on the block in the world stage. And it wanted to do things differently. Much differently. Australia was seen as the great big new social experiment that the world would gather around to watch. Things would be done differently here and the global community sat back to watch the results of this new experiment, this new country, this new nation called Australia. Laws were enacted in Australia which were never seen in England, or indeed, in any other country on earth at the time. Some laws were popular. Some were not. Some were incredibly controversial, even for the time! Australia in the 21st Century might pride itself on multiculturalism, but it wasn’t always like that…
Immigration Restriction Act (1901)
A similar law existed in America. It was called the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924. But Australia was the first country to implement a law such as this.
What was it?
The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was an act that regulated who could come into Australia. They didn’t want any undesirable people in this great social experiment that Australia was! They wanted Australia to be pure, clean, innocent and…
…white.
Incredibly white.
More bleach was air-dropped into Australia before 1965 than any other country on earth.
The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was designed to keep out undesirable people from the Australian nation. Asians. Jews. Africans. Americans. Anyone seen as undesirable. How did they do this?
Simple. They asked them if they could speak English!
There wasn’t going to be any other language in this new country other than English, so if you wanted to live here, you had to speak English. If you couldn’t, you couldn’t come in. Simple!
This was primarily designed to keep out Asians. I’m here, so it obviously didn’t work.
The problem was that a surprisingly large number of foreigners spoke English.
So much for that idea. To try and add a few more tripwires in this new immigration law, the government started changing the conditions of entry. How did they do this?
When you arrived in Australia, you had to take an English test to evaluate your language-skills. When it was found out that this wasn’t effective in keeping out the global rabble, the law was…altered.
Instead of giving a test in English, a test could now be given in ANY European language. And I do mean ANY language. German. French. Italian. Polish. Russian. Latish. Czech. Spanish!
…it still didn’t work. But it’s what they tried.
Pacific Island Labourers Act (1901)
Along with the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, there was also the Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1901. This was designed to kick out of Australia any persons living there who came from islands near to Australia. Again, this backfired. While several thousand Pacific-Islanders were indeed shipped out of Australia, a significant portion of them were able to apply to stay in Australia.
How?
Simple. Because they weren’t from the Pacific Islands. Their parents, or grandparents were. But they were born in Australia! It wasn’t legal to send them back to some place which they weren’t from in the first place, so the government had to let them stay put.
And there were a lot of them in Australia. They’d been brought over starting in the 1860s to work in Queensland, on the sugar-plantations. They were dark-skinned people, after all, and they were surely much better at working in the harsh, humid, hot and sunny Queensland climate than white folks. But then it was decided that they just had to leave.
The “White Australia Policy”
All these acts and laws and regulations were designed to create something unique in the history of the world. A completely white country. It wasn’t like America where blacks and whites were simply segregated…no. In Australia, they wanted to make sure that the whole country was white from the very start!…The Aborigines didn’t count, though…
There was a lot of support for a White Australia, but just was just as much dissent. And a significant amount of dissent came from Britain.
Why?
Australia was part of the British Empire. And the British expected Australia to trade with other countries within the Empire. Countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and India. The White Australia Policy irritated the British and they weren’t happy with the fact that it existed, because it meant that non-white subjects from British colonies couldn’t live and work in Australia, an act that was sometimes necessary for purposes of trade and business. This was why the British objected to the White Australia Policy. But then, Australia was by now its own country and nation…it could do what it liked without having to listen to England.
The White Australia Policy survived for decades, strengthening and weakening and gaining and losing support through the years. During the 1930s, fears of the Japanese and a second coming of the “Yellow Peril” increased support for a White Australia. However, after the Second World War, the need to repopulate Australia caused the Policy to be significantly relaxed, when the government realised that it could not afford to be picky about who it allowed into the country if they expected Australia to survive. It was during the postwar years that the White Australia Policy began to crumble in earnest.
The fact was that the policy had never really been any good. Non-whites had been trickling into Australia for years, and the policy never completely kept unwanted foreigners off of Australian soil. On top of that, Australia needed a larger population in the postwar era to fill up the gaps left by all the dead soldiers from the War. It was unreasonable and impossible to ask all red-blooded Australian males to do their patriotic duty and shag like rabbits on Viagra, and copulate for the good of the nation, so the Australian Government had to look…overseas! (horror of horrors!)…for more people!
The popular slogan became: “Populate, or Perish!”
This meant that Australia had to increase its population if it expected to survive in the dangerous and uncertain postwar world. Massive tourism and immigration campaigns started, encouraging people from everywhere (so long as it was white) to come to Australia!
A large percentage of the new arrivals in Australia were refugees from the Second World War. European Jews, British war-brides, displaced persons with nowhere else to go. But in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, more and more Asians started flooding into Australia. Trouble in Asia was encouraging people to leave and move south. The Chinese Civil War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War were driving people out of Asia towards Australia.
The White Australia Policy finally collapsed when international events made it impossible to implement – the numbers of Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese refugees pouring into Australia made the Policy a joke, and it was officially ended in 1966.
Universal Female Suffrage
Australia, the great social experiment, while it may not have been as forward thinking in issues of race and culture, was certainly more open to other ideas…such as the shocking notion of allowing women to…vote!
In 1902, Australian women were allowed to vote alongside men.
…Yeah. So what’s the big deal?
The deal is that Australia was the first country in the Western world to do this!
Britain? Nope. 1918.
America? Try again. 1920.
Germany? 1918.
France? Good luck. Not until 1944.
China? Surely, communists with all their equality and whatnot? Nope. 1947.
Canada? 1917.
Australia was the first! (Okay, second. New Zealand – 1893…damn Kiwis…).
Australia’s Place in the World
In 1901, Australia officially became a nation. It could go to war, it could run its own affairs, create its own laws, set its own taxes and was no-longer tied to Britain!…Except that it still (and still does) have the Queen as its head of state, and the Governor-General as the Queen’s representative in the Land Down Under.
Australia was a big exporter…and importer. It sent out shiploads of gold, iron, wool, wheat and leather, and in came things such as consumer-goods from England and America.
Australia was miles from England…it took two months to get there by ocean-liner…but a lot of Australians saw themselves still as being British. They supported Britain in wartime and peacetime. When Britain went to war with the Dutch South-Africans (the Boers) in 1899, Australia sent troops off to fight. When Britain went to war with Germany in 1914, Australia sent troops off to fight. When Britain went to war with Germany (again!) in 1939, Australia sent troops off to fight.
Why?
Australia is on the other side of the world, for God’s sake! Why on earth would it get involved in British wars?
Popular opinion in Australia listed reasons such as…
- Similar cultures.
- Helping “Mother England”.
- Failure to hep England in her time of need would result in England being too weak to help Australia in hers.
In the Edwardian-era, imperial pride and ties to “Mother England” still ran strong through the fabric of Australian culture and society. When soldiers fought and died in the First World War, they died in service of “The Empire”, not Australia. Indeed, such was Australia’s closeness to Britain that when the First World War came around in 1914, over sixty thousand Australians signed up to go to war.
The interesting bit?
Not a single one of them was a career-soldier.
Australia was the only country to participate in the First World War, which had a completely volunteer army. Shopkeepers, schoolteachers, engine-drivers, cable-car gripmen, farmers, shearers, bank-tellers and waiters rushed to sign up for the army. The most experience that Australia really had of fighting in big wars was in the Boer War of 1899 (during which, Australian soldier Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant was tried…and executed…for trumped-up charges of ‘Treason’, disobeying orders, and killing innocent noncombatant Boers).
After the Second World War, Australia stopped looking to Britain for aid, and turned increasingly towards the United States. Colonialism died a slow death as the European powers grudgingly (in the case of France, incredibly so!) gave up their colonial posessions. Australia joined the British Commonwealth, the collection of countries which shared historic, colonial ties with Britain.
Mental illness is a horrifying thing. It has had a long, long, long, troubled past, full of superstition, horror, misunderstanding, experimentation, mistreatment, pain, suffering, abuse and conjecture. It’s the stuff of horror movies like “House on Haunted Hill”. For centuries, the mad and insane have suffered, some in silence…others, not so much.
This is the history of madness. A look at how mental illness has been viewed throughout the centuries, and how people attempted to treat it, control it and cure it.
The Nature of Madness
Mental illness has been around for as long as mankind, and for as long as it has existed, there have been explanations for it, reasons for it, cures and treatments for it, whether they be right, wrong, effective, ineffective or just plain crazy!
How far mental illness can be traced is totally unknown. Only since the dawn of the written word and reliable records can we can even begin to guess at how many centuries mental illnesses have existed for, or how far back certain specific illnesses can be traced.
The Cause of Insanity
People have been trying to figure out what caused mental illnesses for as long as they’ve been around. One of the earliest explanations was that it was related to the movements, phases and positions of the Moon. The Latin word ‘Luna’, or ‘Moon’, has given us the words ‘lunacy’ and ‘lunatic’.
Other common beliefs included posession by devils, demons, evil spirits…or that the person was a witch. In the last case, the most expedient ‘cure’ involved a large stake, lots of wood and a burning torch. To deal with ‘evil spirits’ or ‘demons’, the most common ‘cures’ were either an exorcism, or a terrifying operation called a trephination or a trepanning.
Trepanning was the practice of gaining access to the brain by means of making an incision in the organ’s outer casing.
In other words…drilling a hole in your head.
Trepanning is still practiced today, but its benefits (relieving pressure on a damaged and swelling brain) are much better understood now, than they were back in the Middle Ages, when this treatment was used to ‘cure’ insanity and release a person’s demons from their soul.
Trepanning was carried out using one of a variety of drilling or boring tools…such as this delightful instrument:
Stay very still and don’t sneeze…
The procedure was typically carried out in the following manner:
1. The patient was seated (or laid) on a chair or bed and secured in-place (either with straps or with the aid of surgeon’s assistants).
2. The head (or the necessary portion of it), was shaved smooth.
3. A Y-shaped cut was made into the skin, and the skin then peeled back.
4. A mark was made on the bare skull and the drill placed thereon.
5. Start drilling.
Oh…and if you’re the patient, you get the unique firsthand experience of watching everything that happens. Because there’s no anesthetics.
Trepanning was used to treat more regular health-issues, such as migraines, headaches and so-forth, but it was most famously used for the treatment of mental illness.
As folklore, superstition and religion slowly gave way to reason, logic, science and medicine towards the 1700s, a greater understanding was sought of the lunatic. What caused someone to go mad, what they should do with him, how he should be treated and what might happen to him. In Georgian England, the answer lay in one word.
Bedlam.
Or, as it is properly called, the Bethlehem Royal Hospital.
The Bethlehem Royal Hospital, or as it was more commonly called,Bedlam, was…and is (it’s still around today!)…the most famous mental hospital in the world. It’s also one of the oldest. Its existence goes all the way back to the early 14th century, when it was established in 1330.
Like Bedlam
The Royal Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam, was, is, and remains, the world’s most famous mental hospital. Even today, a phrase survives. A place that is rowdy, noisy, out of control and crowded with people is described to be “like Bedlam”. As indeed, the hospital was, during its most famous and notorious period, in the 1700s.
Previous to this time, the inhabitants of Bedlam were referred to as ‘inmates’, as if it was a prison for the mentally ill. In 1700, the inhabitants (also nicknamed ‘Bedlamites’) were called ‘patients’ for the first time. Between 1725-1734, ‘Curable’ and ‘Incurable’ wards were opened, where patients were supposedly housed accordingly. But despite the apparent show of progress, Bedlam was a hellhole.
In the 1500s and 1600s, the hospital was filthy and patient-care was almost nonexistent. Barely anything changed by the Georgian era. Patients were often chained to walls, locked in filthy cells or subjected to brutal ‘treatments’, such as ‘The Chair’.
It didn’t DO anything. You were strapped in an armchair. Tied down. Secured. Then the chair was hoisted up into the air and spun around…and around…and around…and around…and around…It was supposed to punish you for being ‘mad’, hoping that you would repent of your wicked and sinful ways and be an upstanding citizen once more.
Unsurprisingly…it didn’t work. Unless the purpose of the treatment was to make you expel your lunch, that is.
For almost the entirety of the 1700s, Bedlam was a popular tourist-attraction in London. It was common for the wealthy, upwardly mobile classes of British society to take in the sights…and one of them was a trip to the Bedlam Hospital, where, for a small fee, you could be granted admission to the wards. Here, you could view the lunatics and bedlamites and if you wished, you could poke them through the bars of their cells with your walking-stick to watch their reactions. It’s fun, trust me. Bring the kiddies…It should always be a family outing, a trip to a lunatic asylum.
One of the most famous depictions of the Bedlam Hospital is the final painting in a series by Georgian artist, William Hogarth, titled ‘A Rake’s Progress’. Painted in the early 1730s, this is what the notorious lunatic asylum looked like in the 18th century
By the turn of the century and the coming of the Victorian era, views on mental health were (gradually) changing and conditions at Bedlam did eventually improve. Government inquiries, reports and investigations brought to light the shocking conditions inside Bedlam and by the dawn of the 19th century, the regular tours had died away after surviving as a London fixture for nearly a century. The patients were given proper care and attention and the buildings improved.
The Maddest of them All
The most famous mad Georgian of them all was one of the kings who gave his name to the era. King George III. Up to 1788, he was a sharp, intelligent, learned man. He enjoyed science, technology, mechanics, farming and nature. He had a lovely and loving wife and a HUGE family (fifteen children in total!). But from then on, attacks of mental illness eventually robbed him of his senses. He died, blind, deaf and insane, locked in a tower in 1820. When his beloved wife, Queen Charlotte, died in 1818…nobody even bothered to tell him.
Mad Words
The Georgian era gave us a number of our most commonly-used words when describing mental illness – “Crazy”, and “Insane”, from Middle English meaning ‘cracked‘, and from the Latin word ‘Insanus‘ (‘Unhealthy’). ‘Psychiatry‘ as a discipline, was first practiced in 1808, when the word was coined by a German physician, Dr. Johann Christian Reil, from the Greek words meaning “Medical Treatment of the Mind”.
A Victorian View of Madness
Mental illness was not widely understood in Victorian times, but things were gradually improving. The Industrial Revolution made life faster. For the first time, things could truly be mass-produced.
And lunatic asylums were no exception. As a partial list, we have:
The Hanwell County Asylum (built 1830).
The Surrey County Asylum (built 1838).
The Royal Bethlehem Hospital (extended, 1837).
The City of London Lunatic Asylum (opened 1866).
Guy’s Hospital (Lunatic Ward, opened 1844).
The list goes on. And this is just in England.
Thanks largely to reforms at the turn of the century, the Victorian-era lunatic was handled with much greater care, but probably with just as much misunderstanding. Causes, and treatments for, mental illnesses…and indeed, the distinctions between one illness and another…were still very much muddled up. But progress was…slowly…being made.
The increase in number, and size, of asylums and hospitals around the world, as well as the number of patients, caused problems. Although chaining patients up was no longer an acceptable method of restraint, something was needed to stop patients from hurting themselves. If they couldn’t be drugged up with heroin, opium, laudanum and morphine (common Victorian drugs for calming someone down!), then they had to be rendered a negligible force in some other manner.
Its existence predates the Victorian era, but the straightjacket was the most common method.
Invented in 1790 in France, it was first used at the Bicetre Hospital in the southern suburbs of Paris. Bicetre was not a place where you wanted lunatics to run wild. It wasn’t just a hospital. It was a lunatic asylum, a prison and an orphanage as well!
The straightjacket was used regularly on mentally ill patients, even before the Victorian era. It was the only way that badly understaffed mental asylums could control all their patients at once. But a straightjacket isn’t supposed to be worn for a long period of time (restricting the limbs like that causes blood-clots and other nasty things…perhaps why Houdini wanted to break out of them so often). Bicetre Hospital was one of the first mental asylums, along with Bedlam, to introduce humane treatment methods for the mentally ill during the sweeping social and moral reforms that spread around Europe and the United Kingdom in the 1790s.
Research and theorising into the causes and possible treatments of mental illness started in earnest in the 1800s. Pioneers such as the famous Dr. Sigmund Freud, helped to guide the way. Freud, a Jewish German, fled Nazism in the 1930s and settled in England. He was on the hit-list of people to kill when the Germans invaded Britain. Fortunately for Freud, the Germans never invaded. And even if they had, it wouldn’t have done them any good. He died less than a month after the war started.
Phrenology
Perhaps you might have seen one of these?
These days, people buy them as paperweights, bookends, curiosities, dust-collectors, souveniers, decorations and hat-holders. But back in the Victorian era, these things were used to understand the brain.
Or something like that.
Shakespeare once wisely said that there was “no art to finding the mind’s construction in the face” (taken from ‘Macbeth‘, that was, in case you’re wondering). What the Bard meant was that it’s impossible to just look at someone, study their face, and then automatically know what’s going on inside their head.
Apparently, Victorian psychiatrists, doctors and psychologists…disagreed with the great playwright, because for most of the 19th century, phrenology held sway as the latest way to read and understand the workings of the human brain. And they were onto something!
…or not.
Phrenology has absolutely NO medical or scientific fact to back it up at all. It was dismissed as quackery by the end of the Victorian era and was declared to be of no practical benefit at all to the fields of medicine or science.
But what was phrenology?
The ‘Science’…so-called…of Phrenology, supposed that a person’s personality and traits, his mannerisms and so-forth, could be determined, or even predicted, by studying the shape of his head. If you’ve ever heard of ‘death-masks’ (masks or busts made of prisoner’s heads after their executions), they were made to try and study the heads (and minds) of the “criminal class”, as it was called in Victorian times. It was hoped that by studying the heads of criminals, their shapes, their foreheads, positions of ears and so-forth, a general list of ‘characteristics’ could be compiled, showing the public the typical face (and traits) of someone who is (or would become) a criminal.
Phrenology advocated the belief that the brain is divided into segments or “organs”. Each organ controlled an emotion, or trait, such as lust, hope, curiosity, aggressiveness, gentility, connivance and so-forth. It was believed that by examining the head of a person, you could map or determine his personality traits.
How?
Using a pair of phrenology calipers. They look like this:
You can stop sucking in your belly. They’re not for measuring body-fat.
The calipers were used to measure the head. By examining the size of the cranium (that’s fancy medical talk for your skull) the phrenologist could pick up on any abnormalities. He was looking for bumps or strange inconsistencies on your head. The positions of these bumps on your head were transferred to a chart (or to a phrenology head) where a number would be printed. The number corresponded with a trait, printed on an accompanying list. The bumps indicated the areas of the brain which were, supposedly, the most developed, and by extension, the personality traits that were most developed within your brain. This could determine your mood, temperment, likelihood for criminal behaviour, propensity towards violence, drunkenness, abusiveness, gaiety…all kinds of things! Fascinating!
Did it work?
No.
But it sure makes for interesting blog-material.
Phrenologists, as they were called, believed that each section of the brain controlled or housed a particular trait or emotion. You can see that here in this chart from 1895:
As you can see, phrenology didn’t last very long. This page is taken from a medical dictionary from 1895. Note the opening passage, that phrenology was the “…science of the special functions of the several parts of the brain, or of the supposed connection between the faculties of the mind and the organs of the brain…”.
Phrenology continued to linger long after it was dismissed as quackery by the respected medical community. It’s mentioned in “Dracula”, by Bram Stoker, and in numerous Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Most notably, in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, where Dr. James Mortimer confesses to an interest in phrenology…specifically, in a close examination of Holmes’s head! (“A cast of your skull, sir, until the original becomes available!”).
Want to know more about phrenology? Here’s an interesting and rather funny lecture given by Prof. John Strachan of Northumbria University in England. Enjoy!…Oh, this is just Part 1. If you want the rest, click on the video and it’ll take you to YouTube, where you can see the rest of it.
A New Century
The Great War of 1914 brought a new horror to the world of mental illness. It was given the title ‘Shell shock’, and was believed to be caused by the deterioration of the mental state, caused by the constant bombardment of artillery shells. The unrelenting stress thus created, it was believed, caused the affected person’s brain to just snap and blow a fuse.
It was in the first half of the 1900s that mental illnesses started getting names. Names like…
Catatonia (1874).
Schizophrenia (1908), from the Greek words that described a ‘split mind’.
Melancholia (An older term. ‘Depression’ today).
Bipolar Disorder (1957). Previously called ‘Manic Depression’ (1952) and ‘Circular Insanity’ (1854).
The 20th century also brought forth a new and terrifying treatment. One which had no sure and certain outcome and which could, if performed poorly (or performed at all!), leave the patient as a comatose vegetable. It was called the lobotomy.
Tinkering with what does the thinking, has been a fascination for centuries…just look at medieval trepanning. The lobotomy had its roots in late-Victorian scientific and medical experimentation. Great strides were being made in medicine during the turn of the 20th century. New drugs, new ways of doing things, new understanding, new technologies, were making the treatment of patients faster, safer, cleaner and more effective. Why not might the same be done for the human brain?
Mostly because the results were almost always a failure.
The Lobotomy
Ah, the lobotomy. Famous in horror films for turning monsters into angels, angels into monsters, and right-thinking people into perfect vegetables. But what is it?
The lobotomy as is most commonly thought of, was developed in the mid-1930s by Antonio Egas Moniz. In 1935 and 1936, Moniz ‘perfected’ one of the most controversial medical treatments in the history of medical treatments…and that’s saying a lot.
A lobotomy involves making two incisions (holes) in the front of the head and inserting a pair of blades into the brain, whereafter two cuts or slices are made into the frontal lobes (quarters) of the brain. This was supposed to alter the workings of the brain, calm the patient down and affect a remarkable change in personality.
…or not.
Some lobotomies were pulled off with relative success. Others became tragic failures. Because the lobotomy required small, precise slices or cuts into the brain, a small, precise instrument was used. Originally, that instrument was one of these:
The scientific term is an ‘orbitoclast’, but its similarity to the axes and picks used by mountain-climbers…
…caused people to call operations carried out with these instruments, ‘ice-pick lobotomies’.
Unsurprisingly, lobotomies were incredibly risky. Patients risked everything from death, paralysis, becoming a vegetable, losing their faculties, their ability to speak, see, function properly in society…It makes you wonder why such a treatment was ever devised in the first place! One of the most famous people to receive a lobotomy was a 12-year-old boy named Howard Dully. He’s still alive today. He was born in 1948. The lobotomy was performed on him with the permission of his parents. The damage was so severe that it took him his whole life for his brain to recover and for him to be able to function properly in society again. The lobotomy is such a mythical procedure in medicine today that he wrote a book about what it was like to have one, and the effects that it had on his life. His memoir is titled “My Lobotomy”.
The effects (and benefits, if any) of lobotomies were disputed almost immediately. Even by the 1940s, people were questioning whether or not this ‘procedure’ did anything useful at all. The Soviet Union made the performing of lobotomies illegal as early as 1950. By the 1970s, most other countries had followed suit. During the heyday of the lobotomy (the 1940s and 50s), up to 18,000 people were lobotomised in the United States alone.
Electroshock Treatment
Electroshock treatment or therapy dates back to 1938. It was devised by Italian psychiatrists Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini. Cerletti first experimented on animals, as all good scientists did back in those days, before moving onto human patients.
Why on earth would zapping someone with electricity be considered a good thing?
Cerletti believed so because he noted a remarkable change in his aggressive, mentally ill patients. Once zapped, aggressive patients tended to be calmer and more manageable. This was seen as a good thing (who wouldn’t agree?) and electroshock therapy was slowly introduced around the world, to treat those who had mental illnesses that caused them to be a danger to those around them, such as the “criminally insane”.
Electroshock therapy is obviously dangerous. Improper use of the therapy can lead to brain-damage, most notably, temporary or permanent memory-loss. It was often prescribed for violent criminals to calm them down, or for mentally ill patients who posed a physical danger to those around them. It’s still used today, to treat extreme depression, although in the 21st century, it’s much safer. It can still result in varying levels of memory-loss however…so if your doctor decides to prescribe you this treatment…think twice before saying ‘Yes’.
You’re being chased out of town. There are riots in the streets. You’re not allowed to go to the cinema, the theatre, to public swimming-pools, restaurants or libraries. You can’t use public transport. Your movements are restricted by a nightly curfew. Every single day brings more challenges, more uncertainty, and even more danger.
But then you hear of this scheme, this program, this initiative. If you take part in it, in a few days’ time, you can escape all this unhappiness. You can be safe and happy and welcomed, in a land where nobody can hurt you. And you can leave right now.
But only you.
Your parents can’t come. Your grandparents have to stay behind. Your uncle and aunt won’t be there to see you leave.
You’re five…six…seven years old. You’re going to a country that you’ve probably never been to before. In all likelihood, you don’t even speak the language. Once in this new country, you cannot leave. You stay there for nearly ten years before you can return to a home that might not exist anymore, to find a family that has been wiped off the face of the earth.
This is the story of the Kindertransports.
What were the Kindertransports?
The Kindertransports was a refugee program established by the British Government in November, 1938. It was designed to evacuate persecuted Jewish children from Germany, Austria and Czechslovakia in the months leading up to the outbreak of World War Two, and to give them shelter and refuge in the relative safety of the British Isles. The program lasted from shortly after Kristallnacht in Germany, to shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in early September, 1939. About 10,000 Jewish German, Austrian and Czech boys and girls were evacuated from their homelands to England, to protect them from rising Nazi antisemitism on the European continent. It is one of the forgotten stories of the Second World War.
What was Kristallnacht?
“Kristallnacht”, a German phrase commonly translated into English as ‘The Night of Broken Glass’, was a nationwide pogrom (essentially a race-riot) of Germany’s Jewish population in November of 1938. In the space of a few hours, thousands of Jewish shops were smashed, burned and ransacked. Windows were broken, shops looted and over two hundred synagogues were burnt down. Many Jews were either shot or arrested and thrown in jail. More were tortured or sent to concentration-camps. It was the most extreme anti-Jewish measure taken by the German Nazi-Party before the outbreak of the Second World War.
The Effect of Kristallnacht
Jews had been fleeing from Germany ever since 1933. In 1935, various ‘Nuremberg Laws’ (a collection of anti-Jewish laws) made life increasingly more intolerable for Germany’s Jewish population. It was during this time that many forward-thinking Jews tried to escape from Germany. A few lucky thousand managed to get ships to England or the United States. Some went to the Dominican Republic. About 30,000 Jews fled to the International Settlement of Shanghai between 1933-1941.
But life for Jews who were stuck in Germany, and who weren’t able to escape, became more and more desperate and difficult with each passing day. Kristallnacht terrified the Jews and appalled the British Government. More than ever, letters pleading for the British Government to issue visas to Jews desperate to escape Germany, came flooding in.
The problem was that the British Government was unwilling to act. The year is 1938. The Depression is only just beginning to ease. The British Government did not want to allow Jews into the British Isles, who might steal jobs that were badly needed for British workers. Above all, the British Government did not see the situation in Germany as being one of refuge, but rather as one of immigration. To the eyes of the British Government, the German Jews wanted to come to Britain to work, not to escape the persecution of the Nazis. On top of this, fears of war with Germany have been growing for months now. British families are evacuating their own children to the countryside, or to towns and villages out of the expected operational radius of German fighter and bomber-planes. How could the government also take in thousands of German Jewish refugees? There wouldn’t be anywhere to house them! Orphanages, schools and foster-families were having enough issues coping with British children, let alone all these continental refugees!
But public pressure forced the government’s hand. In the end, a compromise was reached – Jewish children, unaccompanied by their parents, would be allowed passage from Germany to England. The British Government could be seen to be doing its part in trying to help Jews evacuate from Germany, but at the same time, British jobs wouldn’t be threatened since the refugees wouldn’t be old enough to work. It wouldn’t be easy, what with British children also being evacuated from all the big cities in southern England, but the government was determined to make some sort of effort.
How did the Kindertransports Work?
You are a Jewish child living in Germany in 1939. You want to be a part of these ‘Kindertransports’ that you’ve heard about. How do you join in?
Jewish children were rounded up. They were assembled in places like schools or orphanages, and then taken to the nearest train-station. Entire classes or orphanages of Jewish children, would be packed up and sent by train from Berlin, Vienna or Prague, to cities in Holland and Belgium (if you didn’t live in Berlin, Vienna or Prague, then you would have to travel there to get on the trains). Once in Holland or Belgium, you would be loaded onto a ship bound for England. Once the ship docked on the coast of England, you would be sent by train to cities or towns in southern England where you would be placed with a foster family, or housed in an orphanage. Perhaps, if you were exceptionally lucky, you might get to stay with relatives already living in England.
But once you reached England, there you had to stay. The outbreak of war meant that you wouldn’t be able to go back to Germany, or German-occupied Europe until May, 1945.
The British government was pressured by Jewish aid agencies, humanitarian groups and refugee advocates for weeks. It eventually set into motion a scheme for evacuating children from Europe.
How Long did the Transports Last?
The kindertransports lasted for approximately a year. The first transport docked in England on the 2nd of December, 1938. The ship left Europe and sailed for the coastal town of Harwich, carrying 196 German Jewish children, who had been evacuated from their orphanage in Berlin (which had been destroyed by the Nazis).
Some of the children in the first Kindertransport, photographed here in Holland, awaiting their ship to England. December 1st, 1938
Every child that was evacuated from Europe was given a bond of fifty pounds sterling, and was issued with a temporary travel permit or visa, that allowed him or her to leave Europe and travel to England. But this was only available to children who were below the age of 17. The expectation of the British government was that once the crisis and anti-Jewish fervor had died down, all the children would be sent back to Germany to be reunited with their families. If they’d know what would happen in just a few months, they might’ve tried even harder with their evacuation-plans…
In Europe, the kindertransports were handled by religious leaders and humanitarian workers who sent trainloads of children from schools and orphanages to the Belgian and Dutch coastlines where they could be sent to England. In groups of a thousand, or a few hundred each time, it’s estimated that about 10,000 children in total, were evacuated before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Life in England
You have escaped Germany. You reached Berlin, you got on a train, you arrived in Belgium and got safely across the English Channel to a British port.
Now what?
As I said earlier, most children were taken in by foster-families or private sponsers. If you were one of these children, then it meant a further train-ride from your port of arrival to the British capital, London, where you would be collected at the station, or at a designated collection-point, by your sponser or foster-family. Other children were taken in by local families living near the arrival port. Leftover children were kept in transit-camps until such a time when they could be sent to specially-prepared orphanages. About half the transported children were taken in by foster families or sponsers, while the rest ended up in boarding schools, orphanages, youth hostels or on farms as farmhands.
Monument to the Kindertransports, Liverpool Street Station, London, England
For most children, life was pretty good. They received gifts and they were mostly well-treated by their host-families, although of course, there were a few which weren’t. Most of the older children found work as farmhands, general labourers or as domestic servants. The oldest of the older children even signed up to join the British Army when they reached the age of 18, determined to fight the people who had driven them out of their homeland in the first place.
The Effect of War on the Kindertransports
The start of the Second World War effectively ended the Kindertransports. In England, a wave of anti-German feeling swept through the country. Thousands of Germans and Austrians were rounded up, arrested and thrown in prison. Among these were abut a thousand kindertransport refugees who looked old enough to be young adults. It was feared by the British Government that these “enemy aliens” might try and sabotage the British war-effort. To try and render them a negligable force, they were packed onto ships and sent to Canada and Australia.
The purpose of the internments was to seperate legitimate refugees of Nazism, from German and Austrian expatriates, who the British government saw as a threat. But in the chaos following the fall of France, everything got mixed up.
The most famous case was that of the HMT Dunera. HMT stands for “His Majesty’s Transport”; the Dunera was a military troopship. Crammed onto it were 2,542 prisoners, double the ship’s actual capacity. They included a smattering of German and Italian P.O.Ws, Nazi-sympathisers, and in one of the biggest blunders ever – about two thousand mostly German or Austrian Jewish refugees, including kindertransport children. The inclusion of the Jewish refugees on the prison-ship was a shameful disaster, one which Churchill himself called a deplorable and regrettable incident.
Where was the ship going?
It left Liverpool on the 10th of July, 1940. It sailed without incident, all the way to the other side of the world! It docked in Sydney, Australia, two months later. The desperately overcrowded ship (which was only supposed to hold 1,600 people) bcame notorious for the cramped, crowded and unsanitary conditions onboard. Australian customs and medical officials, who boarded the ship when it docked in Sydney, were appalled by the conditions in which two thousand Jewish refugees, and about 540 P.O.Ws, were forced to spend two months at sea in!
The Dunera docked in Port Melbourne, Australia, 1940
The prisoners onboard ship, including the Jewish refugees, were herded into prisoner-of-war camps in Australia. Eventually, letters sent to England by the refugees made the government realise that they’d made a horrific mistake! Changes were implemented and the Jews were automatically segregated from the German and Italian P.O.Ws and Nazi-sympathisers, and given their own camp. Here, they received medical treatment and whatever food and water the Australian government could spare. They were classified as “friendly aliens”, who posed no threat to the war-effort of the British Empire.
Of the Jewish refugees who somehow ended up in Australia on the Dunera, about a thousand of them stayed in Australia where they were offered permanent residency by the Australian government. Several hundred of the younger refugees enlisted in the Australian Army to fight the Japanese and the Germans. The remainder of the refugees booked passages back to England on the next available ship.
The Last Transports
The Kindertransports ended officially on the 1st of September, 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland. On this day, the borders were closed and trains were no-longer allowed to pass freely between the countries of Europe.
The Winton Trains
The Winton trains were a small number of trains that ran from Czechslovakia to safe ports in Western Europe, transporting Czech Jewish children to safety in England. They are named after Sir Nicholas Winton, the young British businessman who initiated the scheme. Sir Nicholas and his trains managed to save nearly 700 Jewish children from death.
The number would’ve been 950 children, but the start of the war ended Sir Nicholas’s humanitarian efforts. When war broke out in early September of 1939, the ninth (and final) Winton train was stopped at the Czech border. Nearly all the 250 Jewish children onboard were eventually killed.
In 2009, a commemorative “Winton Train” ran from Czechslovakia to England to commemorate Sir Nicholas’s efforts. Onboard the train were Jewish survivors who escaped the Holocaust on the original Winton trains back in 1939, and their descendants. The commemoration was also a celebration of Sir Nicholas’s 100th birthday! As of the time of this post, Sir Nicholas is 102 years old.
The very last Kindertransport left Europe on the 14th of May, 1940. It was the steamship Bodegraven, which left the Dutch port city of Ijmuiden (“Ei-mouden”) during the fall of Holland. It carried eighty incredibly lucky children to safety in England.
Of the 10,000 Jewish children and teenagers who escaped the Nazis during the Holocaust thanks to the kindertransports, nearly none of them ever saw their parents ever again.
To thousands of people, the Darwin Awards are a series of hilarious but tragic true stories that circulate the internet every few months and which each year, are updated with newer and even more hilariously sad award-winners who have done mankind the dubious honour of stepping up to receive this coveted, time-honoured and completely senseless imaginary prize.
For those who don’t know, the ‘Darwin Awards’ are fictional awards that should be given out each year to the people who, in the award’s own words: “remove themselves from the human gene-pool” either by rendering themselves sterile or by killing themselves in an increasingly stupid and hilarious range of ways.
Legendary Darwin Awards include the man who tried to check for the presence of petrol with a lit match, the bomb-disposal expert who tried to dispose of nitroglycerine by patting it down with a shovel and the youth who attempted to play ‘Russian Roulette’ with an automatic pistol.
The awards pay ‘tribute’, so to speak, to the legendary naturalist Charles Robert Darwin and his famous Theory of Evolution. The theory states that every species on earth improves with each generation by killing off the elements of that species which are detrimental to its progress…or in layman’s terms: ‘Survival of the Fittest’. The winners of the Darwin Awards have therefore done mankind a favour by removing themselves from humanity and in the long-run, contributed towards the betterment of mankind.
In the 21st Century, this is all that most people think about when they hear the name ‘Darwin’. Little thought is probably given these days, to the theorist and scientist who came up with this radical, revolutionary and groundshaking idea that has shaped modern biological science for the past 150+ years. So what is the Theory of Evolution? How did Darwin come up with the Theory and what happened when he did?
What is the Theory of Evolution?
There are a lot of mistaken beliefs about the Theory of Evolution, warped and twisted over time by those who attempt to give it credence and by those who would destroy it as heresy. So what exactly is it?
- The Darwinian Theory of Evolution is not an attempt to explain the creation of the world.
- The Darwinian Theory of Evolution is not an attempt to show how life came into being.
- The Darwinian Theory of Evolution is not an attempt to explain ‘where we come from’.
- The Darwinian Theory of Evolution is not an attempt to explain ‘where we go to’.
- The Darwinian Theory of Evolution is not an attempt to explain the creation of the known universe.
So if that’s what you’ve been told…forget it immediately.
The Darwinian Theory of Evolution attempts to explain none of these things. It was created to attempt to explain how and why a species changes over time and how animals of all kinds (including humans) can change through natural selection to better adapt to their surroundings. Nothing more. Nothing less. The story of how Darwin came up with this theory was revolutionary and mindboggling to medical, scientific and religious minds of the mid-1800s. Although his theory was fascinating and interesting, it was also wildly controversial…nearly 200 years after it was first published, it doesn’t seem like much has changed.
Who was Charles Darwin?
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist, born in Shropshire, England in 1809, into the wealthy and prominent Darwin-Wedgewood Family. His maternal grandfather was Josiah Wedgewood…Yes, the same Wedgewood who established the famous pottery firm. Darwin developed an interest in medicine and science from a young age. He was particularly interested in plants and animals, and fancied himself as something of a gardener.
Charles’s father was the physician Dr. Robert Waring Darwin, and as a man of science, was delighted at his son’s field of interests and encouraged him with his gardening and scientific research. Charles also helped his father in his medical research and attending to his patients.
As a student, Charles’s scientific interests were shared by his older brother, Erasmus Darwin. The two brothers set up a scientific laboratory in a garden shed in their house and Charles became his brother’s lab-assistant in their numerous experiements. It was this upbringing, surrounded by medicine, science, biology, a burning curiosity and a fascination for plants and animals, that would spur on Darwin to, in his later years, develop his famous evolutionary theory.
The World Before Darwin
Even today in the 21st Century, there are still people who believe firmly in the Theory of Creationism. This theory states that God created everything and that the Story of Creation as told in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, is to be taken as literal and true fact.
As it was in the 1800s, nearly two centuries ago.
Prior to Darwin’s development of the Evolutionary Theory, how did people explain the history of the natural world?
Taking the bible as a guide, scientists believed that the world was only a few thousand or tens of thousands of years old. They believed that everything was a divine creation from God above. And this would’ve been fine…except for one problem.
People kept finding fossils.
Fossil-hunting was just as popular in Victorian times as it is today. And whenever scientists were confronted with these, they had no idea how to explain it. It went against everything that religion had told them about the history of the world, and in the 1800s, religion was the bedrock of society. To question the Church, to question God, on anything, was strictly taboo. It simply wasn’t done!
…but the fossils were there. And they were an annoying little thorn in the side of the scientific and religious communities that wouldn’t go away. So how did they explain them?
The closest thing to the Evolutionary Theory that existed before it, was the belief in naturalism. In a nutshell, naturalism is the understanding that there are specific Laws of Nature. These laws regulated how and why certain things happened in the natural universe. The one that we see every day. Anything outside this order would not and did not affect the natural world, and had no bearing or significance to life on earth whatsoever, these elements being called ‘Supernatural’. Since God did not exist in nature and since nothing that didn’t exist in nature was thought to have a bearing on the operation and maintenance of the planet, God was seen as insignificant and imaginary. His presence or absence from the lives of everyday people was something of no consequence. As he wasn’t of the natural world, he couldn’t affect it or regulate it in any way.
In the earlier 1800s, naturalism was the only theory apart from Creationism, that had any followers. But Victorian conservatism forced naturalism underground. It went against the teachings and belief of the Church of England, and was quashed and discredited to the fullest extent possible.
…And we still have those pesky fossils.
Without naturalism to back up any theories, scientists of the early 1800s believed that fossils existed due to the theory of catastrophism.
The Theory of Catastrophism is exactly what it sounds like. According to this theory, scientists believed that every few thousand years, God caused great natural disasters. Tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, raging infernos and great storms. These powerful, earthshaking, earth-changing, cataclysmic events or ‘catastrophes’ (giving the theory its name) was God’s way of wiping out everything that had existed before, and starting fresh with a new world every few thousand years. Fossils, argued catastrophism scientists, were merely the remants that God left behind of the stricken worlds that he had obliterated after each catastrophic event.
Once a catastrophic event had taken place and the earth was wiped clean, God would recreate the earth and its creatures out of nothing but thin air (because he’s like…God and can do…anything), set it up and then just sit back and watch, to see if his latest version of Earth would work out as he planned.
An awesome theory. But there were still people in the scientific community to whom this theory did not jive. To them, it did not explain the history of the world in a coherent and realistic manner that explained everything that they saw around them, or everything that they found on archeological digs. Amongst these naysayers of the Theory of Catastrophism, was Charles Darwin.
The Call of the Sea
In 1831, a young sea-captain was stocking his little ship for a voyage around the world. A voyage of scientific research, a voyage of adventure, a voyage of discovery!
This captain was Robert FitzRoy.
FitzRoy was a sea-captain, a navy man, and one of the first successful meteorologists, who made accurate weather-forecasting a reality. He helped design better and more accurate barometers to forecast the weather with greater accuracy (a barometer works by measuring atmospheric pressure, the same kind of ‘high pressure’ and ‘low pressure’ that your local weatherman talks about on the 6 o’clock news every evening, thereby allowing people to foretell the weather).
FitzRoy was looking for a naturalist – a scientist of the natural world – to follow him on his voyage and to be his travelling companion. He chose the young (22-year-old) Charles Darwin to be that naturalist.
The voyage was the chance of a lifetime for Darwin. A very long chance. The voyage took nearly five years! In that time, he and FitzRoy would literally sail around the world, leaving England in December of 1831 and heading west. They would sail down through the Atlantic, around the bottom of South America, across the Pacific, stop off at New Zealand and Australia, then sail all the way across the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, around Africa, up the continent’s west coast and then back to England, in October of 1836.
The actual purpose of the voyage was to chart the world, to make corrections on earlier, less accurate maps, and to test out the new maritime chronometers. The maritime chronometer, the insanely accurate ship’s clock invented by clockmaker John Harrison at the turn of the century, was a relatively new invention in the 1830s. Although they were now relatively cheap enough that any ship with a wealthy-enough captain could purchase one, they still required rigorous in-the-field testing. When FitzRoy set sail in 1831, he carried twenty two of these clocks onboard his ship!
This maritime chronometer, housed in the British Museum, was one of nearly two dozen carried on FitzRoy’s ship during its 1831-36 voyage
And the name of this ship?
The H.M.S. Beagle. That’s the Beagle there, in the middle of this painting from 1841.
A Voyage of Discovery
The H.M.S. Beagle left England on the 27th of December, 1831. It initially sailed south to the Canary Islands, and then southwest towards South America. Regular stops allowed Darwin to get off the ship and to explore the South-American wilderness, where he examined plants, animals, bones and fossils. He would even arrange with Capt. FitzRoy, to have himself dropped off at one point along the coastline, while the ship sailed on without him. They would meet up further along the coastline at a pre-determined time and place, where Darwin would reboard the ship for the next leg of their voyage.
The Beagle reached the famous Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean in September of 1835. Here, Darwin collected more specimens and wrote about his observations on the islands, such as the famous giant tortoises…He even tried to ride one!…but the tortoise failed to oblige him and retreated inside its shell.
It was while he was on the Galapagos Islands, that the seeds for Darwin’s Theory of Evolution were gathered. As he journeyed between the islands, examining the local wildlife, he noticed how the birds which existed on each island, although were all of the same species (they were all mockingbirds), no two types of mockingbirds were exactly the same. Each island had its own distinct type of bird. From this observation, Darwin concluded that the birds had to have a common ancestor – They had to, because they were all the same species of bird! This ancestor arrived in the Galapagos sometime in the distant past, and over several hundred years, its descendants adapted and morphed to make the best use of their local environments.
In January of 1836, the Beagle reached Australia. It dropped anchor in Sydney, a young city, then not yet fifty years old.
The ship then sailed across the Indian Ocean towards South America…again. Here, it turned northwards and it reached England on the 2nd of October, 1836.
The voyage had taken nearly five years, and Darwin had ammassed a library of observations, diary-entries, sketches, scientific specimens and stuffed animals. Before the end of the decade, he would publish his account of his journey on the Beagle and was in the process of writing an account of the flora and fauna that he had encountered on his voyage (finally published in 1843).
On the Origin of Origins
Charles Darwin did not develop his evolutionary theory on the voyage of the Beagle. He’d already been thinking about it before he left England. What the voyage allowed him to do was to carry out extra research and collect data to back up his theories on evolution.
Almost the minute he got off the Beagle when it docked in England, Darwin started thinking about his theory of evolution. His observations on creatures such as the mockingbirds of the Galapagos Islands had convinced him that he was onto something. He theorised that the birds got the way they did through evolution or ‘transmutation’. Transmutation being the belief that species mutate or change over time, to adapt to their environments, and that this was a process that took several successive generations, each one growing bigger, or better, or stronger, or more adept than the one that preceded it.
Sound familiar?
In 1838, Darwin read “An Essay on the Principle of Population“. It was written by the late (1766-1834) Reverend Thomas Malthus. Malthus was fascinated by populations, demographics and people, and he made the study of population and demography his hobby. In ‘The Principle of Population‘, Malthus observed that no population grows forever. Sooner or later, something happens that checks or culls the population. Famine. Fire. The Black Death in the 1340s. On the subject of sustaining and maintaining a population, Mr. Malthus wrote:
“Must it not then be acknowledged by an attentive examiner of the histories of mankind, that in every age and in every State in which man has existed, or does now exist, that the increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence, that population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase, and, that the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.”
- Rev. Thomas R. Malthus, ‘The Principle of Population’, Chapt. 7.
19th-century writing is hideously convoluted, so what does that all mean? The reverend is saying that in every age and state of human existence, the ability of a population to grow is directly influenced by its means of subsistence – the things needed to survive – food, water, clothing, heat, discount-DVDs etc. If the necessities for survival increase, then the population that depends on them will also increase. But, if a population outgrows its means of subsistence, then it will end up decreasing in size (due to starvation, death, disease and vice), until such time that the population has returned to a level where the available resources can support it comfortably once more.
Darwin must have read this passage when he read the full text of Malthus’s essay in 1838. And it made him think of what is now one of the cornerstones of the Evolutionary Theory.
Figured it out yet?
The Survival of the Fittest.
Darwin’s observations during his voyage on the Beagle, and his research and brainstorming, caused him to suppose that a contributing factor to evolution was the supposition that only the strongest of any species survives when some great event happens, that threatens their existence. These survivors, these fighters, pass on these traits that allowed them to live, to their children, which make them even stronger, and so-on and so-forth, down the generations.
Linked to the ‘Survival of the Fittest’ idea, Darwin came up with another brainwave in 1840. He called it ‘Natural selection’. He possibly linked this to the older theories of naturalism (mentioned earlier), which stated that there were laws in nature that regulated how the earth worked. Surely, these laws regulated not only the plants and air and sky and water, the sun and the moon, but surely…the animals as well! These laws stated that nature selects which animals survive in which environments due to natural traits with which they are born…natural selection…and that the survival of the fittest determined which of these selected, came out on top as the dominant species or creature in a particular part of the world. As they say – Many are called, but few are chosen.
“On the Origin of Species”
Throughout the 1840s and 50s, Charles Darwin worked on his groundbreaking new book on science and the origins of different species of animals. And he took his time about it, too. Nearly twenty years! Wondering when the hell this long-fabled book of his was ever going to come out of the press and onto bookshop shelves, Darwin’s colleague, biologist Alfred Russel Wallace (who was also exploring evolutionary science), sent Darwin a package in June, 1858, to show Darwin that he wasn’t the only scientist out there who was stumbling around and thinking about evolution. The actual package turned out to be a book that Wallace had just recently published on the subject of evolution. Most likely, Wallace sent Darwin a copy of his essay entitled “On the Natural History of the Aru Islands”, which would’ve been his latest published work; it came out in 1857.
This little nudge encouraged Darwin to press on with his book. In 1859, he published:
“On the Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection,
or the Preservation of Favoured Races
in the Struggle for Life”
Now that is one hell of a long title. Fortunately for us, it was shortened to “On the Origin of Species” later on, and by the sixth edition, just “The Origin of Species”.
The ‘Origin’ was a bombshell of a book. It went against everything that science and religion had believed up to that point, and it was the culmination of years of research by Darwin and other emerging evolutionary scientists, all in one package.
‘Origin’ was both a popular and fascinating book, and also a hated book, and was received much better in some countries than in others. In the German states (actual ‘Germany’ as a country did not exist until 1871) of the Prussian Empire, the book was well-received, as well as in the United States and other countries around the world.
For all its popularity, the book also garnered plenty of controversy. The idea that humans were descendant from lower, earlier, more primative life-forms, just like all other animals, as the book suggested, flew right in the face of the Church. After all, God created humans in his OWN image. Not in the image of monkeys and chimps and apes! Darwin’s theories regarding the biological history of humanity were a prickly subject where religion was concerned…150 years later…and it still is.
Darwin after ‘Species’
Darwin followed the consumption of his book by the world’s reading public with great interest. He read letters sent to him, he received telegrams, he read book-reviews, newpspaper-articles and engaged in scholarly debates with colleagues and friends. The outcry over the publication of ‘Species’ was not as great as Darwin had feared, but there were still those who grumbled about it. Some in religious circles dismissed it completely, while others saw evolution as proof of God’s great powers and his abilities to change animals to make them more at home in their environments.
Some people argued that miracles performed by God held no place on earth (linking back to the theory of naturalism again – what doesn’t happen on earth, doesn’t affect earth) and that such miracles would completely go against the natural workings of the world as were understood in the 1850s and 60s. Darwin’s new book, it was claimed, explained the history of the world in a comprehensive and understandable way, that made the best use of all the archeological and biological evidence then available. Perhaps predictably, it was the younger set of scientists and biologists who were more receptive to Darwin’s ideas, and the movement of evolutionary biology was called ‘Darwinism’ in his honour.
By the end of the 1800s, evolutionary explanations and theories had gained a foothold of acceptance in the Victorian scientific community. In 1871, Darwin published his next great work, “The Descent of Man”, in which he discussed his theories of human evolution. Apart from ‘Species’, this was his other great work. Despite increasingly frequent bouts of increasingly bad health, Darwin kept writing and publishing scientific and biological papers and books throughout his life.
The End of Darwin
Charles Darwin died on the 19th of April, 1882. He was seventy-three years old. His last words were to his wife, Emma Wedgewood-Darwin, and to two of his children, Henrietta and Francis Darwin. After petitioning by his friends and colleagues, Darwin was given the honour of a burial at Westminster Abbey in London.
Charles’s older brother, Erasmus, who had fuelled Charles’s early interests in science and biology, died a year earlier in 1881. He remained close and friendly to his younger brother throughout their lives, and Charles’s SEVEN children (originally ten, but three died young) fondly called him “Uncle Ras”. Erasmus was a confirmed bachelor and never married. He could be a rather quiet, sullen, grumpy person when he was alone, but was a bit of a party-animal when he was with friends and family. He received his brother’s book, ‘On the Origin of Species’ with enthusiasm and praised it highly, calling it the best thing he’d ever read. When Erasmus died, it was Charles’s wife, Emma, who broke the news of his brother’s death. Charles confessed joy at this development. He knew that Erasmus had been in poor and rapidly declining health for several years, and was glad that his suffering had finally ended.
Nursery rhymes, so-called because they were told by wet-nurses to young children who slept in the nurseries of large houses, are little sing-song rhymes that have been passed down over the centuries and which are still told to children today. They’re cheerful, funny little poems and rhymes, designed to delight children and teach them language in a way that they will enjoy and understand. But that’s all. After all…they’re just nonsense-verses…right?
Wrong.
Here are the real stories and origins behind some of the most common nursery rhymes that you and I grew up with in our childhoods.
Jack Be Nimble
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick! Jack, jump over the candlestick!
A cute little poem, isn’t it? About someone jumping over a candle. But what does it mean?
This poem dates back to the 1500s. In Tudor-era England (1485-1603), a common superstition held that one’s fortunes could be foretold by jumping over a burning candle. How did this play out in practice? Well, you lit a candle, placed it on the floor and jumped over it.
If the candlle stayed lit, it signalled good fortune and a bright future.
If the candle went out, it signalled bad fortune and dark times ahead.
Sing a Song of Sixpence
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye!
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie!
When the pie was opened, The birds began to sing, O, what a dainty dish, To set before the king!
This nursery rhyme also dates back to the rule of the Tudors. In Medieval and Early-Modern high society dinners, it was common practice for chefs to create showpieces for the dinnertable. These dishes or centerpieces weren’t designed to be eaten, they were there as a display-piece to show off the chef’s skill.
It was a common trick-dish that chefs used to bake, that appears in this nursery rhyme. A pie-base and walls were baked in an oven. The lid of the pie was baked separately. Live birds (or frogs or mice or any other suitably small animal) were put into the empty pie-crust, and the pastry lid was placed on top. The whole thing was then served at the table.
It wasn’t there to be eaten. It was meant to be a practical joke. The first person to cut the pie open would get the shock of birds (or mice or frogs) jumping out of the pie and flying or running all over the dining-room.
…Pie, anyone?
Lucy Locket
Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it, Not a penny was there in it! Only a ribbon ’round it.
In medieval times, clothes did not come with pockets. If you had anything small that needed to be put away, to keep your hands free, you would put it into a small cloth pouch, purse or ‘pocket’ tied to your belt. If the ribbon or cord holding the pouch to your belt came loose, then you literally..lost a pocket.
This is also the origin of the term ‘cutpurse’ (meaning an early type of pickpocket-criminal), who would quite literally cut the cord of your pocket away from your belt with a knife, and then run off with it!
Pease Pudding
Pease Pudding Hot, Pease Pudding Cold, Pease Pudding in the pot, Nine days old.
Pease Pudding (also called Pease Porridge or Pease Pottage) was a staple-food of the peasantry in medieval times. Made of little more than peas, water and grains, this cheap, filling food made up one of the cornerstones of the medieval peasant diet. In times of famine, food was so hard to come by, that people relied on this simple vegetable stew to sustain them through even the toughest times, eating it…hot…cold…or even rancid stale! Pease pudding remained a popular quick-and-easy meal well into the Victorian era (during which, it was sold by street-vendors as fast-food, along with sheeps’ trotters, baked potatoes and of course…fish and chips!).
Almost everyone knows this rhyme. It goes all the way back to the late 1400s. It appeared in its present form in 1695.
This simple poem, just three lines long, is actually a remnant of a much larger poem, sung by girls in centuries past, in a similar manner to a jump-rope song. The girl would ask such questions as when she would marry, where she would live, what she would wear on her wedding-day, how she would get the dress (indicating financial status) and lastly, what kind of husband she would marry. The poem lists out all the possible occupations that her future husband might have.
Monday’s Child
Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day,
Is bonnie and blithe and good and gay.
If you ever wondered why Morticia and Gomez Addams’s daughter is named Wednesday Addams…that’s why.
This rhyme, from the 1830s, was supposed to predict a child’s future and temperment, dependent on the day on which he or she was born.
Pat-a-Cake, Pat-a-Cake
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake,
Baker’s Man,
Bake me a cake as fast as you can,
Pat it, and prick it, and mark it with a ‘B’,
And put it in the oven for baby and me!
This rhyme dates to the 1690s. But what’s the whole thing about ‘mark it with a B’ for?
Believe it or not, but people didn’t always do their baking at home.
Before the invention of the first real household stoves (the cast-iron range-cooker in the early 1800s), most people did their cooking on open fires, in pans or pots or cauldrons.
This was fine for things like spit-roasting meat, or cooking things in a pot, like stew…or soup…or 2-minute noodles.
But what if you wanted to bake a cake? Or a pie? It simply couldn’t be done in the comfort of your own home, because the domestic oven didn’t exist at the time.
So if you did make a pie or a cake, and wanted to bake it, but didn’t have an oven, what did you do?
More often than not, you took it down the street to the village bakery. Here, the local baker would put your pie or cake into his big commercial oven, and bake it for you (for a small consideration, of course).
Because this was a pretty common practice before the widespread use of the first modern range-stoves (which had their own, inbuilt ovens), bakers would mark the tops of their customers’ pies and cakes with their owners initials. This was to prevent mix-ups and confusions when the baked goods were removed from the ovens and laid on tables to cool, before customers came to pick up their finished goods. Hence the line ‘mark it with a ‘B”.
Yankee Doodle
Yankee Doodle, Went to town, A-riding on his pony, Stuck a feather in his cap, And called it ‘Macaroni’!
This popular song dates from the mid-1700s in the British North-American colonies.
What the hell is ‘Macaroni’?
Well…it’s…pasta.
But in the 1700s, pasta was new. Especially to the English. And English travellers encountering ‘macaroni pasta’ for the first time, found it unique, exciting and oh-so next-big-thing. So it was, that anything new, amazing, and eventually – over-the-top, exaggerated and excessively decorated, came to be known as ‘Macaroni’.
The song was invented by British soldiers living in Colonial America at the time of the French-and-Indian Wars (ca. 1750s). It was designed to poke fun at the fashionable aspirations of the American colonials and how they strived to put on airs and graces, and dress up in the latest European fads and fashions…and failed miserably. Basically, it’s the British teasing the Yanks about how they’re pathetic tryhards at imitating the latest European fashions.
…Looks like nothing much has changed in 250 years.
Anyway. What is ‘Macaroni’?
Macaroni was a crazy European fashion of the mid-1700s. The word was used to describe anything new, flashy, outlandish and ridiculously foppish and exaggerated. The Macaroni fashion and style was closely linked to 18th century foppishness – a fop being someone who paid far too much attention to his appearance…basically metrosexuality before it was cool. It was this exaggerated attention paid to one’s appearance…and the thought that one looked GOOD…that the British poked fun at their colonial counterparts in the song.
The names Hitler, Goering and Heydrich will forever be drenched in blood. Forever mocked. Teased. Spat on. Have songs sung about them regarding various states of testicular development…or underdevelopment.
The actions and inactions carried or not carried out by three of the most reviled men in history have been condemned an infinity of times by survivors, soldiers, historians, ordinary people, politicians, students, teachers, professors, freedom-fighters…and even…their own families.
This is the story of the members of the Families Hitler, Himmler and Goering, who turned their back on the black sheep of their name, who would forever tarnish whatever good reputation they might once have had, or might possibly have had in the future. This is the story of how members from the families of the three most hated men in history worked against their relatives’ revolting actions to try and attone for the sins and misdeeds that would forever be linked to their names.
Just in case you don’t know who these men are (unlikely), here’s a brief rundown:
Adolf Hitler – Chancellor or ‘Fuehrer’ of Germany. Leader of the Nazi Party which ruled Germany from 1933-1945.
Hermann Goering – One of Hitler’s right-hand men. Head of the German ‘Luftwaffe’ (airforce).
Reinhard Heydrich – Senior S.S. general. He chaired the infamous “Wannsee Conference” where high-ranking German officials gathered to discuss the details of the “Final Solution”.
The Good Germans
This is a legitimate article about actual historical events and persons. All the people mentioned in this posting are real and they really did what they did. None of this is made up. Members from the families of Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering and Reinhard Heydrich, really did conspire against them and worked against the Nazi war-machine during the Second World War. Their stories have been drowned by nearly seven decades of blood, but they are remarkable…and true.
So, let us begin.
William Patrick Hitler (1911-1987)
Related to: Adolf Hitler
Familial Connection: Nephew
William Patrick Hitler was born in Liverpool, England, in 1911. His father was Alois Hitler, half-brother to Adolf Hitler. His mother was an Irishwoman named Bridget Dowling.
The Hitler family is hardly conventional. It’s full of failed marriages, deaths, half-siblings and bastards (literally and figuratively).
William Patrick Hitler grew up in England. His father abandoned him at a young age and went back to Germany; William was raised by his mother, and he wouldn’t see his father again for nearly twenty years. When the First World War ended, William went to the new German ‘Weimar Republic’, the new Germany that had sprung up out of the dust and smoke of the end of the Great War. By now, it was 1929. In a few years, William’s uncle Adolf would seize power, in 1933.
William initially tried to take advantage of ‘Uncle Adolf’s new and powerful position as the new leader of Germany, but he became more and more dissatisfied with what he saw. He wanted Uncle Adolf to give him more to do, perhaps feeling that someone as influential as Adolf Hitler would have more influence. William even tried to blackmail his uncle. When this backfired on him, William fled to the United Kingdom in January of 1939. It was during this time that he wrote an article for a popular magazine, entitled “Why I Hate My Uncle”. Shortly afterwards, William and his mother moved to the United States of America.
When the Second World War started a few months later, William and his mother were trapped in the U.S.A. With German U-boats prowling the Atlantic Ocean looking to attack Allied shipping, it was too dangerous to sail back to England. Eventually (and understandably, after quite a bit of fuss), William managed to join the U.S. Navy, where he worked as a hospital corpsman.
After the War, William changed his name from the German ‘Hitler’ to the more English-sounding ‘Stuart-Houston’. He married and had four sons.
He died in the United States in 1987. He was 76 years old.
William P. Hitler had a sibling – A half-brother named Heinz Hitler (born to his father’s second wife, in Germany). Unlike William, Heinz joined the Nazis. He was captured by the Russians and tortured to death in 1942. He was 21 years old.
Albert Goering (1895-1966)
Related to: Hermann Goering (Nazi officer)
Familial Connection: Brother
Unlike his older brother Hermann, Albert Goering was a rather quiet, gentle sort of fellow. He hated the Nazis and the brutal tactics that they employed. He wanted to live the quiet life of a wealthy, German aristocratic gentleman, living somewhere in the countryside. Of course, having someone like Hermann Goering for a brother made these beautiful dreams rather harder to attain than usual.
Albert was so upset by what the Nazis were doing that he began to actively defy them…probably one of the few people who could do so, and get away with it. He helped Jews and political prisoners escape from Germany to countries of safety by getting them out of jail or by getting them essential travel-documents and money. He used to forge his brother’s signature regularly on important papers to help Jews escape.
So as not to be seen doing things that were suspicious, Albert would occasionally “help” the Nazis…in quite possibly the most unhelpful ways possible! He might sometimes be put in charge of Jewish transports. Only, trucks transporting Jews might never reach their work-assignments, prisons or labour-camps. Instead, they’d drive off a side-road, park in some quiet spot, and then Albert would turn a blind eye while all the prisoners hopped off the trucks and ran away into hiding, or tried to escape.
On occasions when Albert was arrested, he always managed to use his brother’s position as a top Nazi to get himself off the hook.
When the war ended, Albert was picked up by the Allies and interrogated extensively. But when all his supporters (mostly Jews) came to his defence, charges of Nazism were finally dropped.
Albert made a modest living as a writer after the war. He died in Germany in 1966. He was 71 years old.
Heinz Heydrich (1905-1944)
Related to: Reinhard Heydrich (S.S. General)
Familial Connection: Brother
Heinz Heydrich was the younger brother of Reinhard Heydrich, a respected general in the German S.S., the paramilitary organisation that was so heavily involved in the carrying out of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”; nothing less than the complete anihilation of the entire Jewish population of Europe.
Heinz Heydrich was a lieutenant in the S.S. Originally, he was very proud of his Nazi association and his older brother’s position within this unique organisation. He was a journalist by trade, and published the party newspaper. He continued his active association with the S.S. until June of 1942.
Early in June, Heinz’s older brother Reinhard died, asassinated by resistence-members in Czechosolvakia. His car was ambushed at a blind corner in a road and he was mortally wounded, dying a few days later in hospital.
It was this event that changed everything. Almost overnight, Heinz received a bundle of Reinhard’s personal papers and files…included in these were detailed plans about the “Final Solution”, in which Reinhard had been heavily involved.
Realising fully for the first time what he’d signed up for when he joined the S.S., Heinz was horrified. He burnt most of the papers in disgust.
Soon after this event, Heinz began to realise that he was in a truly unique position. Being the brother of a prominent S.S. general (albeit, a dead one), and being the editor of the party newspaper meant that he had a lot of influence. He used this to help as many Jews as possible escape from Germany. As a writer and editor of the party newspaper, Heinz had access to a commercial printing-press. He used this to print fake travel-documents which he signed and forged and stamped, and gave to Jewish families, so that they could escape from occupied Europe to countries of safety.
Heinz continued this work for two years, and might have lived out the war and be acquitted at the Nuremberg trials, if not for an event in November of 1944.
An investigation was launched into the goings-on at the S.S.’s newspaper offices. It was a pretty mundane thing – They just wanted to know why there was such a shortage of paper (in 1944 Germany, a lot of things were in short supply). Heinz, terrified that he’d be found out, committed suicide, shooting himself in the head.
He was 39 years old, and left a wife and five children behind.
Want to know more? Or perhaps you don’t believe me that all this is possible?
Back in December of 2009, I wrote a two-part article about the British home-front of the Second World War. Although I covered a lot of things, upon reviewing that posting, it’s become apparent to me that I didn’t really write that much about the Blitz, the concentrated aerial bombardment of British cities by the German Luftwaffe from 1940-1941.
This posting will concentrate on the purpose, aims and effects of the Blitz on London during the Second World War.
What was the Blitz?
The Blitz is probably the most famous event of the Second World War. Although it was by no means the first time that civilians were exposed to civilian aerial attacks, it is certainly the most memorable.
The Blitz was the deliberate and concentrated bombing of British cities and towns (although the main target was London), by the German Luftwaffe in the period between the 7th of September, 1940 to the 10th of May, 1941.
The Blitz gets its name from the German word “Blitzkrieg“, ‘Lightning War’. This new, mobile form of warfare brought the war to the enemy, instead of waiting for the enemy to make the first move. The whole point was to strike first and strike fast. Just like lightning does, hence the name.
The Purpose of the Blitz
After the fall of France in mid-1940, the German war machine turned its attention to the British Isles. It was the German intention to invade Britain, but they realised that an invasion would be impossible if they didn’t manage to knock out at least one of the Britain’s two most formidable fighting forces.
Great Britain was defended by the Royal Air Force (the RAF), and the Royal Navy, then the most powerful blue-water navy in the world (and had been for the past 200 years).
The Germans knew that they couldn’t hope to fight and win against the Royal Navy, but they hoped that they would be able to attack and destroy the Royal Air Force. So began the Battle of Britain.
The Battle of Britain was supposed to knock out British air-superiority and allow the Germans to launch their invasion of Britain with unchallenged air-support. Unfortunately for the Germans, the British were made of tougher stuff than they’d supposed, and after several weeks of vicious aerial combat, the Germans were forced to surrender. It was the first battle in the war that the Germans had lost.
Unable to beat the RAF, the Luftwaffe decided instead to try and destroy British cities and towns to demoralise the British people. The Nazis thought that, by doing this, they could force the British to surrender to the might of the Aryans and cease their hopeless and useless attempts to struggle onwards in vain. So began the Blitz.
Preparing for the Blitz
The British Government planned for months for the coming of the Blitz. They never expected the Germans to play nice, so they had plans for every eventuality and scenario, including large-scale aerial bombardment of heavily populated cities.
Amongst these preparations were…
- Evacuation of children, babies, toddlers, expectant mothers, the ill and the elderly from towns along the south coast and major cities, to country towns further north, out of the effective range of German bomber-planes. This mass evacuation, which started on the 1st of September, 1939, was called Operation Pied Piper. It was the first of several evacuations from large British cities throughout the war.
- Issuing everyone, man, woman, child and even babies, with gas-masks. The British fully expected the Germans to bomb them with mustard gas, chlorine gas and other nasty and potentially deadly gases. No such gas-bombings ever took place, but nevertheless, civilians were urged to carry their gas-masks with them everywhere they went, and were reminded to keep them in a place at night where they would be instantly accessible.
- Enforcing a blackout throughout England. Street-lights were turned off. Car-lights were covered. Bicycle-lamps shielded. Thick, heavy blackout curtains were distributed to every single home and business and every night, these curtains had to be put up over a building’s windows so that not a single streak of light could be seen. The blackout was enforced with amazing strictness. You could be fined for showing even the smallest amount of light!…Even the glowing tip of a cigarette!
- Issuing the public with personal air-raid shelters. Anderson Shelters and Morrison Shelters (more about those later).
- Inflating enormous barrage-balloons. Barrage-balloons were huge, gas-filled floating balloons that were shaped like blimps. They floated above the cities and towns of England (and other allied countries) to protect people from low-flying enemy aircraft. If a low-flying German plane appeared, it would have to fly around, or over the barrage balloon, or risk crashing into it and having the balloon’s tethering-cables wrap around its propellers, causing it to stall and crash. Some balloons had explosive charges on them, so that any plane that crashed into them set off the charges and the balloon exploded, taking the plane down with it.
Barrage balloons floating over central London during the War. The building at the bottom of the photograph is Buckingham Palace
Surviving the Blitz
So…what happened during an air-raid?
Fortunately for the British, they were equipped with a new wonder-technology. It was called Radar. Or correctly, R.A.D.A.R, which stands for “RAdio Detection And Ranging”. Although it was in its relative infancy at the start of the war, RADAR allowed the British to monitor enemy airplanes. Where they were, how many there were, how high they were and where they were going. The Germans never figured out what RADAR was until after the war. They never equated the huge radio towers on the south coast of England with aircraft detection.
RADAR allowed the British to keep an eye on enemy planes. And most importantly, it allowed the British to warn large cities of incoming enemy air-raids. RADAR posts would be contacted by radio and telephone and then the warnings went out in the form of air-raid sirens.
There were two types of air-raid sirens in the war. The smaller, hand-cranked ones which could be operated by one man, or larger, electromechanical ones which were powered by electricity. There were a number of warnings that these sirens could give out, but the two most common ones were “Red Danger” or “Red Alert” (continuous high-low tone), and “All Clear”, (continuous high-pitched tone).
Even with radar. Even with sirens. Even moving as fast as you could, the chances of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time during a raid could be pretty high. From the moment that the sirens went off, you had between 10-15 minutes to make it to an air-raid shelter before the bombs started to fall.
To give you an idea of just how terrifying a raid was, imagine the following scenario:
You finish work early and go home. During the war, businesses closed shop early so that people could get home in time for air-raid preparations. Perhaps you have to walk, tripping over rubble, broken glass, wood, masonary, blown up cars, around cordoned off streets…in the dark, because there’s no street-lights burning…and the Underground is out of action from power-shortages and bombing.
Imagine getting home to a small, rationed dinner, putting up the blackout curtains and going upstairs to bed in your cold bedroom. It’s cold because like everything else, coal is rationed, so you can’t keep your furnace burning all the time like you used to.
You fall asleep. Exhausted. You’re woken up at one o’clock in the morning by the steady, wailing, high-low tones of the nearest air-raid siren. You’re groggy, dizzy, tired. You can’t see straight in the half-light, and you’re only dressed in your night-clothes…and you have ten minutes to run out of your house with all the things you hold dear…and make it to a bomb-shelter before your house is blown to pieces and you become another statistic. If you live with your family, imagine having to round up the kids…your wife, your husband, your brothers, sisters, your parents, grandparents…and getting them all up and moving and out of the house in the middle of the night when they’re all asleep..in ten minutes. In fact make that five minutes. Because after ten minutes, you’re dead.
Imagine staying in your shelter during the raid. You can’t sleep because of the sirens, the fires, the explosions, the rattling of the flak-guns and the reports of anti-aircraft cannons going off, mixing with the sound of aircraft engines overhead.
You stay up all night, wondering if the next bomb has your name on it. When the raid is over, you leave the shelter and wonder if your house is still standing. Whether your friends are still alive, whether that one person who didn’t make it into the shelter on time is dead or not, or whether they managed to hide somewhere and survive. Imagine having to clear away rubble and pick through the remains of your destroyed house. Imagine not being allowed to go back home because there was an unexploded bomb in the middle of your street.
Newsreel footage of the Blitz
Imagine having to do this for seven months. That was how long the Blitz lasted.
Imagine having to do this every single night, after night, after night, after night, for two and a half months without pause. That was how long the Blitz concentrated on London alone.
That was the reality of the Blitz.
Air Raid Precautions
Now that you have a mental picture of the panic of an air-raid, you can imagine the sheer terror that gripped people when those sirens went off every single night.
So how did they cope with it?
Well, enter the A.R.P.
A.R.P. stands for “Air Raid Precautions”.
The ARP was responsible for the safety of civilians during air-raids in Britain during the Second World War. They evacuated people from their houses, they did head-counts, they directed people to shelters, they assisted with raid-related emergencies such as fires, rescues, unexploded bombs (or UXBs as they were called) and collapsed buildings.
The men on the ground doing the work for the ARP were the ARP wardens, with their metal Bodie-style helmets and dark blue uniforms.
Apart from the above-mentioned duties, ARP wardens also enforced the blackout. “Put that light out!” was a common thing to say if a light was visible from the street. Wardens also issued gas-masks, personal air-raid shelters, patrolling the streets at night, and handling bomb-damage. ARP wardens and fire-watchers would carry buckets of sand with them during an air-raid to put out incendiary bombs that had exploded and set things on fire. Incendiary bombs were firebombs filled with nasty liquids that would fizzle, burn and explode if you tried to put the bomb out with water, so sand was thrown on them instead to prevent the fire from spreading. ARP wardens also gave raid-victims first-aid and would help the police and firemen recover dead bodies from destroyed buildings and shelters. Apart from their helmets, ARP wardens were also given handbells and specially-manufactured Metropolitan police-whistles with “A.R.P” stamped onto them, to use as alarm and attention-attracting devices during a raid.
An ARP helmet, bell and metropolitan-style ‘ARP’ police whistle
Amazingly, the ARP existed long before the War ever started. It was formed back in 1924!
Why?
Well, during the First World War, London was bombed by German zepplins and bomber-planes. During these early raids, there was no prescribed way of handling the situation, since it was completely new in the history of warfare. Determined to be prepared if it happened again, the ARP was established to assist people during an air-raid if London was ever bombed again in the future.
The ARP wardens had among the most dangerous jobs in England during the War. Imagine having to run from your house in a raid to find a shelter in the pitch black when the sirens went off. Imagine having to roam around the streets directing human traffic, having to order people around, having to calm hysterical women, screaming children and panicking men while sirens scream and bombs explode around you, knowing that at any second, a bomb could go off, a building could collapse or catch fire, and you’d be dead. Imagine having to try and herd dozens, hundreds, of panicking people into an air-raid shelter in the height of the chaos, with only your hands and your police-whistle to direct people and get attention – Don’t bother shouting out orders – nobody would hear you over the sound of the explosions and sirens.
Such was the reality of being an air-raid warden.
Air-Raid Shelters
So what exactly were you supposed to do when the air-raid sirens went off?
Well, in the five or ten precious minutes of warning that RADAR and sirens were able to give you, you had to snatch all your worldly belongings, gather the people of your household, get your gas-mask (you HAD to take it. No exceptions. Even the Queen Mum carried hers with her everywhere she went) and run for the nearest shelter.
What kinds of shelters were available to people during the War?
In Britain, air-raid shelters varied significantly. They might be railroad bridges, church crypts, the cellars and basements of big buildings, or most famously – Underground Tube stations. Seventy nine of them were converted into air-raid shelters and underground workshops during the War.
But what if you couldn’t make it to a public air-raid shelter or gathering-point in time? What did you do then? Perhaps the nearest shelter was four blocks away.
Can you run four blocks in two minutes?
If you couldn’t, then you had to rely on the government-issued air-raid shelters. They came in two styles. The Anderson Shelter and the Morrison Shelter.
Anderson Shelter
Designed in 1938, a year before the war even started, this crude air-raid shelter was named for Sir John Anderson, the chap in charge of air-raid precuations.
The Anderson Shelter was a cheap, D.I.Y. shelter. It came delivered to your house (or you could go out and buy one) in fourteen prefabricated parts: Six roof-panels, six side panels, and two end-panels (one with a door, to create an entrance).
When properly assembled, the Anderson shelter was designed to hold six people. The shelters were six feet high, four and a half feet wide, and six and a half feet long. And it wasn’t just a matter of bolting them together in the garden as a children’s cubbyhouse. You had to dig a hole in the back yard! Six and a half feet long, four and a half feet wide (for the length and breadth of the shelter), and four feet deep! You assembled the shelter in the hole, with additional space for the door, and then you covered the entire thing with earth to provide shock-protection.
Despite how flimsy the whole construction sounded…these things did save lives.
But what if you didn’t have a garden, and you lived miles from the nearest public shelter?
Then you used the…
Morrison Shelter
The Morrison Shelter was named for Herbert Morrison, then Minister of Home Security. The Morrison shelter was a heavy, steel table with wire sides between the legs and base. It was designed to hold two to three people and protect them in the event of a raid. Because of their design, Morrison shelters often doubled as coffee-tables or dining-tables in people’s living-rooms during the War. In a pinch, you could open the side of the shelter, crawl in and slam it shut behind you.
The Purpose of the Shelters
Duuuh. To protect you against bombs!
Ehm…no.
Anderson Shelters and Morrison Shelters were not, and never were, designed to protect you against bombs.
Be serious. Is a metal table or a few sheets of corrugated steel, going to protect you against a bomb weighing thounds of pounds?
Of course not.
Well then what was the point of having them?
The point of these shelters was not to protect you from bombs. They were never designed to take a direct hit. Instead, they were designed to protect you from shrapnel.
When a bomb drops and explodes, it sends out heaps of shrapnel. The metal shell-casing, bricks, glass, wood, mortar, chunks of concrete and all other kinds of flying debris. Every single one of these things is a potentially lethal missile. If they hit the sides of the Anderson Shelter, you would be safe. This was why the shelters were dug into the ground and covered with soil. To protect against shrapnel.
Morrison shelters protected you from above. They were designed to withstand the force of the house collapsing on top of you if it was bombed. The table-shelter would give you a ‘safe-zone’ in which to hide, protected from the rubble, until ARP wardens and fire-watchers could extinguish the flames and get you out alive.
Public Shelters
If you didn’t have a garden or space for a Morrison Shelter in your apartment, then in an air-raid, you could use a public air-raid shelter. The most famous public air-raid shelters were the seventy nine Tube stations that were converted into bomb-shelters and underground workshops during the War. Some stations which were no-longer used might be converted into storage-areas or workshops. But other stations which still received regular traffic were used as air-raid shelters.
Ducking down in the Tube was hardly pleasant. How would you like to spend the night in a cold, draughty, piss-soaked subway station with dozens of other people, with blankets and cold food and no toilets and rats and water and the wailing of the sirens, the blasting of anti-aircraft cannons and the explosions of bombs up above you all night?
The British Government initially dissuaded people from using the Tube as an air-raid shelter. They were scared that, once everyone went underground, they’d never want to come out again.
When these fears were proved groundless, the government picked out the nearly eighty stations across London that could be used to house people in air-raids. They were fitted with extra toilets, lights, running water, bunk-beds and even special trains that came by with hot food! At night, Tube workers would cut the power so that Londoners could sleep on the railway tracks without getting electrocuted by the current that ran along the third rail which powered the subway trains.
Of course…you had to be able to wake up on time in the morning, otherwise you might get run over by the morning rush-hour!
People kept their spirits up down in the Tube with songs and games. Many people would actually arrive early! They’d show up in the station after work with their wives and husbands and kids, tea and sandwiches, blankets, coats and pillows, and pick out the best spots in the station to bunk down for the night.
Other public air-raid gathering points included basements, cellars, church-crypts and bridges. While none of these provided complete safety from aerial attack (almost nothing could protect you from a direct hit), they were made available for those people who had nowhere else to run.
Despite the provision of private shelters and the setting-up of public ones, a significant number of Londoners actually chose to sleep in their own homes during the air-raids. Since sleeping in the shelters didn’t guarantee safety, some Londoners decided that if they were going to die anyway, they’d prefer to die in their own homes.
The Baedeker Blitz
The main body of the Blitz on the United Kingdom was over by mid-1941. However, that didn’t mean that the danger had completely passed, and throughout the war, the Germans continued to conduct air-raids on British cities and towns. The next most famous set of raids were collectively called the Baedeker Blitz.
These air-raids were named after the famous Baedeker (pronounced ‘Bay-Decker’) guidebooks. The Baedeker Co. (ironically, a German company!), was famous for printing in-depth guidebooks of famous countries and cities for the travelling public, covering everything from England to France, Italy to China. They were the Lonely Planet of their day.
These raids, which took place between April-June of 1942, targeted the famous tourist and cultural centers of the British Isles, such places as would be mentioned in the famous Baedeker Guidebooks (hence the name).
Cities targeted included York, Bath, Norwich, Exeter and Canterbury. The famous Canterbury Cathedral was one of the targets during the Baedeker Blitz. Fortunately for the British, the bomber missed the Cathedral (although not by much). Unfortunately for the British, the bomb struck the cathedral’s archives building, destroying it in a direct hit.
V1s and V2s
By the last year or so of the war, the Germans were in deep trouble. The Allies were closing in from the East and West. From France, British, Canadian, French, Polish and American forces were charging towards Berlin. In the East, the Russians were steamrolling the Germans back, taking bloody revenge for their fallen comrades, whom the Germans had previously captured…and killed…in their hundreds of thousands.
But that didn’t stop the Germans from trying to strike at England. In 1944 and 1945, they developed and launched first the V1, and then the V2 rockets. These crude weapons were the predecessors to today’s guided missiles.
Launched starting shortly after D-Day, the V1s were nicknamed ‘Doodlebugs’ because of the buzzing noise they made when they flew overhead. Although probably a powerful psychological weapon, in reality they were not as effective as the Germans had hoped. Doodlebugs were slow and cumbersome. British anti-aircraft cannons could take them out with relative ease. And even when the Germans launched doodlebugs en-masse, only one in four ever made it past the anti-aircraft guns.
The V-1 ‘Doodlebug’
The V2s, much faster and more accurate, were so advanced for the day that they were beyond the capabilities of anti-aircraft gunners to shoot down. Deciding that it was impossible to destroy the rockets once they were in the air, and unable to destroy the launching areas (hidden and well-protected), the British instead relied on disinformation and espionage to defeat the Germans and their fearsome new Weapon of Mass Destruction.
For the duration of the war, the British had been training a large number of spies. Some spies were British. Other spies were Germans who spied for Germany, but who were captured by the British and turned into double-agents, spying for both countries, but only supplying useful information to the British. Some German spies actually hated the Nazis. They would sign up for spy-duties, get sent to England, and the moment they could, they would hand themselves into British authorities, divulge their mission-details and any handy bits of information, and then switch sides and spy for the British.
This complex network of spies and misinformation was called the Double Cross System. And the British used their extensive network of agents and spies to screw up the Germans and their V1s and V2s.
Because of the crudeness of these early missiles, the Germans had to rely on their agents in England to tell them how successful the weapons were. Egged on the British, the German double-agents would send back misleading reports.
If a missile missed London (or another prominent target), information sent back to Berlin was that the missile was on target and that nothing should be changed.
If a missile hit its target, then a message sent back to Berlin would say that the missile had been ranged too long (or short) and that corrections would have to be made. These ‘corrections’ would in fact result in the previously-accurate missiles going off-target and striking smaller communities or exploding harmlessly in the countryside.
Using these tactics, the British were able to redirect the majority of German V-2 rockets into less-populated (or completely unpopulated) parts of the country, where a bomb-explosion was less likely to kill someone.
By early 1945, with the Allies closing in on Germany on all fronts, and the Germans running short on everything from food, to water, fuel, ammunition and more essential things like lederhosen, their campaigns of terror against Britain finally ceased.
Cities all over the British Isles were devasted by the bombing. Streets were cordoned off, buildings were demolished, entire families might be wiped out. Apart from London, probably the hardest-hit city was that of Coventry, where almost the entire city was flattened by German bombing in one night. So intense was the bombing that the Germans invented a new word to describe the sheer level of destruction – Koventrieren – to Coventrate – or to destroy something completely.
Few people today can imagine the terror of exploding bombs, the scream of air-raid sirens and living in constant, daily fear. For many people, it’s something they read about in history-books, see in movies or in episodes of ‘Foyle’s War’…But it did happen.
Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Hitler? If you think we’re on the run? We are the boys who will stop your little game, We are the boys who will make you think again!
‘Cause who do you think you are kidding Mr. Hitler? If you think old England’s done?
Mr. Brown goes off to town on the 8:21, But he comes home each evenin’ and he’s ready with his gun!
So watch out Mr Hitler, you have met your match in us, If you think you can crush us, We’re afraid you’ve missed the bus
‘Cause who do you think you are kidding Mr. Hitler? If you think we’re on the run, We are the boys who will stop your little game, We are the boys who will make you think again,
‘Cause who do you think are kidding Mr. Hitler? If you think old England’s done!
Behold the original 1940s theme-song of the British Home Guard!
Okay, no, not really.
‘Who Do You Think You are Kidding Mr. Hitler‘ was the theme-song to the popular 1970s TV show “Dad’s Army”, that chronicled the activities of a fictional Home Guard unit during the Second World War. The song was actually written in 1968 and sung by famous music-hall veteran Bud Flanagan. Flanagan came out of retirement to record the theme-song as a special favour to the show’s creators, who were avid fans. They wanted the show’s theme-song to be sung by a real wartime singer (which Flanagan was), and they got lucky when he agreed. Really lucky! Flanagan died less than a year later!
“Dad’s Army” was one of the great television comedies of the 70s. But it’s scary to think that fiction mirrored reality in so many ways! A lot of the jokes in the show (weapons-shortages, no uniforms, poor training, old codgers thinking they could fight off the Luftwaffe) were actually real problems faced by the real Home Guard back in the 1940s! This is the true story of Britain’s citizen army – The Home Guard.
Local Defence Volunteers
With the fall of France, the British were terrified that the Germans might turn their sights on England and attempt to invade them sometime in 1940 or 1941. Fearing that they might not have enough fulltime soldiers to defend the British Isles, on the 14th of May, 1940, the British Government established the Local Defence Volunteers, a ‘citizen army’ who could fight off the Germans and secure the Isles until soldiers from other parts of the Empire could arrive to provide backup.
The L.D.V was expected to be made up of about 150,000 carefully-chosen men who would be Britain’s first line of defence against a German invasion. Within 24 hours of the original radio broadcast made by Anthony Eden, 250,000 men had signed up! To give you an idea of how many that is, the entire British Army was 250,000 men before the war started! By 1943, the Local Defence Volunteers numbered nearly two million (1.8 mil, precisely), and never fell below 1,000,000 for the rest of the war.
Dad’s Army – The Home Guard
The L.D.V. was renamed the “Home Guard” by order of Winston Churchill in August of 1940. It sounded better and was easier to write down. This proud fighting force of patriotic British men would stave off impending doom from a Nazi invasion of their treasured homeland!…or not. We’ll never know, because Britain was never invaded, but the British Government and Army were determined to be ready for any eventuality.
Signing up for Duty
The Home Guard officially recruited men and boys ranging from 17-65 years in age. Recruits were men who were too young to fight in the regular army, too old to fight in the regular army, who were excused from regular combat due to medical issues or who were excused from enlistment due to being in a ‘reserved occupation’ (having a job that was essential to the war-effort…like baking bread…and no, I’m not kidding. Bakers were exempt from joining the army).
In the flurry of activity to join the newly formed Home Guard, the rules were only loosely followed. Children as young as fifteen and sixteen joined the Home Guard and grown men as old as seventy joined up! The oldest guardsman was Alexander Taylor. He first bore arms for king and country back during the Mahdist War of 1881! When he signed up for the Home Guard, he was well over eighty years old!
Approximately 40% of the Home Guard were made up of former soldiers, most of them veterans of the Great War of 1914 (ahem, the First World War to you and me).
Because the majority of the guardsmen were of advanced age, the Home Guard was given the popular nickname: “Dad’s Army”.
Training the Guard
Training for the Home Guard was rudimentary. Because such a sizeable number of the men (as well as their commanding officers), were all veterans of former wars (the Great War, the Boer War, the Second Afghan War of the 1880s and so-on), they felt that they didn’t need any training. They were soldiers already! Or they were…once upon a time…and they were ready to do it again!
As noble and patriotic and romantic and well-meaning as all these sentiments were, they all overlooked the fact that many of these men fought back in the days of cannons, horse-cavalry charges, bayonets and single-shot rifles! Their training didn’t prepare them for a modern, 20th century war! So like it or not, they all had to be trained from the ground up…all over again. Some officers were allowed to keep the ranks that they’d earned during previous conflicts, however.
Arming the Guards! (The Bullet is not for firing!)
It’s just as well for the people of Britain that their homeland was never invaded. The Home Guard had nothing to fight with!
See, during the war, all the best weapons were required by the regular army. They got all the up-to-date machine-guns, mortars, knives, daggers, small-arms and rifles. The Home Guard had to make-do with whatever crap they could find that was left over! The wartime mantra of “Make do and Mend” was never more true!
The Home Guard was woefully under-equipped. They didn’t even have proper uniforms until halfway through the war! Just armbands that they wore on their sleeves. And weapons…oh boy.
To give you an idea of how ill-equipped the guardsmen were, they used to do rifle-drills with almost anything BUT a rifle. They used billiard-cues, broomsticks, walking-sticks, crutches, umbrellas, cricket-bats, pitchforks, hoes…anything!
What firearms they could find were usually what they brought from home. Their revolvers, their heirloom duelling-pistols, Uncle Jack’s hunting-rifle, double-barreled sawn-off shotguns, break-open long-barrel shotguns, handguns…they didn’t have a single rifle between them!
The shortage of arms for the Home Guard was so severe that they even broke into museums to find them! Cannons, muskets, blunderbusses, musketoons…even old cavalry swords! Everything was requisitioned by the Home Guard for the defence of the realm. And I don’t mean that they knocked on a museum door, spoke the curator, got him to sign a piece of paper and then helped themselves to the guns…I mean they literally broke in! Smashing glass display-cases and making off with the guns!
Winston Churchill recognised this shortage of firearms and he wrote a letter to the War Office in June of 1941 which read:
“Every man must have a weapon of some kind, be it only a mace or a pike!“
You can guess what happened next.
What Churchill REALLY meant was that the Home Guard should be equipped with whatever weapons were available and that every effort should be made to give them the best firearms that the British Army could spare!
Unfortunately for Churchill, the War Office took his message a little too literally. In 1942, they finally finished producing 250,000 pikes.
Yes.
Pikes.
Long, pointy sticks that go stabby-poke.
Exactly what Churchill said when the War Office told him that his order of pikes was ready for dispersement, isn’t recorded. But it was probably an impressive array of profanities.
Needless to say, the ludicrous pikes were never used. Most of them were never even unpacked and removed from storage! The guardsmen refused to use them, anyway.
Eventually, the Home Guard did get proper rifles. They were the old Lee-Enfield rifles used during the Great War. This was probably beneficial to a certain extent. Nearly half the guardsmen were Great War veterans and would’ve been familiar with the rifles. The only problem was, these rifles were now over twenty years old!
Americans and Canadians tried to help out their British friends. They collected and donated all their old rifles that they didn’t use anymore, and sent them to England. So at least the Home Guard had proper rifles now…even if they were outdated vintage ones!
While they might have had rifles (and might have also had ammunition), the guardsmen didn’t have much else. They had to improvise most of their weapons, such as grenades. They learned how to make rudimentary firebomb-grenades out of old bottles, flammable liquids and old rags. These homemade grenades were copied from the originals invented by the Finnish in 1939. They were called “Molotov Cocktails”, and were named for Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister.
Grenades weren’t the only things that the guardsmen had to make for themselves. They even produced their own mortars! A particular model (called the Northover Projector) was essentially a rudimentary grenade-launcher/mortar that fired grenades into the air. Blackpowder (not used since the American Civil War of the 1860s!) was poured down the barrel, then a grenade was forced down the barrel after it.
The powder was ignited using a toy precussion-cap (those little things that you stick in children’s play-guns that go ‘Bang!’) and was operated by a two-man crew. The Northover Projector was cheap, easy to use…but hardly effective. Half the time it could misfire, or even worse, explode in the breech, blowing the thing apart and injuring the crew.
Although the Northover Projector was manufactured commercially, many people made their own, homemade versions. It was often called the “Drainpipe Mortar” because of its long, slim shape.
The Duties of the Guard
Because Britain was never invaded, it’s widely believed that the Home Guard didn’t do anything. This wasn’t exactly true.
The Guard was employed in various activities throughout the war. They patrolled harbours and ports, they guarded ammo-dumps and important military installations and storage facilities, and they manned anti-aircraft cannons during the Blitz. Over a thousand guardsmen died in combat during the war.
The guardsmen also arrested and rounded up downed German pilots, they helped the wounded, cleared rubble from air-raids and rescued the trapped who were stuck in their collapsed houses. In 1941, the Guard was even allowed to guard Buckingham Palace! Churchill proudly declared that if London was invaded, the Home Guard would fight a bloody war with the Germans for every single city block.
The End of the Home Guard
The Home Guard was stood down in late 1944, when it was pretty certain that the Germans wouldn’t be doing any fighting against the British on their home soil anytime soon. It was formally disbanded on the 31st of December, 1945.
…D’awwwww…
One of the most famous depictions of the Bedlam Hospital is the final painting in a series by Georgian artist, William Hogarth, titled ‘A Rake’s Progress’. Painted in the early 1730s, this is what the notorious lunatic asylum looked like in the 18th century
