• The Bonus Marchers

    1932 was a rough year in the old U.S of A.  The Great Depression was in full swing and many people were out of a job.  The unemployment rate was over 15% and climbing.  People were starving with no hope and no way out.  There had been unrest beginning in December 1931, when a small hunger march on Washington was led by the communist party.  A few weeks later a Pittsburgh priest led 12,000 men to Washington to advocate for unemployment rights.  Riots broke out at a Ford plant in Michigan and left four dead and fifty wounded.  By May 1932, tensions were high.  That was when the Bonus Expeditionary…

  • Edwin Lutyens

    Edwin Lutyens was born in London in March 1869. He was named for a friend of his father, artist Edwin Henry Landseer. Lutyens studied at the Royal College of Art and graduated as an architect in 1887 before working for a year in the offices of Ernest George and Harold Peto, where he met noted architect Sir Herbert Baker. In 1888 Edwin Lutyens set up his own offices, working for several years in fashionable Bloomsbury Square, during which time he met garden designer and leading horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll, with whom he collaborated on several commissions. His style mixed brick paths, with overflowing borders of lupins, lilies and lavender to create…

  • First and Last

    So following on from my article on the Armistice, what led to it and how it came about, I now want to focus on the impact the procedure and its application had on the men on the ground. As we have seen, the German forces were already in a state of confusion; their efforts were failing and they were losing ground fast. The American belligerent forces had joined the war effort on the side of the Allied Powers early in 1917 during the Spring Offensive, at a time when the Entente were still counting the cost of the futile Somme offensive of 1916. Germany had hoped to follow up the…

  • Peace Treaties

    In honour of Armistice, today I am writing about an important part of the Great War…. The Road to the Armistice, The reason why this topic is often considered reactionary is that although the Armistice was a pre-arranged agreement, first approached at the beginning of 1918 with President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” for achieving peace in Europe, it did nothing to prevent further casualties as the conflict continued until after the Politicians and the Leaders had finished hashing out their terms and conditions, and a Treaty was signed. During this period of negotiation, tens of thousands of the world’s young men continued to be slaughtered. The contents of the final…

  • The Great War, Cause and Effect

    On this, the 102nd anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War, I thought I would offer a quick synopsis of the political climate and so forth that led to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife the Duchess Sophia, and the ensuing declaration of war. I also wanted to add a few details as to the aftermath, when the guns finally fell silent over four years later. Following a series of deaths in his family, including his son Crown Prince Rudolf in 1889 in a double murder/suicide, and the execution of his brother Maximillian in Mexico after his failed attempts at establishing a monarchy with Napoleon…