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Battle of Britain Day

Posted in Film, History with tags , , , on September 15, 2015 by telescoper

Today is the 75th Anniversary of the day that historians regard as the climax of the Battle of Britain. To commemorate this, a huge flypast will take place across the South of England. Unfortunately, the weather isn’t too great today, and I don’t think it will be quite the spectacle that was intended, although Purple, Brown and Black sections are due to fly over Brighton from RAF Goodwood and perhaps the clouds will have broken up by the time they get here. Normally Battle of Britain Day is commemorated on a Sunday, as 15th September 1940 lay on a Sunday.

I had a friend – now long dead – who served as a fighter pilot in the RAF during the Battle of Britain and I once asked him about the tactics they used. He explained that they didn’t really have any tactics. When scrambled they were usually lucky if they managed to get to the right altitude before the enemy were on them. And if they did, they just flew head on at the incoming planes and tried to shoot them down. There was little point in attacking a big formation from behind with a handful of planes, which was the usual situation: you might pick off one or two but the bombers would carry on to their target. You had to attack from the front in order to scatter them. He added that on a good day, if you were feeling exceptionally brave, you might even keep your eyes open as you screamed straight into the enemy at getting on for 400 mph.

Another event of 15th September 1940 exemplifies the almost insane courage of the RAF pilots. A formation of Dornier bombers penetrated the British air defencesa as central London, where it was engaged by planes from a number of RAF squadrons, including the Hurricane of Flight Sergeant Ray Holmes. Holmes got into position to shoot down one Dornier, but when attempted to fire he discovered he had run out of ammunition. In an act of amazing bravery he decided to ram the Dornier. He succeeded ins slicing off the plane’s tail and it came down on Victoria Station. Somewhat improbably, Holmes managed to bale out and, though injured, survived to fight again. He died in 2005.

The other thing that this event reminded me of was the film Battle of Britain. The movie is a bit dated now, largely because some of the special effects don’t really stand up to modern comparisons: no cgi when it was made, for example. The best thing about it for me, though, is the wonderful music written for the film by William Walton, especially in the following sequence where the dogfights are shown with only the music as soundtrack. This turns the shots of terrifying close-range combat into a something a lot more than an action movie. It’s a work of art.

The context of this sequence is, as far as I know, historically accurate. Over the summer of 1940 the Luftwaffe had sent raid after raid over to attack Britain, these raids increasing in size as time went on. Hugh Dowding, Head of Fighter Command at that time, refused to let his planes be drawn into a huge battle against numerically superior forces and instead kept most of his planes in reserve, sending up only a squadron or half a squadron to meet the incoming planes. Thanks to the breaking of the German Air Force Enigma code, Dowding knew that the Luftwaffe pilots had been handing in grossly exaggerated reports of how many planes they had been shooting down. Convinced that the RAF was on the brink of collapse, the Germans launched an enormous air raid on September 15th 1940 intended to deliver the knockout blow and prepare the way for invasion.

Dowding knew that they were coming, and put every available plane at the RAFs disposal into the air. The survival of this country was at stake during this battle. There were no reserves. When the Luftwaffe arrived over Britain their pilots were aghast to find the air filled with Spitfires and Hurricanes whose pilots, having been consistently outnumbered in the battles so far, relished the chance to fight for once with something close to numerical equality with the enemy. The RAF scored a decisive victory, convincing Hitler to abandon his plans for an invasion in 1940.

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Fish, Chips and Immigration

Posted in History, Politics with tags , , , , , , on September 10, 2015 by telescoper

I’m not the biggest fan of Simon Jenkins, especially when he goes off on one of his childish anti-science rants, but there’s a powerful piece by him in today’s Guardian  with which I agree totally. Reading the article on the bus, and especially the passage about the arrival of Huguenot refugees from France in the 18th Century, I decided to repost the content of an item from about 5 years ago, to demonstrate the importance of immigration to Britain’s culture and traditions, sometimes in very surprising ways.

Have you ever wondered where and when the traditional “British” dish of fish and chips originated? The answer is fascinating, and a little bit controversial too.

The practice of eating fried fish in batter started to appear in England during the fifteenth century; it was derived from the  Pescado Frito cooked by Portuguese Sephardic Jews – Marranos – who had moved to Britain to escape persecution in their homeland. By the Victorian era “Fish Fried in the Jewish Fashion” was extremely popular in the working class districts of London, particularly in the East End. Dickens refers to a “fried fish warehouse” in Oliver Twist, which was first published in 1837. It seems to have become available in large quantities with the rapid development of trawler fishing in the mid 19th century.

Incidentally, there is a prominent relic  of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who settled in the East End right next to Queen Mary, University of London in Mile End (see left). The burial ground has, I think, recently been moved but it neverthless provides a timely reminder that immigration is by no means a new phenomenon as far as the East End is concerned.

The traditional way of frying the fish involved oil and I don’t know precisely when the practice of using lard – which is what is used in many modern shops – came on the scene, but it clearly would not have met with Jewish approval and must have been a more recent development.

The origin of chips is more controversial. The first occurence of this usage of the word chip according to the Oxford English Dictionary appears in Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities, dated 1859, in the phrase

Husky chips of potatoes, fried with some reluctant drops of oil

Some say the practice of frying potatoes like this originated in Belgium or France, and that chips are a British version of pommes frites or french fries. This style of cooking potatoes could have been brought to London by the Huguenots (French Protestants who settled in the East End of London after being forced out of their homeland). However, there is some controversy about how and why chips became so popular throughout Britain. Some claim the practice of eating fried potatoes was already established in the North of England before 1859. It also seems that fried chipped potatoes were served in working class eating establishments throughout Victorian London. Many working people – especially single men living in lodging houses – lacked the facilities or the ability to cook anything substantial at home, so preferred to buy their food ready made. At an Irish Ordinary you could get a filling meal of beer, meat and fried potatoes for about tuppence (in old money). Such establishments proliferated all over London during the 19th Century as the number of navvies and other itinerant Irish labourers  grew in response to the demand for manual workers across the country.

I think it was most likely the presence of a nearby Irish Ordinary that led a Jewish londoner called Joseph Malin to hit upon the idea of combining fried fish with chipped potatoes. At any rate it’s reasonably well established that the very first commercial Fish-and-Chip Shop was opened by him in 1860 in Cleveland Street and business was so good that it was followed by many others across the East End of London and beyond.

There’s something rather inspiring about rediscovering that Britain is nation whose traditions and institutions have always been so reliant on foreign immigrants. Even Fish and Chips turns out to be from somewhere else. This is actually what makes me proud to be British.

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The Day of Daltonism

Posted in History with tags , on September 6, 2015 by telescoper

Having a quick look at Twitter this morning as I drank my coffee I discovered that it is the birthday of the English scientist John Dalton, who was born on 6th September 1766. Dalton is most famous in the United Kingdom for his work on chemistry and physics, but somewhat less so for his pioneering studies of colour blindness. I didn’t know until today, in fact, that the birthday of John Dalton, who was himself colour blind, is Colour Blindness Awareness Day so I thought I’d do a quick post to mark the occasion. You might also be interested in this guest post on the subject of colour and colour perception.

Here’s a test for some of the main types of colour blindness – can you read the numbers?

Colour_Blind

Colour blindness comes in different forms and affects a significant fraction of the population, with a much higher rate of occurrence in males (up to 1 in 10 in some groups) than in females (about 1 in 200). It also varies significantly across different populations, with particularly low rates for, e.g., Fijian males (0.8 %) and much higher frequencies among, e.g. Russian males (9.2%). I am not colour-blind myself, but I know several colleagues who are. In fact at the meeting I was at last week, when one speaker decided to show two different sets of results on a graph by plotting one in red and the other in green, there were howls from several in the audience who couldn’t tell them apart. It’s very easy to make careless mistakes like this in preparing lecture materials when it takes only a small effort to make them suitable for all. I urge colleagues who teach to remember that if they are 100 men in the audience the likelihood is that there will be around 8 to 10 who are colour blind.

Thinking about this makes you realise how many maps and other designs rely on full colour perception for their effect. I’ve previously celebrated the London Underground map as an excellent example of graphic design, but it must be a nightmare to a person who is colour blind!

tube_map

Last week I gave a short speech at the workshop to celebrate Sabino Matarrese’s 60th birthday, in the course of which I mentioned the late Francesco Lucchin, who first invited to Italy to work with the Padova group (of which Sabino was a member) back in the early 90s. Francesco and I ended up writing a book together and during the course of working on that he told me that he was “daltonic”. I later found out that this word does exist in English, but it is not in common usage as a word meaning “colour blind”. In fact the standard word in Italian for “colour blind” is “daltonico” and there are many other variants in other European languages, such as the French “daltonien”. It’s very curious that Dalton’s name is so strongly associated with colour blindness across the European continent but not in the country of his birth. I wonder why?

By the way, if I understand correctly, the English word “daltonic” refers to a specific form of red/green colour blindness called deuteranopia, whereas the foreign variants can refer to any form of colour blindness.

Anyway, must wrap it up there. I have to mark some resit examinations which, according to the instructions, should be done in red ink by the first marker and in green ink by the second marker…

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From here to Astragalo

Posted in Biographical, History with tags , , , , on September 5, 2015 by telescoper

Now that I’m back to the relatively autumnal setting of Brighton, I can’t help reflecting on last week’s meeting. On Monday evening I attended a cocktail party in a very pleasant bar in Castiglioncello overlooking the sea. Sunset views are something of a speciality from this location:

image

Anyway, the name of the place we were in was Astragalo. I checked and, as I suspected, this the Italian word for astragalus, which has an approximately tetrahedral shape. Astragalus is also a kind of plant, which is perhaps more likely to be associated with the name of a seaside bar, but that spoils the connection I wish to make with probability theory, a topic that came up regularly during the conference I was attending, so I’ll ignore it.

Nowadays gambling is generally looked down on as something shady and disreputable, not to be discussed in polite company, or even to be banned altogether. However, the formulation of the basic laws of probability was almost exclusively inspired by their potential application to games of chance. Once established, these laws found a much wide range of applications in scientific contexts, including my own field of astronomy. The astragalus provides a very early example.

Gambling in various forms has been around for millennia. Sumerian and Assyrian archaeological sites are littered with examples the astragalus (or talus bone). This is found just above the heel and its roughly tetrahedral shape (in sheep and deer at any rate) is such that when it is tossed in the air it can land in any one of four possible orientations; it’s fairly similar in fact to the four-sided dice used in some role-playing games. The astragalus can be used to generate “random” outcomes and is in many ways the forerunner of modern six-sided dice. The astragalus is known to have been used for gambling games as early as 3600 BC.

images

Unlike modern dice, which began to appear around 2000BC, the astragalus is not quite symmetrical, giving a different probability of it landing in each orientation. It is not thought that there was a mathematical understanding of how to calculate odds in games involving this object or its more symmetrical successors (right).

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The Last Match

Posted in Cricket, History with tags , , , , , on August 23, 2015 by telescoper

Yesterday (Saturday 22nd August) I took the day off to go to Sussex County Cricket Club‘s ground at Hove watch some cricket and also to watch a play called The Last Match. Here’s a snap I took in the direction of the scoreboard as play commenced, at 11am.

Hove_cricket

As you can see from the picture, it was very sunny yesterday – the high cloud had vanished by the afternoon to leave a perfectly cloudless blue sky. I arrived at the ground already rather hot, having walked from Kemptown (which lies well to the East of Hove) along the seafront and through Brighton city centre to get there. Fortunately, cricket grounds are not short of options for liquid refreshment!

The match going on was between Sussex and Yorkshire in the County Championship. I haven’t seen much County cricket in recent years, but it was good to see a reasonably big crowd there. Many of them were Yorkshire supporters who had presumably made the short trip South from the Midlands to watch the game. Saturday was the second day of a four-day game. Yorkshire had batted first on day 1 and reached 346-6 by close of play, with Gary Ballance not out on 98 and Tim Bresnan not out on 44 (both former England players). No sooner had I settled into my seat than Ballance got his century, but Bresnan took about 35 minutes to get to his fifty. Thereafter the Yorkshire batsman progressed steadily, adding a hundred to their overnight score without losing a wicket but soon after that Ballance was out for 165, clean bowled by Liddle. A few runs later Bresnan was run out in controversial fashion: the batsmen went for a quick single, fielder Chris Nash threw at the bowler’s end whereupon the bowler caught it and fell on the stumps, knocking them all over with Bresnan short of his ground. The umpire’s finger went up, but it should have been not out, because the ball is supposed to hit the stumps at some point. Anyway, the umpire’s decision is final – no reviews in County cricket – so Bresnan was out for 78 with the score on 458-8. Had I been Yorkshire captain I would probably have declared then to let my bowlers have a go at Sussex before lunch. But that didn’t happen.

Six overs later the ninth wicket fell, at about 12.59 (with lunch scheduled for 1pm). Then a rule was invoked with which I was unfamiliar. Apparently in County cricket if a wicket falls just before lunch, so that the batting side is nine down, play continues for up to 30 minutes (or 8 overs) or until the final wicket falls. Thus it came to pass that, possibly for the first time ever in the history of cricket, play stopped Play…

The Play concerned was due to start at 1.15 in one of the function rooms at the boundary of the ground, but the organizers decided to hold back the start until the session of play (in the cricketing sense) had actually finished. As it happened, the last wicket pair for Yorkshire batted about 7 overs and added 35 runs until Plunkett was run out. Yorkshire’s innings closed at 494 all out. Now the Play could start.

The subject of The Last Match was legendary Yorkshire spin bowler Hedley Verity. I posted about him not long ago so I won’t repeat his life story here, but the point was that the last match he ever played in for Yorkshire (and indeed the last competitive match he ever played in) was the County Championship fixture against Sussex at Hove which took place from August 30th to September 1st 1939. Hence the poem I posted yesterday, which is actually quoted during the play.

The significance of the date September 1st 1939 is that was when German forces began the invasion of Poland, which commenced at 5am UK time. Although Britain did not formally declare war on Germany until 3rd September, the invasion of Poland did lead to various emergency measures being immediately adopted in Britain. One of these was that a plan to evacuate all children of school age from major cities was implemented on that day. On the morning of 1st September the Yorkshire players were told that they should abandon the final day and return home. Verity must have been especially keen to rejoin his family, as he had two young children to think about. Yorkshire had by then already won the County Championship so there wasn’t really that much to play for. However, the players on both sides discussed what to do and decided to play out the match, the main reason being that it was a benefit match for Jim Parks. I’d also suggest that the players probably knew they wouldn’t be playing cricket again for a long time, and wanted to savour the last monents of peaceful normality, much as a condemned man might savour his last cigarette.

It’s probable that the cricketers’ minds were not entirely on the match that day, but what happened was remarkable nevertheless. Sussex had batted first and score 387 all out; Yorkshire managed 392 all out in their first innings. Verity had taken only 2 for 108 off 18 overs in the first innings, which makes the second innings all the more remarkable. Sussex were bowled out for a paltry 33, with Verity the destroyer (6-1-9-7). Yorkshire then knocked off the 30 required to win for the loss of one wicket, and won the match. The Yorkshire players bundled onto their coach and travelled home.

Verity subsequently enlisted in the British Army and, as a Captain in the Green Howards, took part in the invasion of Sicily in 1943. During the Battle for Catania, Verity was ordered to lead his unit in a night attack on a farmhouse occupied by German soldiers. He did so, but he had walked into a trap and they were quickly surrounded. Half his men were killed and he received a bullet in the chest. He died of his wounds in a prisoner of war camp at Caserta, near Naples on July 31st 1943, at the age of 38, but the official telegram informing his family that he had been killed was not sent until some time later; it was dated 1st September 1943..

Apart a brief preamble and some film footage projected at the rear of the stage, most of The Last Match is set in the hospital in which Verity spent his last days and revolves around a conversation between himself (played by Al Barclay) and a fictional character, Francis Watson (played by Daniel Abelson) whose role is to hold a mirror up to Verity. Francis is younger, more cynical and from a wealthier background than Verity who comes across as rather old-fashioned but with a strong sense of personal duty. It only lasts about 35 minutes, but in that short time it touches on a wide range of issues, especially the conflict between freedom and responsibility. It’s a poignant story, well written and acted, although its brevity means that there’s no time to develop the characters fully. It did occur to me watching it that it would work very well as a radio play, and I hear that there has been some discussion of that possibility.

Congratulations to writers Colin Philpott and Kit Monkman for such a thought-provoking piece. It certainly added an interestingly different dimension to a day’s cricket. The production now moves to Yorkshire – it will be at Yorkshire County Cricket Ground, Headingly on 1st September and again on 24th September, and a couple of other venues in between. Do go and see it if you get a chance.

So then it was back to the cricket, sunshine and (I must admit) some beers – Harvey’s mainly! On what seemed to be a good batting wicket, the Sussex batsmen struggled early on against an impressive Yorkshire pace attack (Sidebottom, Bresnan, Plunkett and Patterson; the first three of whom are former England bowlers). Despite numerous appeals, a lot of playing and missing, and more oohs and aahs than you will hear in a Frankie Howerd monologue, openers Ed Joyce and Luke Wells put on 110 for the first wicket before Wells fell to Adil Rashid for 43. A couple of balls later Rashid also dismissed the hapless Machan for a duck. Plunkett trapped Nash lbw for 18 to make it 139-3. Ed Joyce brought up his century with a six off Rashid, and almost immediately departed off the same bowler to make it 175-4, whereupon Sussex sent on a nightwatchman, Oliver Robinson, who was almost out first ball to Rashid but clung on until close of play.

Honours pretty even I’d say at the end of day 2, and this (Sunday) morning’s session having been lost to rain with more bad weather forecast for tomorrow, I suspect this one will be a draw.

So there you have it. War and peace. Life and death. Sussex and Yorkshire. Beer and lovely weather. What more could you want from a day off?

UPDATE: Monday 24th August. Sussex ended day 3 on 493-7 with centuries for Michael Yardy and Ben Brown. No play was possible this morning, the final day, because of heavy rain, so the match does indeed look set to be a draw.

UPDATE to the UPDATE: No play was possible on Monday at all due to rain, so the game did indeed end as a draw.

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Six Spitfires

Posted in History with tags , , , on August 18, 2015 by telescoper

I am indebted to James West for sharing this picture of no fewer than six Supermarine Spitfires seen earlier today over the Solent..

image

Six planes is half a Squadron. Seventy-five summers ago, during the Battle of Britain, such a tiny force would frequently have been scrambled to take on over 100 incoming enemy planes. And not only over the South of England. This day in 1940, August 18th, was a particularly tough one for the RAF and has come to be known as the Hardest Day, with heavy losses on both sides.

I can’t help reflecting upon the fact that the pilots involved in that momentous conflict were not only so few in number, but also so very young. Nineteen or twenty was typical, the same age as the undergraduate students I teach at work.

So few and so young, but without their courage and skill the world would have slipped into unimaginable darkness.

Lest we forget.

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Peterloo 16th August 1819: why it is important to remember

Posted in History on August 16, 2015 by telescoper

A perspective on the Peterloo Massacre, which took place on this day in 1819.

P.S. For those of you unfamiliar with the location of the Peterloo Massacre, it was at St Peters Fields, Manchester (iin the Midlands).

kmflett's avatarKmflett's Blog

Peterloo 16th August 1819- why it is important to remember

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16th August marks the 196th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre at St Peters Field in Manchester.

peterloo

As EP Thompson noted in the Making of the English Working Class Peterloo, even in an age when the internet, mobiles and social media had never been thought of, was an event of national significance.

The numbers of dead and injured when the Manchester Yeomanry rode into a peaceful crowd protesting for the vote has never been finally substantiated, but aside from those killed it ran into hundreds in terms of those who received injuries from sabres or horses hooves.

Peterloo had several lasting impacts. One was the 1832 Reform Act. Another was the Manchester Guardian. The founder of the paper, Taylor, was a persistent critic of the Magistrates actions at Peterloo.

The detail of what took place on St…

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Astronomy: One of the Seven Liberal Arts

Posted in Art, Education, History, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on July 20, 2015 by telescoper

This morning I came across this picture (via @hist_astro on Twitter):

Seven Liberal ArtsIt is by Giovanni dal Ponte and was painted in or around 1435; the original is in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. It depicts the Seven Liberal Arts which, in antiquity were considered the essential elements of the education system. The Arts concerned are: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Astronomy, Arithmetic, Geometry and Music. Appropriately enough, Astronomy is in the middle.

I suspect some of you may have noticed that there are more than seven figures in the painting. That’s because each of the Liberal Arts is itself represented by a (female) figure, presumably a Goddess, and also a famous character associated with the particular discipline. Second from the right, for example, you can see Arithmetic accompanied by Pythagoras, who seems to be trying to copy from her notebook. Astronomy. In the centre, kneeling at the feet of Urania (the muse of Astronomy) is Ptolemy..

It’s quite interesting to look at the structure of a Liberal Arts education as it would be in classical antiquity. The first three subjects (Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectics) formed the Trivium (from which we get the English word “trivial”). “Grammar” means the science of the correct usage of language, knowledge and understanding of which helps a person to speak and write correctly; “Dialectic” basically means “logic”, the science of rational thinking as a means of arriving at the truth; and “Rhetoric” the science of expression, especially persuasion, which includes ways of organizing and presenting an argument so that people will understand and hopefully believe it. These may have been considered trivial in ancient times, but I can’t help thinking that we could do with a lot more emphasis on such fundamental skills in the modern curriculum.

After the Trivium came the Quadrivium: Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music all of which were considered to be disciplines connected with Mathematics. Presumably these are the non-trivial subjects. We might nowadays consider Astronomy to be a mathematical subject – indeed in the United Kingdom astronomy was until relatively recently generally taught in mathematics departments, even after the rise of astrophysics in the 19th Century. On the other hand, fewer would nowadays would recognize music as being essentially mathematical in nature. Historically, however the connections between music, mathematics and natural philosophy were many and profound.

Of course there are now many other disciplines and it would be impossible for any education to encompass all fields of study, but I do think that it’s a shame that modern education systems are so lacking in breadth, as they tend to emphasize the differences between subjects rather than what they all have in common.

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Pluto and the Pavilion

Posted in Biographical, Football, History with tags , , , , , on July 14, 2015 by telescoper

This is a busy week in many ways and for many reasons, but the main activity revolves around Graduation at the University of Sussex; the ceremony for graduates from my School (Mathematical and Physical Sciences) takes place on Thursday which gives me a couple of days to practice the pronunciation of the names I have to read out!

Anyway, last night there was a very Commemoration Dinner in the Dining Room of Brighton Pavilion:

Brighton_Pavilion_Dining_room

The decor is a little understated for my tastes, and in any case I was among a group of about 40 guests who were seated elsewhere owing to the popularity of the event. In fact I was in the Red Drawing Room, which as its name suggests is, er, red:

5_royal_pavilion_red_drawing_room

Anyway, the dinner itself was splendid with particularly fine wine to boot. One of the topics of conversation was the forthcoming flypast of Pluto by the NASA New Horizons spacecraft. As the token astrophysicist on my table I tried my best to answer questions about this event. In fact the closest approach to Pluto takes place about 12.50 pm today (BST) but it will take some time for the images to be downloaded and processed; data transmission rates from the outer edge of the Solar System are rather limited! After passing Pluto, the spacecraft will carry on out of the Solar System into interstellar space. One thing I didn’t know until this morning was that the discoverer of Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, expressed a wish that when he died his ashes should be sent into space. In fact, they are on New Horizons,  being carried past the planet object he found just 85 years ago. I find that very moving, but it’s also so inspiring that such a short time after Pluto was discovered a spacecraft is arriving there to study it. We humans can do great things if we put our minds to them. Science provides us with constant reminders of this inspirational fact. Unfortunately, politics tends to do the opposite…

I hope to provide a few updates with images from New Horizons if I get time. Here to whet your appetite is today’s stunning Astronomy Picture of the Day, showing Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, in the same frame:

PlutoCharon01_NewHorizons_1080

Here’s a close-up of Pluto from yesterday:

Pluto_yesterday

And if that isn’t enough, click here for a simulation of the detail we expect to see when New Horizons reaches its closest approach to Pluto.

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Stonewall and After – in Praise of Drag Queens

Posted in Biographical, History, LGBTQ+ with tags , , , , on June 28, 2015 by telescoper

Despite not being able to go to the big event in London yesterday, it’s been a very memorable Pride Weekend, preceded as it was by the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States of America that the right for same sex couples to get married was protected under the constitution. The White House responded to the judgement in appropriate style:

white-house-rainbow-3

I’m tempted to quote Genesis 9:16, but I won’t.

My facebook and twitter feeds have been filled with rainbows all weekend, as is my wordpress editor page as I write this piece. It’s been great to see so many people, straight and gay, celebrating diversity and equality. Even a Dalek joined in.

Gay Dalek

I’m a bit more cynical about the number of businesses that have tried to cash in on  Pride but even that is acceptance of a sort. It’s all very different from the first Pride March I went on, way back in 1986. That was a much smaller scale event than yesterday’s, and politicians were – with very few exceptions – notable by their absence.

In fact today is the anniversary of the event commemorated by Pride. It was in the early hours of the morning of Saturday June 28th 1969 that the Stonewall Riots took place in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. There are few photographs and no film footage of what happened which, together with some conflicting eyewitness accounts, has contrbuted to the almost mythical status of these demonstations, which were centred on the Stonewall Inn (which, incidentally, still exists).  What is, I think, clear is that they were the spontaneous manifestation of the anger of a community that had simply had enough of the way it was being treated by the police. Although it wasn’t the first such protest in the USA, I still think it is also the case that Stonewall was a defining moment in the history of the movement for LGBT equality.

One of the myths that has grown up around Stonewall is that the Stonewall Inn was a place primarily frequented by drag queens and it was the drag queens who began the fight back against intolerable  police harassment. That was the standard version, but the truth is much more complicated and uncertain that that. Nevertheless, it is clear that it was the attempted arrest of four people – three male (cross-dressers) and one female – that ignited the protest. Whether they led it or not, there’s no doubt that drag queens played a major role in the birth of the gay liberation movement. Indeed, to this day, it remains the case that the “T” part of the LGBT spectrum (which I interpret to include Transgender and Transvestite) is often neglected by the rest of the rainbow.

I have my own reasons for being grateful for drag queens. When I was a youngster (still at School) I occasionally visited a gay bar in Newcastle called the Courtyard. I was under age for drinking alcohol let alone anything else – the age of consent was 21 in those days – but I got a kick out of the attention I received and flirted outrageously without ever taking things any further. I never had to buy my own drinks, let’s put it that way.

Anyway, one evening I left the pub to get the bus home – the bus station was adjacent to the pub – but was immediately confronted by a young bloke who grabbed hold of me and asked if I was a “poof”. Before I could answer, a figure loomed up behind him and shouted “Leave him alone!”. My assailant let go of me and turned round to face my guardian angel, or rather guardian drag queen. No ordinary drag queen either. This one, at least in my memory, was enormous: about six foot six and built like a docker, but looking even taller because of the big hair and high heels. The yob laughed sneeringly whereupon he received the immediate response of a powerful right jab to the point of the chin, like something out of boxing manual. His head snapped back and hit the glass wall of a bus shelter. Blood spurted from his mouth as he slumped to the ground.

I honestly thought he was dead, and so apparently did my rescuer who told me in no uncertain terms to get the hell away. Apart from everything else, the pub would have got into trouble if they’d known I had even been in there. I ran to the next stop where I got a bus straightaway. I was frightened there would be something on the news about a violent death in the town centre, but that never happened. It turns out the “gentleman” concerned had bitten his tongue when the back of his head hit the bus shelter. Must have been painful, but not life-threatening. My sympathy remains limited.

I think there’s a moral to this story, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide what it is.

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