• Soldier-Poets of the Great War

    Ok, so National Poetry day… Adela has given us her offering with Robert Frost. Nice, but doesn’t swing it completely for me. Obviously with my love of all things war…. it has to be the Soldier-Poets of the Great War. John McCrae, ‘In Flanders’ Fields’, Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’, Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Killed in Action’ all extremely poignant, and more important in their own way tell of the horrors of war. But my favourite has to be Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. I will follow up in the near future with a little more about this topic, but for now, I want to concentrate on this poem. To me, nothing…

  • The Somme

    The plan had been drawn up months before. The Allied forces in their first joint effort battle would attack the German front lines along a 24 miles long stretch of France bordering the River Somme. The plan had originally been to attack German-held strongpoints in this area of France, around the Thiepval/Albert area. In February 1916 the Germans launched their own initiative at Verdun against the French forces, a week before the Allied assault was scheduled. Instead it came to be that the Somme offensive was used as a diversionary tactic to divide the German forces between the two areas, and thus give the exhausted and over-powered French a bit…

  • The Order of the White Feather

    During the Great War, several incidences of young ladies presenting a white feather to young men not in uniform, to denote their presumed cowardice, occurred. The romanticised outcome being that the man in question would be publicly shamed into dashing off to the nearest recruitment office to enlist. So what prompted these acts? Was it a random idea that gained momentum as the initial rush to do ones bit subsided? If we dig a little deeper we find that there is much more to the story than a simple shaming gesture. Popular theory has is stated that the white feather became associated with cowardice as the result of perhaps what…

  • Lanoe George Hawker VC

    Born in Hampshire on December 30th, 1890 into a well-know and respected military family, Lanoe George Hawker attended first Stubbington House School, and then from the age of eleven, Dartmouth’s Royal Navy College. Despite being an intelligent boy and a keen sportsman, his academic grades proved disappointing as a career in the Navy seemed unlikely. Instead Hawker enrolled at Woolwich Royal Military Academy before enlisting as an officer cadet in the Royal Engineers. After seeing a film about the Wright Flyer in 1910, Hawker, a keen inventor and dabbler in all thing engineering, developed an interest in aviation, and after gaining his flying certificate at his own expense in 1913,…