Appeal for information regarding 1913 suffragette bombing of Edinburgh Royal Observatory

In something of an unintended coincidence, just after I posted an article describing the life of Williamina Paton Fleming, a Scottish woman who travelled to Boston and became a female astronomer, famous for identifying and classifying the Horsehead Nebula, the BBC published an appeal for information regarding the suffragette bombing of Edinburgh Royal Observatory in 1913.

Plea over Edinburgh Royal Observatory suffragette bomb mystery

In a further coincidence, Williamina Paton Fleming died on May 21, 1911, two years to the day after the bombing.

Although I could not have known the BBC was going to publish its appeal, I had noted how, for the time, it was an unusual achievement for a woman to have become not only an astronomer, but to have become a noted astronomer.

I’m not sure how much of Willimaina’s success was a result of being in America, rather than Britain where, in 1913, the suffragettes began a campaign of destruction driven by the Women’s Social and Political Union and led by Mrs Emily Pankhurst and her daughter, which included a firebomb attack on the grandstand of Ayr Race Course. They also set fire to important buildings such as Leuchars Railway Station, and the Whitekirk in East Lothian.

According to the BBC article:

The bomber was never caught following the blast that shattered windows, splintered floors and cracked stone on the observatory’s tower on 21 May 1913.

The bomb, a jar with gunpowder, exploded at 01:00 when nobody was inside to be injured.

Blood, a ladies’ handbag and a note were found at the scene.

Scrawled in ink on a scrap of paper was the phrase: “How beggarly appears argument before defiant deed. Votes for women.”

Dr John Davies, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, told the BBC Scotland news website: “The bomber, or bombers, were never caught so we don’t know anything about them, but if any of their grandchildren are still in Edinburgh, we’d love to meet them and find out more so we can update the display in our visitor centre.”

…

Mrs Pankhurst said about the WSPU’s activities: “We don’t intend that you should be pleased.” The then Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Ralph Sampson, certainly was not.

He described the attack as “an outrage”.

Nobody was ever charged with the attack.

At the time, the observatory only employed men.

Today, the current director of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, which runs the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, is Prof Gillian Wright.

A piece of the jar used in the bomb is on display at Edinburgh Royal Observatory.

The Royal Observatory, Edinburgh

The Royal Observatory, Blackford Hil © kim traynor via geograph

Williamina Paton Fleming – Scottish astronomer « Secret Scotland

Luxury cars stolen on my doorstep

I pass the Sherwood Garage on a daily basis, and usually see at least one offering that catches my eye, although I have to admit that the trend for Chelsea Tractors has lessened that occurrence in recent years. But the remaining stock is generally from the more upward end of the car food chain, and even the exotic on occasion. A few years ago, it even got some of my business when a fairly rare car showed up in the lot. And in a strange turn of events, I even have a set of architect’s plans for the site, from the days when it was a real garage, and sold petrol.

These days, I just like to walk past (note, walk) and watch out for the occasional Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bentley, Rolls, or similar toy that appears in the yard, as they seem to have access to just about anything, regardless of price.

Unfortunately, when I browsed the news this morning, the news was not so good, with an overnight raid seeing six cars taken from the yard at some time between 11 pm Sunday night and 1 am Monday morning.

Luxury cars stolen in Glasgow garage raid

Sherwood Garage, Baillieston, has cars stolen in £80,000 raid | News | Glasgow | STV

The vehicles taken were: a Jaguar X Type, black Porsche Boxster, a black Porsche Cayenne, a silver Audi S3, a black Ford Focus ST, and a blue Ford, which police said were valued between £75,000 and £80,000.

That shows they were after the easy to move stuff, as there are often single cars sitting there that with that price on their windscreen, but they are easy to spot, and more specialised.

I suppose the disappointing thing is to have something like this happen on what amounts to your own doorstep, rather than somewhere far away.

Anyone with information relating to the theft from the used car garage is asked to call Shettleston Police Office on 0141 532 4800.

The reports suggest the thieves broke into the office where the keys were kept, and this is something that has had me puzzled for years, more so when the keys are now generally paired to the cars, and immobilisers and/or alarms are standard, and reasonably effective to all but an “expert”. The downside of this success is that thefts now begin not with breaking into the car, but breaking into the garage (or home) first, to get the keys. When I’ve been at such places and checking or buying a car, I’ve never understood the logic that has most of them with the keys hanging on boards on the wall, meaning that it does not take a great deal of thought to work out the easiest way to steal cars from the forecourt. Not putting them in a safe, or taking them off-site seems lax, and almost an invitation.

I was also amused by the Police statement where Detective Constable Graham Harries said:

There is a local bar, close to the garage and I am appealing to anyone who may have been in the pub or in the area around the time of the theft.

It’s possible people came outside to smoke a cigarette and may have seen activity at the garage. I am appealing to anyone who has any information or knowledge to get in touch with us.

Many years ago I had the “good luck” to be rammed from behind by a kid in his shiny new turbo Fiesta, while I was waiting to turn right almost outside the pub door. I’d been watching the kid in my rear view mirror, and he was doing anything but looking where he was going, or paying attention to the road as he was having a good laugh with his mate in the passenger seat, and I had really hoped for a break in the oncoming traffic to get out of his way. But there was no gap, and when he arrived where I was waiting, he was still looking at his mate and laughing.

Despite happening at the door of the pub, not one of the guys who had been downing their pints there saw a thing when I asked.

Williamina Paton Fleming – Scottish astronomer

Every morning I receive a daily feed of significant “things” for the day, and every morning I generally dismiss it all as irrelevant tripe, as a search of the text generally reveals every item that might be of interest turns out to be about a footballer, baseball player, or unknown band member who happens to be called “Scott” or similar, and is usually an American as well.

This morning, however, there was something interesting in the list. And I almost missed it, but for spotting the word astronomer beside an obituary carrying a woman’s name.

A Scottish astronomer, and a successful female Scottish astronomer at that, from the days when women were frowned upon if they tried to do anything other than get married, keep house, and bear children.

Williamina Paton Fleming

Willamena Paton Fleming

Williamina Paton Fleming was born in Dundee on May 15, 1857, to Robert and Mary (née Walker) Stevens.

Her education took place in the public schools of Dundee.

She married James Orr Fleming, and moved to America, where the family settled in Boston, and needing to support herself, Williamina became a copyist and computer at Harvard College Observatory in 1181. It is also said that she worked as a maid in the home of Professor Edward Charles Pickering, who became frustrated with his male assistants at the observatory and, according to legend, declared that his maid could do a better job, and hired her to do clerical work there. She would eventually be placed in charge of dozens of women hired to do mathematical classifications, and edit the observatory’s publications.

She devised and helped implement a system of classifying stars by assigning them a letter according to how much hydrogen could be observed in their spectra. ‘A’ had the most hydrogen, ‘B’ the next most, and so on. Later, another woman – Annie Jump Cannon – would improve and simplify the system, using temperature as the criteria.

In nine years, Fleming catalogued some 10,351 stars which went on to be published as the Henry Draper Catalogue. During her work she discovered 59 gaseous nebulae, more than 310 variable stars, and 10 novae, by noting the presence of bright lines within their spectra. In 1907, she published a list of 222 variable stars which had been discovered in the course of her work.

In 1888, She discovered the Horsehead Nebula on Harvard plate B2312, describing the bright nebula (later known as IC 434) as having “a semicircular indentation 5 minutes in diameter 30 minutes south of Zeta [Orionis].” William Henry Pickering (Edward’s brother), who had taken the photograph, speculated that the spot was dark obscuring matter.

But, all subsequent articles and books seem to have denied both Fleming and WH Pickering the credit for the discovery. Fleming’s name was absent from the list of objects which were then discovered by Harvard, and JLE Dreyer, who compiled first Index Catalogue, merely attribute the entry to “Pickering”, which most readers of the time would have assumed to mean EC Pickering, then director of Harvard College Observatory.

However, by the time the second Index Catalogue was issued by Dreyer in 1908, Fleming (and others at Harvard) had become famous enough to receive proper credit for later object discoveries… but not for her earlier observation of IC 434 and the Horsehead Nebula.

Recognition

In 1899, Fleming was given the title of Curator of Astronomical Photographs.

In 1906, she was made an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, the first American woman to be so elected, and was soon after appointed honorary fellow in astronomy of Wellesley College.

She was also a member of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America, and the Société astronomique de France.

Shortly before her death, the Astronomical Society of Mexico awarded her the Guadalupe Almendaro medal for her discovery of new stars.

Personal life

Although dedicated to her work, Williamina Fleming enjoyed a full domestic life at home as well, and had a son, Edward P Fleming, who graduated as a mining engineer from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1901, and was employed as the chief metallurgist of a large copper company in Chile. She was also an ardent supporter of the Harvard eleven, and followed their games to the stadium.

Publications

Her publications included A Photographic Study of Variable Stars (1907), and Spectra and Photographic Magnitudes of Stars in Standard Regions (1911).

Brief illness and death

She had suffered poor health for a number of years, but her enthusiasm for her work had maintained her.  However,  feeling unwell at the start of May 1911, she went into hospital to rest, where her condition was found to be critical. She developed pneumonia, which proved fatal, and she died in Boston on May 21, 1911.

Coincidences

Just days after I put this article together, the BBC published an appeal for information relating to the bombing of Edinburgh Royal Observatory. A suffragette protest of the time:

Information on the mystery bomber who 100 years ago attacked the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh during a suffragette campaign is being sought.

The bomber was never caught following the blast that shattered windows, splintered floors and cracked stone on the observatory’s tower on 21 May 1913.

The bomb, a jar with gunpowder, exploded at 01:00 when nobody was inside to be injured.

Blood, a ladies’ handbag and a note were found at the scene.

Scrawled in ink on a scrap of paper was the phrase: “How beggarly appears argument before defiant deed. Votes for women.”

Plea over Edinburgh Royal Observatory suffragette bomb mystery

The action took place in 1913, only two years after Williamina’s death, confirming our opening observation about attitudes to women at the time.

As well as the timing of the article, there is a second coincidence in the date of the attack, May 21, the same as Williamina’s death, albeit two years later, in 1913.

European architecture award for Riverside

I’m tending to avoid stories that are adequately covered in the mainstream news, unless they’re worthy of special mention, or likely to be missed by those who avoid mainstream news. It’s all pretty glum and grim, and often pathetic as worn out hacks try to keep their jobs by sensationalising everything in an attempt to curry favour with their editors, and keep their jobs for another week.

However, the story of Glasgow’s Riverside Museum winning the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA) is one that deserves a mention.

Riverside is the first Scottish museum to win this award, and joins previous UK winners including Beamish: North of England Museum, and the National Railway Museum in York.

Collecting the odd award or two also helps Riverside shine a little brighter, as it stands in the shadow of the long-established Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, and is very much the ‘new kid on the block’. I noticed that eligibility for this award is quite limited, and museums that might qualify need to have been built or extensively refurbished within the last three years.

Commenting on the museum, the judges said:

The Riverside Museum demonstrates brilliantly how a specialist transport collection can renew its relevance through active engagement with wider social and universal issues.

The EMYA 2013 Judging Panel agreed unanimously that the museum fulfils the EMYA criteria of ‘public quality’ at the highest level.

Via Riverside Museum is European Museum of the Year

There’s always one door face in the crowd looking to rain on the parade, and I noticed that one commenter on another site could only manage to say that Glasgow’s transport museum had been going downhill ever since it moved out of Albert Drive (I might add that happened back in 1987, 26 years ago), and that Riverside wasn’t up to much as “Glasgow’s transport museum”, because it did not have a particular type of modern train, once common around the city, on show. And even referred to those in charge as ‘morons’ for having steam engines on display.

I’m almost tempted to make a train-spotter and anorak joke – but will resist.

Locomotives, were a major industry in and around the city of Glasgow in the days of steam… and I don’t think I need say any more on the subject, as anyone who knows their history will know of the various engine works, and how the streets had to be cleared to make way as the completed locomotives took priority as they were taken to the Clyde for shipping. At the river, giant cranes were installed to lift the massive engines onto ships which transported them around the World. Springburn is reputed to have held a 25% share in the global locomotive market, with four major works in the area.

Yes, only a moron would devote any space in Riverside, a Glasgow transport museum, to steam.

(Aye, right )

Most of the rest of us will just be happy that Riverside is joining Kelvingrove, and bringing awards and recognition to Glasgow.

Riverside Museum in May sunshine © Barbara Carr via geograph

Dambusters memorial flight footage shows aerial gunner’s view

Other than “enjoy”, and maybe “imagine the reality of the event itself”, there’s little to add to this footage shot from onboard the RAF Memorial Flight Lancaster as it flies over the Derwent Dam, Derbyshire to mark the 70th Anniversary of the famous World War II Dambusters Raid.

On May 15, the Lancaster performed three flyovers of the dams in Derwent, accompanied by other aircraft.

Who can explain the extra Taggart episode: Fresh Kills?

It’s taken me a while to finally organise our listing of Taggart episodes, and it looks as if the series really has come to an end, with the last episode “The Ends of Justice” having aired on Sunday, November 07, 2010. Mumblings about foreign funding that might have seen further episodes having failed to produce anything tangible.

While I was not impressed by the “new” short format episodes of the latter years (nominally 60 minutes for the whole story), I still liked the fact that it was centred in and around Glasgow. However, the format killed the quality and depth of plot and storyline the writers were able to develop in the beginning, when they had three episodes spread over 270 minutes to play with.

The other aspect I came to miss was the use of old “gritty” locations around Glasgow, gradually lost over the years as the city fathers decide the place had to be cleaned up and made to look squeaky clean.

But it was a detail I noticed while collating the overall list of episodes that left me with a puzzle.

I’d long given up trying to create a definitive list of series and episode numbers, this just doesn’t seem to exist, and the various listings available simply don’t agree. The same thing holds true for first air dates. Again, the listings that can be found online from various source fail to agree on these dates.

However, what I didn’t expect to find (other than perhaps in spelling) was any disagreement in the episode names.

But there was one left when I finished the list.

Series 27, episode 3 is consistently reported as have been first aired on Sunday, October 17, 2010, and the title is almost always reported as Silent Truth.

The plot get complicated (as usual), but in essence revolves around the Mamood family, which came to Glasgow to make a fresh start but is devastated when the son, Farid, is murdered, having been doused in petrol and allowed to burn to death. The team investigate what appears to be a racially motivated murder in a multi-ethnic community. More attacks and deaths follow, with drugs, immigration, and rivalries entering the story.

One of the online resources lists this episode twice. Once under the title given, then again as Fresh Kills, airing on Saturday, October 30, 2010. It also number this as Episode 3, and Silent Truth as Episode 5, just to add to the confusion.

Episode 3, Season 27 : Fresh Kills – Taggart

Episode 5, Season 27 : Silent Truth – Taggart

They also list this episode twice in their Season 27 summary:

Season 27 – Taggart

Which gives it a total of seven episodes, although the season clearly had only six.

Looking around the web for further information on Fresh Kills, or anyone offering an explanation for the appearance of the name fails to find anything useful, and other mentions appear to be nothing more than sloppy “cut and paste” jobs of the original source linked above, rather than any new work, or proper research and checking.

So…

Is Fresh Kills someone’s typo or mistake?

Or was it some sort of provisional title that leaked out somewhere, and has become attached to this story, and later dropped for the final title of Silent Truth?

Does anyone know the truth?

Surprising connection to PLUTO revealed in Inverness

I still find that some of the items which come to light about World War II arrive as something of a surprise, especially when they tie together subjects which show just how widespread some activities were. Here we have a building/business in Inverness, which played a vital part in Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France scheduled for June 6, 1944, D-Day.

Formerly Deeno’s – Formerly AI Welding, Inverness © Kenneth Allen via geograph

Essential for this success of this invasion plan was PLUTO (not Pluto, which is a planet), the PipeLine Under The Ocean. PLUTO was vital, as the D-Day landings could easily have stalled and come to a dead stop had there been no fuel for the vehicles involved. Without it, a massive shipping operation would have been needed in order maintain fuel supplies, supplemented by any supplies which could have been captured on the other side of the Channel – a need the German forces would surely have thwarted, as they would sooner have destroyed what scant reserves they had by then, rather than allow them to be captured. Reliable and continuous fuel supplies were fundamental and essential.

The pipeline would stretch across the English Channel, and be almost 80 miles long. And, it was not a single pipeline, with some 20 ultimately be laid across the Channel. Two different designs – a flexible type for the ends, and a less flexible steel type for the central section – were laid while the Allies were advancing towards Germany.

Clyde tests

Test were carried out in the Firth of Clyde (it really was a busy place during the war), when sections of pipe were laid by the Post Office cable ship Iris during 1942. These tests proved invaluable, as they showed that the pipes had to be pressurised,  not only during laying, but also during manufacture (at 7 bar or 100 psi). Additionally, the Clyde test showed that none of the existing cable-laying ship ships were large enough or powerful enough to handle the PLUTO pipeline. Merchant ships were quickly stripped out and converted to handle the job, using specially designed gear to handle the massive pipeline.

On the south coast of England, pumping station feeding the pipeline were disguised to look like ordinary cottages, garages, and shops. And even ice-cream parlours.

In order to feed the pipeline, more than 1,000 miles of pipeline were constructed to connect ports to the pumping stations. This was all constructed during the night, to avoid detection on photographs taken by German aerial reconnaissance patrols.

In terms of numbers, January 1945 saw 300 tons of fuel being pumped to France per day, increasing to 3,000 tons per day by March, and reaching a peak of 4,000 tons (almost 1,000,000 Imperial gallons) per day. By VE day, a total of more than 781,000 m³ (equivalent to a cube with sides more than 92 metres or 300 feet  long), 0r over 172 million imperial gallons of fuel had been pumped to the Allied forces in Europe.

Inverness welders

So, where did Inverness figure in all this?

Welders in Inverness worked on the fuel pipeline that eventually supported the D-Day landings and subsequent advance towards Germany.

It has just been reported that attempts to secure funding for the renovation of the former AI Welders premises in Academy Street, Inverness, were unsuccessful.

It seems that the factory also made parts for Spitfires, and welded  the hubs into which carried the propeller blades.

Workers also made parts for the Pipe Line Under The Sea, also known as Operation Pluto.

The operation involved laying pipelines in the English Channel to supply fuel from pumping stations on mainland England and the Isle of Wight to stores on France.

Delivering fuel by ship was deemed too risky. Allied commanders feared the vessels would be sunk by German submarines and aircraft.

There were also concerns the ships would get in the way of other Allied shipping.

Many of the pumping stations were disguised in an effort to prevent the sites being attacked. One station was built to look like an ice cream shop and another as a fisherman’s cottage.

Unsuccessful bid for funds to restore Inverness building

The AI Welding building

It took me a while to track down the actual building this story referred to, as the factory referred to began life as the offices of the Rose Street Foundry.

AI Welding is no more, and the building, or the ground floor at least, became Deeno’s – described as “Sport’s Bar”, or more likely a pub for football supporters. If the online stories are anything to go by, a place to steer well clear of, or it would be, had it not closed some years ago.

Fortunately, someone has shared pics, so we can see the building, and the surviving detail on the fascia, dating from its original life as part of the Rose Street Foundry. Originally a series of three murals decorated the upper fascia, but now only two survive. The one on to the left was already obscured when the building was photographed in 1988, so this is not a recent loss. Although it was not recorded, it seems to have at least some features visible in the pictures seen here, which date from 2011. In the 1998 picture, it was blank, having apparently been painted over. The two remaining mural are in reasonable condition, given that this building dates from 1894:

There’s little to be seen of the mural on the left, but the centre and right hand side items can still be seen and photographed:

AI Welding Inverness centre mural © Kenneth Allen via geograph

AI Welding Inverness right mural © Kenneth Allen via geograph

Although I have referred to them as AI Welding’s mural, this is purely in the context of this article about the wartime use of the building, as the mural subject clearly relate to the work of the Rose Street Foundry.

After the Dambusters Raid

Yesterday, May 16, 2013, was the 70th anniversary of the 1943 Dambusters Raid on the dams of the Ruhr.

One thing has always puzzled me about this raid, the lack of any follow-up activity by Allied bombers.

While there has been debate about the effectiveness of the raid itself, I’ve yet to come across anything similar about the aftermath.

Why didn’t the Allies send in bomber afterwards?

With the areas already in ruins, and resources being diverted to make good the damage done by the Dambusters, the effect could have been multiplied by continuing to harass the repair work through conventional bombing raids on the thousands of workers sent to make good the damage.

One thing may have held the Allies’ hand on this option – the fact that much of labour would have been supplied by slaves, captured enemies of the Nazis used as forced labour.

There can be little doubt that many of these labourers would have died in such raids, as there would have been little protection or shelter for them, and their masters would not have deemed them worthy of air raid shelter. Their forced labour was already an effective death sentence, and they would just have shipped more in to replace the losses.

As it was, the raid saw the Möhne and Eder reservoirs pour some 330 million tons of water into the western Ruhr valley. Flood waters spread for about 50 miles (80 km) from the source. On the ground, around 1,300 people were killed, including 749 Ukrainian prisoners of war based in a camp just below the Eder dam.

History also tells us that when the Allies did carry out raids where locals were killed as a consequence of targeting information passed on by the Resistance, then further information was no longer provided. I forget the name of the exact incident that comes to mind, but am sure it involved attacks on one of the V-weapons facilities.

The Möhne Dam

Four hours after the Dambusters Raid, this was the Möhne Dam:

Later still, the damage caused by the bouncing bomb could be seen more clearly:

Albert Speer, by then Hitler’s Armaments Minister, had to summarise the damage, and reported his findings to the Führer. Speer was also puzzled about the lack of further attacks:

On April 11, 1943, I proposed to Hitler that a committee of industrial specialists be set to determining the crucial targets in Soviet power production.
Four weeks later, however, the first attempt was made — not by us but by the British air force — to influence the course of the war by destroying a single nerve center of the war economy.

The principle followed was to paralyse a cross section, as it were – just as a motor can be made useless by the removal of the ignition.

On May 17, 1943, a mere nineteen bombers of the RAF tried to strike at our whole armaments industry by destroying the hydroelectric plants of the Ruhr.

The report that reached me in the early hours of the morning was most alarming. The largest of the dams, the Mohne dam, had been shattered and the reservoir emptied. As yet there were no reports on the three other dams.

At dawn we landed at Werl Aireld, having first surveyed the scene of devastation from above. The power plant at the foot of the shattered dam looked as if it had been erased, along with its heavy turbines.

A torrent of water had flooded the Ruhr Valley. That had the seemingly insignificant but grave consequence that the electrical installations at the pumping stations were soaked and muddied, so that industry was brought to a standstill and the water supply of the population imperiled.

My report on the situation, which I soon afterward delivered at the Fuehrer’s headquarters, made “a deep impression on the Fuehrer. He kept the documents with him.”’

The British had not succeeded, however, in destroying the three other reservoirs. Had they done so, the Ruhr Valley would have been almost completely deprived of water in the coming summer months.

At the largest of the reservoirs, the Sorpe Valley reservoir, they did achieve a direct hit on the centre of the dam. I inspected it that same day. Fortunately the bomb hole was slightly higher than the water level. Just a few inches lower — and a small brook would have been transformed into a raging river which would have swept away the stone and earthen dam.

That night, employing just a few bombers, the British came close to a success which would have been greater than anything they had achieved hitherto with a commitment of thousands of bombers. But they made a single mistake which puzzles me to this clay: They divided their forces and that same night destroyed the Eder Valley dam, although it had nothing whatsoever to do with the supply of water to the Ruhr.

A few days after this attack seven thousand men, whom I had ordered shifted from the Atlantic Wall to the Mohne and Eder areas, were hard at work repairing the dams.

On September 23, 1943, in the nick of time before the beginning of the rains, the breach in the Mohne dam was closed.

We were thus able to collect the precipitation of the late autumn and winter of 1943 for the needs of the following summer. While we were engaged in rebuilding, the British air force missed its second chance. A few bombs would have produced cave-ins at the exposed building sites, and a few more bombs could have set the wooden scaffolding blazing.

Excerpt from, Albert Speer: INSIDE THE THIRD REICH

…  is not only the most significant personal German account to come out of the war but the most revealing document on the Hitler phenomenon yet written. It takes the reader inside Nazi Germany on four different levels: Hitler’s inner circle, National Socialism as a whole, the area of wartime production and the inner struggle of Albert Speer. The author does not try to make excuses, even by implication, and is unrelenting toward himself and his associates… Speer’s full-length portrait of Hitler has unnerving reality. The Führer emerges as neither an incompetent nor a carpet-gnawing madman but as an evil genius of warped conceits endowed with an ineffable personal magic.

New York Times review

Loch Striven and the Bouncing Bomb

Today, May 16, 2013, marks the 70th anniversary of Operation Chastise, better known more popularly as the Dambusters Raid, thanks to the publicity it has received over the years in the 1955 film, The Dam Busters.

Dan Snow presented The Dambusters: 70 Years On, a tribute to World War II’s Dambusters raid, as veterans and their families gathered to remember the bravery of the 133 men who undertook it. Live from RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, on Thursday May 16, 2013 , 19:00 BST on BBC 2: BBC iPlayer – The Dambusters: 70 Years On

The BBC later published a follow up story, including superb video of the surviving Lancaster and Spitfire flying low over Derwent reservor, used for bouncing bom practive flights, followed by a pair of low and slow Tornadoes. The RAF Battle of Britain Memorial Flight and 617 Squadron flew over the dam in Derbyshire’s Hope Valley on Thursday lunchtime.

See also Dambusters raid: Retrace the daring journey, which includes the hand-coloured map from the official June 1943 British Air Ministry report on the Dambusters raid.

In preparation for the raid, many tests were carried out, both in the laboratory to prove the concept, and at various locations around the country to prove the full-size versions, and train the crews in advance of the raid itself.

On such location was Loch Striven, where dummy Highball bombs were dropped as part of the tests. These dummies contained no explosives, and the empty steel casings were filled with concrete, with stories of some having been made of wood, constructed and filled with wood, sawdust, and glue by CE Morris Furniture of Glasgow. These were abandoned and left in the loch after the war, but were located during dives carried out during 2010. Our Loch Striven page contained links to footage of the dives, showing the dummy bombs as found, but the urls have changed over the years, and we eventually lost track of them, so the links on the page no longer work. They may be available elsewhere, with a bit of searching.

We were told of plans to return to the site, and to raise one or more of the bombs for display in museums, with the first to be presented to the Brooklands Museum in Surrey, where the Barnes Wallis collection is held. If more were raised, then they will be placed in local museums. It is worth noting that at present there are no complete Highballs on display anywhere.

Note that Hihghball was the naval version of the bouncing bomb, intended to be used against ships. This version was never used operationally.

Spherical bombs seen in the film were dummies. The device was still classified as secret when the film was made, and shots that would have shown the final cylindrical design were censored.

Loch Striven was closed off while the tests were being carried out there, and a number of writers have describe how the Lumberjills were sealed in their cabins, with the windows covered and guard on the doors, while the bomb was being tested there, and smoke screens used to hide the public view along the loch from its entrance.

It may be that the footage in the clips below show Loch Striven, beginning at approximately 2:00 minutes – but this is just speculation from various discussion of the clip:

Upkeep practice bomb under modified Lancaster bomber

The picture is described as showing a practice Upkeep weapon attached to the bomb bay of Wing Commander Guy Gibson’s Avro Type 464 (Provisioning) Lancaster, ED932/G ‘AJ-G’, at Manston, Kent, while conducting dropping trials off Reculver.

The raid revisited

One of the disturbing trends I have spotted in recent years is for some historians to revise the value of a number of World War II operations, generally to downplay their effectiveness – and the cynic in me would probably add that this pronouncement might be accompanied by a new book they have just published to back up their claim.

Chastise, or the Dambusters Raid, is one such operation, which has come in for increasing claims that if it was not an outright failure (not all the dams were breached as planned), its effectiveness has been grossly overstated.

I find such revelations surprising, and disappointing, as they come from established historians who have written to the contrary in the past, and I see the name of the advisor to the classic series “The World at War” included amongst them.

Granted, I would have no argument with any claims that the Dambusters raid, and many other similar operations, were highly, and even over-played in terms of positive propaganda terms at the time when presented to the public. But this was in time of war, when such emphasis was essential to maintain morale.

But to go back decades later, and say that they were ineffective is ridiculous and even borders on the disrespectful to those who took part.

It’s also hard to understand, since those voicing such opinions should know better, and that the value of such raids was not their obvious result – the breaching of the dams in this particular case – but the strategic cost to the enemy, and wider effects of the raid’s on the use of resource, labour, material, and time. They seem to forget that everything used to rebuild after this raid had to be taken off another job being made to support the German war effort. The country was already working flat-out to support its armed forces and aggression. It menfolk were conscripted and sent to the front, labour was at a premium, made possible only by the enslavement of many conquered peoples, forced to work on Nazi weapons production. This included people taken from as close as the Channel Islands, which the Germans occupied during the war.

That the Germans were able to quickly restore the dams and their production in the area affected by the raid is testament not to the failure of the raid, but to how important the area was to the Germans.

Dan Snow writes in the BBC Magazine:

The Germans certainly rose to the challenge: the dams, which had taken five years to build, were repaired by armies of forced labourers working around the clock in just five months.

A major hydroelectric power station at Herdecke was out of action for weeks, not months, thanks to a similarly Herculean effort. Thousands of troops, Hitler youth, prisoners of war and enslaved workers were thrown at the task.

Canals were dredged, factories rebuilt, river banks reinstated, bridges replaced. Britain’s bomber supremo, Sir Arthur Harris, who had opposed the raid as harebrained all along, with some justification, wrote later: “I have seen nothing… to show that the effort was worthwhile except as a spectacular operation.”

Senior Nazis downplayed the damage after the war. Albert Speer, the German armaments minister, expressed amazement that the repair operations were left untroubled by further bombing raids which would have delayed the vital reconstruction and turned a nuisance into a major crisis.

Time has thrown up a wealth of information about the impact of the raids, much of it unavailable to an earlier generation of historians.

In James Holland’s recent book, Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the Dams, he states that “it is time to put the record straight”. He insists that the damage was “absolutely enormous” and it was “an extraordinary achievement”.

He points out that every bridge for 30 miles below the breached Mohne dam was destroyed, and buildings were damaged 40 miles away. Twelve war production factories were destroyed, and around 100 more were damaged. Thousands of acres of farmland were ruined.

Germans instantly referred to it after the raid as the “Mohne catastrophe”. Even the cool Speer admitted that it was “a disaster for us for a number of months”. German sources attribute a 400,000-tonne drop in coal production in May 1943 to the damage caused.

Another German report into the effects of the raid talked about “considerable losses of production” caused by “the lack of water” and that “many shaft mines, coking plants, smelting works, power stations, fuel plants and armaments factories were shut down for several days”.

The fact that a titanic effort was made to repair this damage shows how high a priority the dams were, and it meant resources were shifted from elsewhere. Nowhere was this costlier to the Third Reich than on the beaches of Normandy.

Hitler had ordered the construction of a massive network of defences against an Allied invasion. Now thousands of workers who should have been toiling in France were redirected to the Ruhr to repair the dams. A year later allied troops would have faced far more significant defences had it not been for the Dambusters raid.

No raid mounted by so few aircraft had ever caused such extensive material damage. It did not bring German war production to a permanent halt, but nobody had expected it to.

Via The Dambusters raid: How effective was it?

See also The Dambusters: marking the 70th anniversary of one of the most daring wartime missions | Herald Scotland

And Dambusters: All the men who took part

Jenkins! Come get your prodemotion.

Funny thing, but since we supposedly saw the arrival of the nice weather, I’ve found that the chances to get out and find something interesting have actually gone down. The past few weeks have been wet, windy, and miserable, and even when I do go out for a wander, there’s nothing happening, and the photo-opportunities seem to have dried up. It was better weeks and months ago, when we had clear blue skies and sun, no rain (yes, it was rather windy), and things looked better, even if the trees were bare, and flowers were only a thing of the imagination.

Looking through some of the pics I took a few months back, just to convince myself I was not imagining this, I found a pic that reminded of a wry smile that crosses my face every time I turn into one of the streets at the end of the road.

While it might be assumed that a call to the boss’s office, and being handed the keys of a shiny new Jaguar as your new company car, could be seen as a promotion or reward for a good year, it might pay to look closely at what you’ve been given.

I can’t help but feel that the recipient of a Jaguar as seen below is being handed an apparent promotion on the one hand… and a warning to “Do Better Next Time!”

Why?

Jaguars are notable as one of the few cars immediately identifiable by their twin exhausts, and it’s only the lower end models that have little tiny engines that are satisfied with a single exhaust, signifying the cost-cutting economy of their production.

You can see the same in the Audi TT, which has a single exhaust on the base models with the less attractive engines. ‘Proper’ version have two exhaust pipes.

Move to BMW, and all the specials such as the 8-series, M-series and Alpinas generally have dual exhausts, as do 911s. Most cars regarded as exotic, or as supercars, used to have twin and quad exhausts, but these have gone nowadays, in favour of peculiar custom installations, where 2, 3, and 4 exhaust pipes can be found in all sorts of weird configurations and groups at the rear of the car. Jaguar was ahead of even those, with some of the V12 E-types have a single exhaust containing four flattened exhaust exits, mounted in the centre. Always liked that one as a particularly neat and tidy installation.

So, back to the prodemotion (that’s just promotion and demotion rolled into one handy word) model, seen from the front, you have a badge of pride…

But from behind, it’s the exhaust of shame, and a good laugh for your colleagues.

Actually the boss’s intention is that it will make you work late every night, and you can eventually sneak out last after they have all gone home, so they won’t see the back of the car as you drive away.

Should look more like: