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A Dark Centenary

Posted in History with tags Church of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard on March 13, 2011 by telescoper

Very busy day today, and I’ve been out and about for most of it in the spring sunshine. I just thought I’d keep up my record of posting every day by marking a centenary that falls today. One hundred years ago, on March 13 1911, L. Ron Hubbard was born. I said “marking” rather than “celebrating” because Hubbard was a truly appaling man – a liar, a charlatan, a conman, a drug addict, and an egomaniac – who left a trail of wrecked lives, largely through the sinister Church of Scientology he founded in the 1950s. Purporting to be a “self-help” organisation, it has succeeded only in helping itself to large amounts of money from its gullible victims, much of it subsequently spent silencing its many critics. Let’s see if they have a go at me!

In 1977, the FBI raided the offices of the Church of Scientology and found damning evidence of burglary and conspiracy. Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue, was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Hubbard himself escaped justice by going into hiding. He died in 1986.

If you want to know more about this so-called Church, I suggest you read the book The Scandal of Scientology, all of which is available online here. I also mentioned it in a post last year.

I’ll just point out one particular victim of L Ron Hubbard: his own son, Quentin. A shy and sensitive boy, he took his own life in 1976 aged just twenty-two, no longer able to tolerate his father’s relentless homophobic goading.

I feel pity for those duped into signing up as scientologists – it seems to me such a transparently phoney operation I don’t see how anyone could fall for it – but for Hubbard himself, pity doesn’t come into it. He was monstrous.

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A Census of the Ridiculous

Posted in Bad Statistics, History with tags 2011 Census, health, Religion, Royal Mail, tax on March 12, 2011 by telescoper

My form for the 2011 Census arrived yesterday. Apparently they were all posted out on Monday, so that’s 5 days in the post. Par for the course for the Royal Mail these days. I’m slightly surprised it arrived at all.

There’s a hefty £1000 fine for not completing the Census, so I suppose I’ll fill it in, despite my feeling that it’s both intrusive and unnecessary. What’s worse is that several of the questions are so badly designed that the information resulting will be useless.

For example, according to the census guide:

Very careful consideration is given to the questions included in the census. Questions must meet the needs of a substantial number of users in order that the census is acceptable to the public and yields good quality data. The questions are selected following several rounds of consultation with:

central and local government
academia
health authorities
the business community
groups representing ethnic minorities and others with special interests and concerns

Hang on. The “business community”? Why should they be consulted? What do they want with my personal information? I thought the census data was for planning public services! On the other hand, when everything is privatised maybe all our personal data will be flogged off to the private sector anyway.

The 2011 Census is the first one to include a question on health. According to the saturation advertising about the census, this question will help plan new hospitals and distribute NHS funding. So what is the new question, the answer to which will provide such valuable data? Here it is, together with the possible responses:

13. How is your health in general?

Very good
Good
Fair
Bad
Very Bad

And that’s it for “health”. Does anyone actually believe such a vague question is going to be of any use at all in planning NHS services? I certainly don’t.

And then there’s the famous question about religion.

20. What is your religion?

For a start I don’t think my religion or lack of it should be any concern to the government. To be fair, however, this question is marked as “voluntary” so respondents are allowed not to answer it without getting locked up in the Tower of London. But in any case it’s a leading question and should never have been included in the census in this form anyway. “Do you have a religion and, if so, what is it?” would have been much better.

I could go on, but I’ve got better things to do today.

I’ll just say this last thing about the Census. Most of it clearly has nothing whatever to do with planning public services. In fact the government already holds most of the information about your private circumstances the form demands. The Census is nothing more an opportunity for the government to cross-check tax, benefit or other records in the hope of finding inaccuracies. In other words, Big Brother is watching you.

And the cost of all this snooping? A whopping £500 million, more than double the cost of the 2001 Census, and all of it at a time of huge cuts to public services. You have to laugh, don’t you?

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The Necessity of Atheism

Posted in History, Literature, The Universe and Stuff with tags astronomy, atheism, David Hume, empiricism, Oxford University, Percy Bysshe Shelley, philosophy, Tasso, The Necessity of Atheism on February 15, 2011 by telescoper

In the course of doing a crossword at the weekend, I learnt that the poet Percy Bysse Shelley was sent down from (i.e. kicked out of) Oxford University 200 years ago this month for writing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. He was at University College, in fact. A bit of googling around led me to the full text, which is well worth reading whatever your religious beliefs as it is a fascinating document. I’ll just quote a few excerpts here.

The main body of the tract begins There is No God, but this is followed by

This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.

That’s pretty close to my own view, for what that’s worth.

More interestingly, Shelley goes on later in the work to talk about science and how it impacts upon belief. A couple of sections struck me particularly strongly, given my own scientific interests.

In one he tackles arguments for the existence of God based on Reason:

It is urged that man knows that whatever is must either have had a beginning, or have existed from all eternity, he also knows that whatever is not eternal must have had a cause. When this reasoning is applied to the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created: until that is clearly demonstrated we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design before we can infer a designer. The only idea which we can form of causation is derivable from the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other. In a base where two propositions are diametrically opposite, the mind believes that which is least incomprehensible; — it is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it: if the mind sinks beneath the weight of one, is it an alleviation to increase the intolerability of the burthen?

The other argument, which is founded on a Man’s knowledge of his own existence, stands thus. A man knows not only that he now is, but that once he was not; consequently there must have been a cause. But our idea of causation is alone derivable from the constant conjunction of objects and the consequent Inference of one from the other; and, reasoning experimentally, we can only infer from effects caused adequate to those effects. But there certainly is a generative power which is effected by certain instruments: we cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments” nor is the contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration: we admit that the generative power is incomprehensible; but to suppose that the same effect is produced by an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent being leaves the cause in the same obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible.

He thus reveals himself as an empiricist, a position he later amplifies with a curiously worded double-negative:

I confess that I am one of those who am unable to refuse my assent to the conclusion of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.

This is a philosophy I can’t agree with, but his use of words clearly suggests the young Shelley has been reading David Hume‘s analysis of causation.

Later he turns to the mystery of life and the sense of wonder it inspires.

Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle. What are changes of empires, the wreck of dynasties, with the opinions which support them; what is the birth and the extinction of religious and of political systems, to life? What are the revolutions of the globe which we inhabit, and the operations of the elements of which it is composed, compared with life? What is the universe of stars, and suns, of which this inhabited earth is one, and their motions, and their destiny, compared with life? Life, the great miracle, we admire not because it is so miraculous. It is well that we are thus shielded by the familiarity of what is at once so certain and so unfathomable, from an astonishment which would otherwise absorb and overawe the functions of that which is its object.

Finally, I picked the following paragraph for its mention of astronomy:

If any artist, I do not say had executed, but had merely conceived in his mind the system of the sun, and the stars, and planets, they not existing, and had painted to us in words, or upon canvas, the spectacle now afforded by the nightly cope of heaven, and illustrated it by the wisdom of astronomy, great would be our admiration. Or had he imagined the scenery of this earth, the mountains, the seas, and the rivers; the grass, and the flowers, and the variety of the forms and masses of the leaves of the woods, and the colors which attend the setting and the rising sun, and the hues of the atmosphere, turbid or serene, these things not before existing, truly we should have been astonished, and it would not have been a vain boast to have said of such a man, Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta. But how these things are looked on with little wonder, and to be conscious of them with intense delight is esteemed to be the distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinary person. The multitude of men care not for them.

I think the multitude care just as little 200 years on.

P.S. The quotation is from the 16th Century Italian poet Torquato Tasso; in translation it reads “None deserve the name of Creator except God and the Poet”.

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You didn’t ask, but I’ll tell you anyway…

Posted in History, Politics with tags Alexander the Great, Army of Lovers, Don't ask don't tell, gay, homosexuality, lesbian, Philip II of Macedonia, Sacred Band of Thebes, US Army on December 19, 2010 by telescoper

I just chanced across the news that the United States Senate has voted to repeal the policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. This silly rule required gay servicemen and women to conceal their sexual orientation or risk being kicked out of the services. It was always an awful compromise and I’m glad to see it has been scrapped.

One of the arguments used against allowing gay people to be open about their sexuality while in the armed forces was that this would be “bad for morale”. I’m not quite sure why, but that’s what people say. Perhaps what it means is that a lot of straight military personnel are deeply prejudiced and that it would be bad for morale to have that prejudice challenged.

Until 2000, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence imposed an outright ban on lesbian and gay people serving in the armed forces. However, in 1999 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that ban illegal. Now, at least officially, the MoD has a much more open and inclusive policy. One regularly sees official representation at Gay Pride marches and so on. Indeed, in 2008, General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of the General Staff, said in a speech that

respect for gays, lesbian, bi-sexual and transsexual officers and soldiers was now “a command responsibility” and was vital for “operational effectiveness”

It would have been hard to imagine even ten years ago that a senior officer in the British Army would make such a statement. I’m sure openly gay soldiers still have a pretty tough time in the army, but we’re heading in the right direction. Times have changed.

But all this is perhaps not as new as you might think.

I’m now going to bore you with a bit of history that might surprise you. The elite division of the Theban army in the 4th Century BC was an outfit called the Sacred Band of Thebes. This consisted of about 300 men, hand-picked for their courage and fighting skill. Or not so much 300 men, but 150 same-sex (male) couples; this was the legendary Army of Lovers. Obviously there wasn’t any need for “don’t ask, don’t tell” in ancient Thebes.

The inspiration for this special unit derived from Plato who, in the Symposium, said

And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their beloved, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other’s side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger?

Initially the members of the Sacred Band were scattered among the rest of the soldiers, in order to raise morale (!), but later on they were all united in a single fighting division, the “special forces” of the Theban army. They were responsible for several famous victories, including the Battle of Leuctra which established Theban independence from Spartan rule.

But brave and steadfast though they were, they eventually met an adversary that even they couldn’t withstand. At the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC they fought an army led by Philip II of Macedonia one of whose generals was his son, a young man by the name of Alexander. The Macedonian army had a new infantry tactic that gave it the edge over all armies of its age. This was the phalanx, a large but tightly bunched and highly disciplined group of soldiers with interlocking shields and bristling with spears, which was impervious to cavalry and archery alike. A few years later when Alexander became King of Macedonia and set off on his journey to Greatness, the phalanx continued to be the mainstay of his army and it allowed him to defeat huge forces at least five or six times the size of his own.

At Chaeronea the fearsome phalanx made mincemeat of the rank and file of the Theban army. In the face of the Macedonian onslaught, the Sacred Band stood its ground to the last, but their resistance was futile. At the end of the battle, their corpses were found piled one on top of the other. They hadn’t given an inch, but all had died where they had stood. The Army of Lovers was no more.

In about 300 BC the citizens of Thebes erected a memorial to the Sacred Band where they had been buried, with full military honours, by Philip II’s soldiers, at the spot where they had fallen. When this was excavated in 1890, 254 skeletons were found, neatly arranged in rows.

The point I’m trying to make with this bit of ancient history is that our attitudes to sexuality are not built in. They’re all formed by social conventions. In fact, bisexuality was quite normal in Ancient Greece, so nobody had any reason to think of homosexuality as some kind of “otherness” that could be a focus of discrimination. Alexander the Great himself had relationships with both men and women and, although he was clearly a megalomaniac and not at all a nice person, he was undeniably rather good at being a soldier.

There’s therefore no reason why gays and lesbians shouldn’t serve with distinction in the army, or anywhere else for that matter. The problem’s not with them, but with the rest of you.

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Observances

Posted in Biographical, History with tags armistice day on November 11, 2010 by telescoper

Just for the record, I sneaked back to my office a little early from this morning’s coffee break, closed the door, and at 11am precisely stood alone for the two minutes’ silence that marks Armistice Day. Cardiff University organised a collective Act of Remembrance in which the two minutes’ silence was preceded by prayers and to which all staff and students were invited. I am, however, not a Christian and the religious dimension means nothing to me, so I did what I prefer to do as long as circumstances permit and marked the occasion on my own.

As I stood in my office looking out over the road, I could see a small group of young people, presumably students, standing outside in silence with their heads bowed. I don’t really understand why but a solitary tear fell from my eye as I watched them.

At 11.02 I went back to work.

Lest we forget.

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To the Warmongers

Posted in History, Poetry, Politics with tags Poppy, Remembrance Sunday, Siegfried Sassoon, World War I on November 8, 2010 by telescoper

As we approach Remembrance Sunday (which this year lies on 14th November) I find myself once again wearing a poppy on my coat lapel, and having once again to explain this to those I meet in the department and elsewhere who don’t approve. I’ve already said everything I think I need to on this in posts last year and the year before, so I won’t repeat myself at length here.

I am aware (and acutely sensitive to) the danger that the wearing of a poppy might be mistaken for support for militarism and that many of our politicians would like to manipulate the meaning of this symbol in precisely that way for their own ends. Nevertheless, I will wear one and will observe the two minutes’ silence on Thursday too. Why? Lest we forget, that’s why…

But instead of debating this again, I will post the following poem and letter, both of which were written by Siegfried Sassoon.

The poem is called the To the Warmongers:

I’m back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
Secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.
Young faces bleared with blood,
Sucked down into the mud,
You shall hear things like this,
Till the tormented slain
Crawl round and once again,
With limbs that twist awry
Moan out their brutish pain,
As for the fighters pass them by.
For you our battles shine
With triumph half-divine;
And the glory of the dead
Kindles in each proud eye.
But a curse is on my head,
That shall not be unsaid,
And the wounds in my heart are red,
For I have watched them die.

The astonishing letter below was written by Siegfried Sassoon in July 1917, and was subsequently read out in the House of Commons. Sassoon narrowly escaped court martial for treason.

It’s worth noting the last two paragraphs:

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realise.

The tragedy is that these words could equally well have been written about Afghanistan 2010 rather than France or Belgium 1917. The sight of Tony Blair wearing a poppy at the Cenotaph is one that filled me with nausea, but his hypocrisy makes it more, not less, important to hang on to the true meaning. Lest we forget. Nowadays, though, I don’t really “wear my poppy with pride”, but with something rather closer to shame.

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Thatcher’s Final Victory?

Posted in History, Politics, Science Politics with tags Comprehensive Spending Review, Golgafrincham, Margaret Thatcher, Winter of Discontent on October 16, 2010 by telescoper

Next Wednesday (20th October) we will hear the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review, and what it means for the scale of the cuts to UK public spending in each of the government departments. After that the detailed breakdown of cuts within each Ministry will gradually be revealed. Some news has already leaked out, of course. The Browne Report published last week almost certainly heralds huge cuts in the state subsidy to the UK University sector, with the cost of Higher Education consequently shifting from the taxpayer to the student. On top of that, and despite the best efforts of the Science is Vital campaign, it seems highly likely that there will be a steep decrease in investment in scientific research – both through the Research Councils and through the research component of Higher Education funding. On the other hand, the defence budget appears to have been spared the worst of the hatchet, with the Trident nuclear submarine programme set to go ahead (with a price tag around £25 billion) and two new aircraft carriers to be built at a cost of £5.5 billion (although it is not clear there will actually be any aircraft to operate from them).

Obviously, knowledge and learning are less important to the future of this country than the ability to fight pointless wars against invented enemies. Morover, we already spend more than most competitor economies on defence as a fraction of GDP, and less on universities and science. How did we end up with such distorted priorities?

On top of these cuts we have to contend with a draconian cap on immigration. New restrictions on visas for non-EU citizens will make it much harder for British universities to recruit overseas students and staff. The new rules give exemptions only to those coming to the UK to take up highly paid jobs, such as professional footballers. Postdoctoral researchers and university lecturers don’t get paid enough to register as economically relevant, so many fewer will be able to enter this country. While these restrictions may satisfy xenophobic Daily Mail readers, they promise to damage the University sector almost as much as the funding cuts, as a significant fraction of the best staff in UK science departments are from outside the EU (including the two winners of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics).

All this sounds depressingly familiar to those of us who lived through the various Thatcher governments and their successors. In fact, looking at the following graph (which I nicked from Andy Lawrence’s blog, but which comes from a document produced by the Royal Society) you’ll see the steady reduction in science investment under previous Conservative governments

I know I’m not alone in interpreting these cuts as not being about the need to secure the country’s finances. The UK’s public debt as a fraction of GDP is rising, of course, and something needs to be done about it. But this graph shows the actual situation:

Serious? Yes, but not sufficient to justify the carnage we’re about to experience.

What is going on is that the parlous state of the UK’s finances is being used as a pretext to resume the Thatcherite attack on the welfare state through a campaign of privatisations and closures so that wealthy Tory voters can get richer at the expense of ordinary working people.

No doubt there will be people reading this who really think that cutting back state expenditure is a good thing, and even I agree with that to some extent. However, there is a part of Thatcher’s legacy that is actually the root of the problem and it represents a fundamental inconsistency of the Thatcher project. Unless it is tackled, the cut-and-burn route will not lead to a sustainable economy, but will take this country into inexorable decline.

The nub of the matter is the Invasion of the Bean Counters into every aspect of public life. The breakdown of trust between government and the public sector that ushered in Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the 1979 General Election has led to a huge increase in red tape involved in the assessment, regulation and general suffocation of public services. As the Thatcher project continued through John Major’s, and, yes, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments (Blair was undoubtedly a Thatcherite) any rises in public spending went not into providing better services but in a vast and unwieldly machinery of regulation. Now it matters less whether the public sector does things well. What matters is that they tick the boxes imposed by civil service mandarins. This mentality has led to a proliferation of overpaid administrators in the National Health Service, schools are hamstrung by the rigid constraints of the National Curriculum, the Police spend more time filling in forms than they do investigating crime, and the number of staff employed in university administration has increased at the expense of teaching and learning.

You might say that this is all the fault of New Labour, but I don’t think that’s right; the suffocation of the UK’s public sector began with Thatcher and it began as a direct result of the Winter of Discontent (a re-run of which seems eminently possible). The reason why a succession of right-wing governments have failed to get a grip on public spending is that they’ve all been run by control freaks and have pumped money into wasteful self-serving bureaucracies.

Britain has turned into a version of Golgafrincham, with the “useless third” now in the position of wielding the axe over those few remaining things in the UK which are actually pretty good.

Apparently, Margaret Thatcher is not in very good health and may not live much longer. I won’t mourn her passing. In Thatcher’s time in office, this country took giant steps towards becoming a police state. She encouraged xenophobia and intolerance, and spawned the generation of small-minded money-grabbing lizards who now occupy the Government benches. As Britain turns into a wilderness of cashable things once more, it looks like she might be set for her final victory.

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The Ladies of Llangollen

Posted in History, Poetry with tags Llangollen, Plas Newydd, William Wordsworth on September 19, 2010 by telescoper

I was doing the crossword in the Times Literary Supplement this morning and one of the clues triggered only a distant memory which I had to check via the fount of all wisdom that is Google. The clue referred to a “Vale of Friendship” which I’d vaguely remembered seeing in a poem by William Wordsworth. Anyway, I was right in remembering the origin of the phrase, but I accidentally found out a lot more about the context as well and thought I’d share it here.

In fact there’s an entire wikipedia page devoted to the Ladies of Llangollen, so there’s no need to reproduce it all here. However, for the sake of you who haven’t heard of them, they were Lady Eleanor Charlotte Butler and the Honourable Sarah Ponsonby. They were of Anglo-Irish extraction and had been brought up just a few miles from each other in Ireland. They met in 1768 and immediately hit it off together. They ran off together to avoid being forced into unwanted marriage, and moved to Wales in order to set up home at Plas Newydd, near Llangollen in Denbighshire, in 1780.

They lived together for the best part of 50 years in Plas Newydd, in relative seclusion, devoting their time to private studies of literature and languages and improving their estate, comprehensively redesigning the house in a Gothic style, and adding a superb garden. They did not actively socialise and town-dwellers of Llangollen seem to have regarded them as eccentrics, simply referring to them as “The Ladies”.

Gradually, their life attracted the interest of the outside world. Their house became a haven for all manner of visitors, mostly writers such as Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Shelley, Byron and Scott, but also the military leader Duke of Wellington and industrialist Josiah Wedgwood; aristocratic novelist Caroline Lamb, who was born a Ponsonby, came to visit too. Even travellers from continental Europe had heard of the couple and came to visit them, for instance Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, the German nobleman and landscape designer who wrote admiringly about them.

The story of the “romantic friendship” between these two ladies is both charming and moving, but it’s also fascinating to learn how their lifestyle was accepted and even celebrated by wider society. One might have thought their relationship would have been regarded as scandalous by their contemporaries, rather than being widely admired as it turned out to be. One is tempted to assume that their “marriage” had a sexual dimension, which it may well have done, but it could have been a platonic, yet still romantic, friendship. As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t really matter; what I find inspiring about them is that they dared to be different.

Anyway, here is the beautiful sonnet that William Wordsworth wrote after meeting the Ladies of Llangollen in 1824, although I believe the Ladies took exception to the description of their magnificent house as a “low-roofed cot”!

A stream, to mingle with your favourite Dee,
Along the vale of meditation flows;
So styled by those fierce Britons, pleased to see
In Nature’s face the expression of repose;
Or haply there some pious hermit chose
To live and die, the peace of heaven his aim;
To whom the wild sequestered region owes
At this late day, its sanctifying name.
Glyn Cafaillgaroch, in the Cambrian tongue,
In ours, the Vale of Friendship, let ‘this’ spot
Be named; where, faithful to a low-roofed Cot,
On Deva’s banks, ye have abode so long;
Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,
Even on this earth, above the reach of Time!

21 Comments »

Postscript: The Bombing of Alnmouth

Posted in Biographical, History with tags Alnmouth, World War II on August 7, 2010 by telescoper

I realised late last night that, in writing yesterday’s account of the air raid on North-East England in August 1940, I had forgotten to mention the reason why I started reading about this particular event. I think it might be interesting to a few people so have decided to put up a short postscript today.

My Uncle George, my late father’s older brother, lives in the picturesque coastal village of Alnmouth in Northumberland. It’s a lovely little place, not far from the market town of Alnwick (which in 2002 was voted the best place to live in Britain by Country Life magazine; it’s always been popular with the huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ crowd). The countryside around is spectacularly beautiful and full of historical interest; Alnwick Castle is particularly interesting. Alnmouth itself is a small port, with a number of splendid pubs and places to eat, and is well worth a visit if you’re in the area. In fact, I intend to move to that part of the world when I retire (if I live that long).

Anyway, Uncle George lives in Argyle Street in the centre of Alnmouth but I was quite surprised to see that the street has a few modern dwellings when virtually every property in the town is quite old, most of the others being of traditional stone construction like so many houses in Northumberland. It turns out that Argyle Street was bombed during World War II and that the new houses were built to replace several that had been destroyed.

It seemed strange to me that the Luftwaffe would bother bombing a tiny place like Alnmouth, so I decided to see what I could find out about the event. Knowing a little about the huge raid I described yesterday, I assumed that it might have been a German bomber involved in that particular raid, jettisoning its load in order to evade an RAF fighter. So I found as many books as I could and started reading about the Battle of Britain, which I found fascinating. Hence yesterday’s post.

However, it turns out that the bombing of Alnmouth in fact took place over a year later, on Saturday 8th November, 1941 at 19.20:

Two bombs on Alnmouth Village; one on a house in Argyle Street, the other in the roadway (a cul-de-sac). People trapped – still digging for four adults and three children believed buried. Later – five missing presumed dead, two died in hospital and twenty were injured. The bodies of a woman identified, also that of a man believed to be a Major Hawkes. Another woman’s body recovered later. Three houses demolished, eleven uninhabitable and many others damaged badly.

The bombs killed seven people, in fact; one man and six women. It was clearly a traumatic event for the people of the village and one which has left a scar to this day.

At that time in the evening in November it would have been dark, and it is thought that the bombing must have resulted from a failure to maintain the wartime blackout that was usually strictly enforced. Initially the blame was attached to two buses at terminus in Argyle Street whose headlights were thought to be reflecting in the water.

It’s still not clear what this plane actually was or what it was doing there on its own. It might have been on a reconnaissance mission, although that seems unlikely given that it was dark and would have been dark for some time; the sun would have sets around 16.15 at that time of year in Alnmouth, three hours before the bombs were dropped. It is more likely to have been part of a larger raid going elsewhere that noticed a light and went for what they call “a target of opportunity”.

PS. Almnouth is just a few miles North of Acklington, which featured prominently in yesterday’s post.

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The Day the War came to Tyneside

Posted in Biographical, History with tags 1940, Acklington, Battle of Britain, Chain Home, Kenton, Newcastle, RAF, Royal Air Force, Spitfire on August 6, 2010 by telescoper

We’re now approaching the 70th anniversary of August 15th 1940, the day that most historians regard as the start of the Battle of Britain. There had been a great deal of aerial combat, especially over the English Channel, in the weeks following the fall of France and the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940, but August 15th was the day when the German Luftwaffe initiated a series massive daytime raids aimed at knocking out Britain’s air defences. Over the following weeks they nearly succeeded. It was only an erroneous change of tactics by the Luftwaffe, away from targetting the airfields and towards the terror bombing of cities, that gave the Royal Air Force time to recover from the punishment it had been taking. Eventually, by late September 1940, the threat of invasion, which at one point appeared imminent, had finally subsided.

I’m sure there will be many commemorations of the Battle of Britain over the next week or so, in which tributes will be paid to the few of The Few that survive to this day and, of course, those that gave their lives in the momentous struggle which happened all those years ago. There will be much talk of famous places such as Kenley, Northolt and Biggin Hill, key sector airfields for 11 Group, responsible for defending London and the South East, which were under massive attack on August 15th and over the following days and weeks.

But it wasn’t just the South-East that was attacked on August 15th 1940. An enormous incoming raid from the North of France was met by Spitfires and Hurricanes of 10 Group and a terrifying dogfight involving about 200 aircraft brewed up over Portland. Further North, 12 Group’s defences were probed by bombers flying from Denmark intent on destroying airfields in Yorkshire.

And then there was 13 Group, which was charged with the task of defending Scotland and the North-East of England. The map below (courtesy of the RAF website) shows the location of their principal airfields and radar installations in 1940. The Operations HQ for 13 Group, RAF Newcastle, was in Kenton, not far from the location of what is now Newcastle Airport. In fact I cycled past the place countless times when I used to work at Cramlington without knowing what it was. Then it was opened to the public for a time and all the maps, charts and telephones were still there. I felt a distinct shudder when I saw it.

I’ve always been fascinated by history. I read a lot of books about it and in Britain you’re never very far from the site of some historical event, perhaps a castle or the site of a bloody battle. Whenever I travel I also try to visit places of historical interest. Reading is fine, but there’s no subsitute for being there and seeing it for yourself.

It’s quite a different matter when history comes after you rather than you going to find it. The idea that such a familiar place (to me) as Kenton could have been so central to the epic struggle that was the Battle of Britain brings it home that the things we take for granted haven’t always been so secure. When I was a kid growing up in Newcastle, Biggin Hill seemed to me as distant as Dunkirk or El Alamein, but the idea of German planes flying over such places as the Farne Islands and Tynemouth is something that still gives me the shivers. I’m sure the people of Iraq felt the same way about the American and British planes that bombed their country during the two Gulf Wars…

I’ve therefore decided to post the following short account of some of what happened on August 15th 1940 in my own neck of the woods, partly because of what I said in the previous paragraph and partly because the numerical facts are are pretty representative of the situation all around the country on that day seventy years ago. I got the details from a book called The Narrow Margin by Derek Wood and Derek Dempster, and you can find a more complete report here where there is a full account of every day’s action during the Battle of Britain.

For a start it appears that the Luftwaffe thought that most of Britain’s fighter defences were committed to the South. They were probably aware of the effectiveness of the long-range Radio Direction Finding (RDF, now known as radar) network known as Chain Home, but disregarded it because they thought there would not be many planes around to intercept them even if they were detected. The raid over Tyneside was despatched from Stavanger in Norway and flew in a roughly south-westerly direction across the North Sea.

At 12.08, RDF trackers began to plot the path of a formation of “twenty plus” incoming aircraft opposite the Firth of Forth at a range of over 90 miles. As the raid drew closer, the estimated number was revised up to thirty, in three sections, approaching from the North-East and heading SW towards Tynemouth.

The radar operators of 13 Group hadn’t had as much practice as their colleagues further south in 11 Group, which probably accounts for the difficulty they had in estimating the number of incoming planes. Nevertheless, with a full hour’s warning, the controller was able to put squadrons in excellent positions to attack, with 72 Squadron Spitfires in the path of the enemy off the Farne Islands and 605 Squadron over Tyneside. Nos 79 and 607 were also put up, but while the latter was in the path of the raid, No. 79 was initially too far north.

No. 72 Squadron from Acklington was the first to make contact, seaward of the Farne Islands. Closing rapidly with the incoming aircraft, it came as a distinct shock when the “thirty” materialised as sixty-five Heinkel 111s and thirty-four Messerschmidt-110s (or ME110s for short), i.e. almost a hundred aircraft. The RAF squadron facing them comprised a mere 11 Spitfires.

When I first read the numbers involved I could hardly believe them. Imagine being outnumbered almost ten to one, but knowing that you had no choice but to attack. Reading through the RAF daily reports makes it clear that these odds were by no means unusual. Time and time again during August 1940, a squadron or half a squadron would be scrambled to meet inbound formations of 100-plus aircraft. Although the RAF pilots were both brave and skillful, facing such an overwhelming weight of numbers against them it was inevitable that the attrition rate would be high. It was the steady loss of pilots, rather than planes shot down, that almost brought the RAF to its knees.

The only chance of an effective defence a small group of fighters could offer was to scatter the massed formation by attacking from the front, trying to disrupt them so much that they would not find their targets inland. That was the plan anyway; it didn’t always work. In the absence of a Squadron-Leader, 72 Squadron was led by Flight-Lieutenant Edward Graham, who, as it turned out that day, led one of the most spectacularly successful air combats of the War.

Thirty miles off the coast, the squadron sighted the enemy. As the RDF stations had predicted, the Germans were flying in three formations – the bombers ahead and the fighters in two waves stepped up to the rear. Misled by the supplementary fuel tanks slung below their wings, which looked like bombs, Graham and his pilots took the closer wave for Junkers 88 bombers whereas they were in fact (twin-engined) ME110s of the fighter escort.

The incoming formation was so vast in comparison with Graham’s small force that he hesitated for a moment, uncertain at what point and from what direction to attack. Apparently unable to bear the suspense, one of his pilots asked him whether he had seen the enemy aircraft. With a stutter which was habitual, but which deteriorated in times of stress, he replied

Of course I’ve seen the b-b-b-bastards, I’m trying to w-w-w-work out what to do.

The reply was to became famous throughout Fighter Command. I don’t blame him for stuttering. If it had been me I would have been filling my pants.

But he didn’t hesitate for long. The Spitfires had had plenty of time to gain height during their long flight from the coast, and were about three thousand feet above the enemy’s mean height. Making the most of his advantage, he decided to lead the squadron in a deliberate frontal attack, diving out of the Sun to achieve maximum surprise. Each pilot was free to choose his own target. Two-thirds attacked bombers or supposed bombers, the remaining third the second wave of fighters, correctly identified as ME110s.

The attack was startlingly effective and caused widespread panic among the German planes whose pilots had been told not to expect that much opposition. Jettisoning their external tanks, some of the ME110s formed a defensive circle, while others dived almost to sea level and were last seen heading East. The bombers, less an indeterminate number destroyed by Graham’s squadron, then split into two formations, each accompanied by some of the remaining fighters. One formation headed for Tyneside, apparently with the intention of bombing the sector station at Usworth; the rest turned South-East towards two aerodromes at Linton on Ouse and Dishforth which they had been ordered to attack. Some of them jettisoned their bombs and headed back to Norway, leaving several of their number in the sea.

The separate parts of the remaining formation finally reached the coast, one near Acklington and the other south of Sunderland. The first formation, engaged successively by the remaining (No. 79) squadron from Acklington, the triple-A batteries defending the Tyne area, and some Hurricanes of 605 Squadron which had come south from Scotland, dropped most of their bombs in the sea. The second, engaged by a squadron of Spitfires from Catterick, a Hurricane squadron from Usworth and the anti-aircraft artillery from the Tees batteries, dropped theirs almost as ineffectively near Sunderland and Seaham Harbour.

Overall, backed by the guns of the 7th Anti-Aircraft Division under Major-General R.B. Pargiter, 13 Group’s aircraft destroyed at least eight Heinkels and seven 110s without suffering a single casualty themselves, although several civilians were killed by bombs and there was considerable damage on the ground, including a few airfields. It is known that, in addition to the enemy losses reported during this period, many German aircraft struggled back to their bases with battle damage and some were written off after crash-landings.

This was one of the most successful actions fought during the entire Battle of Britain and its effect was that that 13 Group met no further daylight raids for the duration. However, it was just one episode in a struggle that became increasingly desperate as the summer of 1940 dragged on. As I said at the start, the defences of 11 Group came particularly close to breaking point, but eventually recovered and the expected invasion never materialised.

The rest, as they say, is history…

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In the Dark