Having recently started a thread about Obama and Churchill which I thought developed rather interestingly, and currently reading a very good book (Finest Years, by Max Hastings) about Churchill, I was amused to hear the following from a friend ...
One wartime morning when Churchill was Prime Minister, and was leading the defiance which Britain then on her own showed towards the Nazis, he retired to the loo in No 10, as we all have to. He had hardly got in there when his valet knocked sharply on the door and said "Prime Minister, Mr Herbert Morrison is here to see you and he says it's urgent".
Morrison, later Deputy Labour Prime Minister, was someone who Churchill particularly despised. So from within the loo came the cry "tell him I can't see him - I can only deal with one sh*t at a time!"
When we lose twenty pounds... we may be losing the twenty best pounds we have! We may be losing the pounds that contain our genius, our humanity, our love and honesty. ~Woody Allen
Is a chocolate muffin loving glitter ball
I should have remembered when making my last post another Churchillism about Attlee: "Mr Attlee is a modest man - indeed he has much to be modest about!"
Attlee was educated at Haileybury College in Hertfordshire, where I sent Harley to school, and it still has an Attlee Room. Haileybury is the successor to the Imperial Services College which was founded in the mid-1800s for the sons of Naval and Army officers who were serving abroad; it was originally at Westward Ho on the North Devon coast and my grandfather was there in the 1880s with Rudyard Kipling. When, in about 1998, I mentioned this to the Bursar at Haileybury he went back into the records and confirmed that R P Molesworth had indeed been there with R Kipling.
I've recently acquired my grandfather's medals, mainly WW1 but including an earlier medal from India, of about 1910. But I once saw in an officers mess a photograph of him from the same period on horseback in front of his Elephant Battery of, probably, 12 pounders - six not-so-little heffalumps all in a row with their guns. When I later tried to acquire it I found that it had been chucked out - aargh! And among his effects are photographs from that time of the then Prince of Wales (later, briefly, Edward VIII) and Lord Louis Mountbatten, posing in front of a tiger which had been shot from a howdah on the back of an elephant - shame, shame, but that's what went on in those days.
Rambling (sorry), having seen those photos when very young, I allowed myself to be convinced that I was going to get a baby elephant for Christmas and it would be kept in the garage. The disappointment still lingers after all these years and having very sadly just lost our lab bitch, aged 13, I may yet get one which we'll keep in Harley's bedroom ...
Tony.
PS. How often has the word howdah appeared, if ever, on RYL - can we check? I'm thinking, Rhueben, of mounting one on my 4x4!
Tony you have any stories about the Royal Sussex Regiment? My fav radio talk show host and psychologist went there.
Haileybury College looks beautiful in pics. Seems like a great college.
The Atlee/Churchill story I was thinking of is this one:
"Winston Churchill entered a men's washroom in the House of Commons one day and, observing Labor leader Clement Attlee standing before the urinal, took up his stance at the opposite end of the room. "Feeling stand-offish today, are we, Winston?" Attlee chirped. "That's right," Churchill replied. "Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it."
When we lose twenty pounds... we may be losing the twenty best pounds we have! We may be losing the pounds that contain our genius, our humanity, our love and honesty. ~Woody Allen
Is a chocolate muffin loving glitter ball
Last Churchill bathroom story (sorry Tony I always like WC jokes and never get to mention them!)
Young man (after seeing Churchill leave the bathroom without washing his hands): At Eton they taught us to wash our hands after using the toilet.
Churchill: At Harrow they taught us not to piss on our hands.
Random, I'm banking on it for Christmas - but Harley doesn't yet know (it'll be a b*gger wrapping it!).
And Jack, I'll investigate what I can about the Royal Sussex. The British Army's infantry regiments were an encyclopedia in their own right; very parochial, very much each a family, and all hugely proud of their own traditions. In pre-WW2 days the officers all knew each other like brothers. Hence when Harley's great-uncle Harley (after whom our Harley is named) was medically boarded and told he would, after 10 years as a regular officer, have to go back to UK and be discharged, he was able to go to a newly promoted CO of the Durhams - whom he'd known in prewar days - and say "for God's sake take me with you" as the battalion was about to go to Halfaya (Hellfire) Pass on the Egyptian/Libyan border.
I have the letter from the CO describing this ("it would be highly irregular - but you can have D Company") and great-uncle Harley duly commanded D Company in the face of Rommel's first advance against Egypt - and was shot fatally as his Company was overrun. It is probable that one of the great advantages of such a "family" system is that under extreme stress and danger no-one wants to be seen a coward in front of their long-standing contemporaries. However I have to say as a Gunner, where such family ties were greatly less existent, I would have been hugely more concerned about what my immediate fellow-soldiers thought about my performance.
But the family fellowship of the British infantry has long been a mainstay of the Army and I suffer for them as our niggardly Treasury, and our hopelessly ignorant politicians, continue to run down our defence capabilities to the point where we are almost incapable of defending anything ...
Oh US is in process of gutting military as well. As the radicals push US further into debt and inflation kicks in I wouldn't be surprised to see military shrink down to almost nothing since US is being intentionally crippled from within. You should see the race rhetoric coming from this admin.
The Royal Sussex Regiment does have a Wiki page. I was just wondering if you ever knew anyone in it
Jack, I can't really add anything much to the wiki page, though a member of my Company at Sandhurst was commissioned into the East Surrey's which was later part of the amalgamation also involving the Royal Sussex.
One thing that does come out of the wiki ref you gave is the appalling casualties suffered by many Regiments in both World Wars. In WW1 many battalions were virtually wiped out in the course of a single morning. In WW2 by the time of D-Day Britain had been at total war for almost 5 years and her manpower resources, which were far outnumbered in the first place by those of the US and the Soviet Union, had been stretched across the three services in France until Dunkirk, North Africa, the battle of the North Atlantic, Italy, India, Burma et al.
The build-up through Normandy after D-Day eventually meant that well over twice as many US troops were involved in the final battle into Western Germany. Some senior American generals criticised the British Army for being over-cautious in the NW Europe campaign, but the Brit generals involved had abiding memories of the slaughter of WW1. And make no mistake, the Brits (and the gallant Canadians) took at least their share of casualties in the often very bitter fighting that took place in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany itself. At one point Britain had to actually disband a formed division of (guessing) 15,000 men in order to provide reinforcements for other divisions which had suffered so many casualties. The US Army, often involved in equally heavy fighting, had enough manpower in Europe to cope, however painfully. And the Soviets had vast manpower, together with huge quantities of tanks and artillery, and could eventually totally overwhelm even the German army - which was arguably man-for-man the best of all the armies involved in WW2. Nor did Stalin give a stuff about the lives of the soldiers he sent into battle; he was utterly ruthless and, provided the outcome of a particular event on the Eastern Front played into his vision of a future communist buffer on the west of the USSR, he didn't care how many of his soldiers died in achieving it.
So, set against all this, the fortunes of one British infantry regiment tend to pale into insignificance! But they were all worthy individuals, no doubt trying to do their best in the formidable circumstances of their time. And let's take our hats off to them! And the Army was made up of such regiments and individuals of that time - no doubt a few cowards, but most trying unselfishly to do their bit!
Tony.
PS. Instead of banging on about boring military history (which was not a little bit boring to those being shot at at the time!) should I next start on perhaps Classic cars (which I can't afford), or just how I'm going to bring up my baby elephant in Harley's bedroom. Or should I just shut up ... ?
